Slack alternatives

[fbaube]

Is there a way to discuss opportunities without using Slack ?

[theckman]

@fbaube at this time if you can't use Slack, your secondary option would likely be a GitHub issue. Because the Go community has converged on Slack, nearing 30k users, it made the most sense to build around that.

Edit: Can you give some examples of which conversations you feel you may be missing out on / would like to contribute to?

[fbaube]

I'd be happy with a list of projects that have passed "review", plus a PoC (for all or per-project) for chipping in. But I see now there's quite a list of projects collected in this issues list :)

[theckman]

@fbaube I'm going to work on getting a simple website up with this information, and more, ideally within the next week.

[pedromorgan]

Its there already..

https://gitter.im/gofrs

Will i get permissions, get access, take over whole project and blow it up ? probably not cos it oAuth perms.. ;-)

[niaow]

We could set up a gitter, but I do not know how helpful that would really be. Having a second stream of chat would complicate things.

[pedromorgan]

Simple decision for me./..

Gitter integrates with gh+gl..

Slack is proprietry and not invited..

[pedromorgan]

And stuff Slack. .lets for IRC..

[theckman]

I definitely don't want to insulate anyone from our effort by choosing a specific chat medium, but I think if you look within the context of the larger Go community there's been a coalescing of people towards Slack. Whether or not you like Slack, it's hard to argue with 30.5k registered users. It's also open for anyone to join, by requesting an invite here.

We're fortunate to have a public Slack workspace with unlimited chat history, which other communities don't have. I can tell you as an admin of the Slack workspace itself, it's not a great platform for an open community for a few reasons. So with that said, I'll admit that I am not always a huge fan of it for our use case.

However, I'm pushing my personal opinions aside and am considering the community as a whole. In doing so I look around, and it seems to be the most common/frequented space we have. If you disagree / have data showing otherwise I'm genuinely interested in pursuing looking in to that. However, that's a strong signal in deciding to use it as "home base" for now.

On top of that, more and more companies are moving to Slack each day, and so I assume more people are using their platform each day. With people already being in the tool for work, and to frequent the Go community, it's easy for them to engage with us. Once we increase the barrier to entry, I see that changing drastically.

That said, this is only my personal opinion on this. I am interested in the perspectives of others, although I think with most of us being in Slack already there may be an implicit bias.

[theckman]

@gofrs/all thoughts?

[leighmcculloch]

I agree that Slack is the most popular tool for communicating right now, and many engineers are familiar with it. With that acknowledged we should still consider if it makes the most sense for this community, and for the type of communication we want to have.

How are we planning on using Slack as a communication tool?

Slack is great for synchronous immediate conversations, and that makes sense when everyone is working and on at the same time. Is that what we want the contributors to gofrs to be limited to?

If we want the contributors to be a diverse set of people, from different countries, backgrounds, availabilities, and timezones, building this community on synchronous immediate on-at-the-same-time communication tools and communication patterns is probably not be the best choice. For me this is less about Slack vs IRC vs Gitter, and more about what our methodology for communicating is going to be.

I think we should explore how we can default to communicating asynchronously.

[zerkms]

In cases when I have multiple choices and want to make a kind-of-scientific decision I create a table where I enumerate the constraints I have/goals I want to achieve, those choices, and their corresponding pros/cons weighted against constraints/goals.

If the slack (as a place where the initiative group met each other originally) does not work well, I propose to create at least a list with the goals and constraints, so that we did have a formal list of things that need to be achieved to become "more welcome to diverse set of developers".

Otherwise this whole thread would become not-so-productive and based on preferences and biases.

[Xe]

Slack works well enough for now IMO. It's not worth dying on that hill.

[theckman]

Happy to revisit later if someone wants to raise a new issue. For now I'd say we're committed to Slack.