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An open community with an interest in developing and using new technologies for tensor data storage.
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Chat platform discussions #68

Open MSanKeys963 opened 5 months ago

MSanKeys963 commented 5 months ago

Hi everyone! 👋🏻

In the last community meeting of 2023 (meeting notes here), we discussed moving away from the existing chat platform in use, i.e. Gitter. There are several reasons to move away from Gitter, but the main reason is the all-time low activity.

Recently, I've been posting the announcements messages on Gitter for community and ZEP meetings, office hours, etc. Apart from my messages, our Gitter channel is pretty silent. We rarely see the community interacting with us Gitter. Has everyone moved away from using Gitter or something else?

Various options were proposed in the past, like Discord, Slack, ZulipChat, Mattermost, etc. I personally use Discord a lot, but I'm hesitant about migrating to Discord. There are several issues I see if we migrate to Discord:

Here's an article which goes into depth: https://alexn.org/blog/2022/04/09/scala-gitter-discord-mistake/.

One of the options favoured the most is using ZulipChat. We realised that some of our community members are already using ZulipChat and are well-versed in it. This also helps reduce friction when migrating users from Gitter to ZulipChat. I have been part of https://imagesc.zulipchat.com/ for almost three months, and I like it.

If there are no objections from anyone to migrating to ZulipChat, there are a couple of options we can look at:

If we join the NF/OSSCi server, we can leverage the existing user base from various projects. I'm sceptical of the admin privileges given to Zarr maintainers in a shared space if we ever need to ban/unban someone for violating CoC.

On the other hand, we'll have complete control of our room, but we'd need to invite the community and bring them our space explicitly.

Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks!

CC'ing folks who might be interested in this conversation: @joshmoore @d-v-b @normanrz @jbms @WardF @jhamman @jakirkham @rabernat

d-v-b commented 5 months ago

I'm happy with Zulip! I don't have a preference for joining an existing server vs creating our own. This might be a question that depends on the usage we anticipate. Gitter is pretty sparsely trafficked, so if we extrapolate from that, then joining a larger server makes sense.

d-v-b commented 4 months ago

Could we move forward with using Zulip? We are discussing V3 refactor stuff over in the ScientificPython discord server, but I feel like some of these discussions would be a great fit for zulip threads.

In one of our community meetings, it seemed like there was broad agreement (or broad lack of disagreement) for using a zulip chat hosted by some other entity (I don't remember which entity that was -- something IBM-adjacent?). It would be a big improvement over gitter, and I worry that fragmented developer communication is going to be a source of friction going forward.

MSanKeys963 commented 4 months ago

Thanks for the feedback and patience, @d-v-b.

After talking to good humans at OSSCi, we were able to set up the Zulip chat server and make it open for everyone, which means everyone can join the server without an invite.

The server is hosted at https://ossci.zulipchat.com/, and I've added https://github.com/zarr-developers/blog/pull/45 for the announcement.

Once the announcement is made, we'd need to replace the Gitter link with Zulip and start deprecating the Gitter chat room by pointing folks to the Zulip server.