Re: [UG-ADMINS] Slack-Team for Usergroups available - IRC <=> Slack gateway

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 9:01 AM, Yitzchok Willroth <[email protected]>
wrote:

>
> These seems like a great solution.  For those whom IRC is a barrier to
> connecting with the community, we can offer the "new sexy" and for the
> curmudgeons, we can get off their lawn. ;-)
>


For that to happen, we'd have to create a Slack channel for each user group
and connect it to their corresponding IRC channel. It'd be up to each user
group to decide whether that's useful for them.

From past experience, too many channels of communication can be
overwhelming to maintain and can ultimately hurt your communication. You
end up creating small groups of disconnected communities within your user
group. Since they don't cross lines, some groups talk about things that
other groups never benefit from. I've tried multiple mailing lists, a
FUDforum forum, a Facebook group, a Google+ page, Meetup.com forums,
Twitter accounts, etc. All of this in the name of trying to reach the
largest audience possible, but it stretches too thin.

I've learned that it's valuable to consolidate and encourage your members
to use the tools you choose, rather than trying to use as many tools as
possible to reach potential members. Quality vs. quantity, and all that.
IRC is not really a barrier to newcomers—participating is. Folks who want
to participate will always participate, regardless of the tools you choose.
Folks who aren't participating yet (but might) would benefit from the
greater exposure to the open source community that comes from learning how
to use IRC (for example) and other tools that are staples of open source
project communication.

For example, how many on this list know that top-posting is frowned upon on
PHP mailing lists? (I'm not trying to call people out on this—just making a
point.) A lot of people don't even know what "top-posting" is, but many
open source projects still maintain rules of etiquette, and one of those is
"do not top post."  I think exposing our members to the way open source
projects are run and how they communicate can benefit them when they first
get involved in a project. It sets them up for success in their first
exposure to that project so that they don't come away feeling like a fool
for breaching some esoteric netiquette rule.

In the early days of Meetup.com, when it was still free, AtlantaPHP had an
account there and used it quite a bit. When they switched to a pay model,
AtlantaPHP quit using the service. A year went by, and we found that so
many people had been looking for us on Meetup.com that someone else created
another AtlantaPHP group and was running meetings, and we didn't know each
other. We decided that we needed to start using Meetup.com again because
that's where people were looking for us.

To play my own Devil's Advocate, this illustrates the reverse scenario. We
had to start using a communication tool that had become the ubiquitous
place for people to look for user group meetings. I am sure that when Slack
becomes ubiquitous, we may find ourselves in a similar situation. However,
while user groups had nothing like Meetup.com before, open source projects
have had the free (as in freedom), open, and distributed IRC networks as
their primary real-time communication tools for over 20 years. I feel that
switching to a proprietary, closed, and centralized network to manage
communication runs counter to the spirit of open source. Perhaps we are
losing something with this transition. Only time will tell.

So, perhaps this is just the $0.02 of someone who is shouting "get off my
lawn" to the newcomers. I don't see myself as having that attitude. On the
contrary, I think tools like Slack and HipChat are excellent for remote
teams. They work great for businesses and closed teams. I am not convinced
they are the right tools for open, distributed teams building open source
software, and our user groups, for the most part, focus on open source
software and being involved in open source communities.

Cheers,
Ben