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Discussion and documentation on community practices
https://docs.ipfs.tech/community/
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Updating IPFS IRC Channel Organization #418

Open momack2 opened 5 years ago

momack2 commented 5 years ago

@Stebalien and I were talking about IRC and how to migrate back more core development chat into the #ipfs-dev channel that has gotten forked off into private threads, and would like to source additional ideas / feedback from the community.

Context

Right now, we have 2 main channels: #ipfs and #ipfs-dev - where the former acts as a water cooler and lobby, and the later acts as an ipfs usage help desk, core protocol development communication channel, and release announcement thread. Currently, the context switching costs between core development coordination vs developer help desk questions is significant - and every single message is interspersed into a single thread. We'd like a way to break those two threads apart into different channels - so that development questions / help requests can get the support they need, without getting intermingled with day to day development updates / chatter.

Rough proposal

  1. Create a new channel "#ipfs-help" or "#ipfs-dev-qs" or something where we can redirect questions and help for people developing on IPFS, or trying to get setup as new users
  2. Reserve conversations in "#ipfs-dev" for core protocol development, debugging, and design - and ensure all developers have their conversation threads in this public channel
  3. Update the README to describe the different IRC channels we have and what questions to ask in each

Other option

There are already specific channels for some of the core working groups like In Web Browsers, GUI, Cluster, etc. We could instead spin up new channels for core development working groups (go-ipfs and js-ipfs) that are public but reserved for core protocol improvement discussions - leaving ipfs-dev to be used as the dev help desk for question.

Thoughts? Feedback? Other ideas? @ipfs/wg-captains - would love your ideas on this!

dirkmc commented 5 years ago

My vote is for creating a new channel - the existing channel is already linked to from a few places, and there are already a bunch of people in it who aren't core devs, so probably it would be easier to make a more focused group in a new channel.

I would also suggest that we agree to an informal set of guidelines to make the core devs channel as useful as possible. Email can be filtered but chat cannot, so everyone will be more productive if we're judicious about the way we use it. For example I'd suggest that messages for a single person be sent as a DM, unless they're relevant to the group.