Sean,
Community personalities differ, and its important to find the tool that fits them.
I’ve worked in communities that *only* operate via mailing lists, you can’t get *anyone* on slack or IRC.
I’ve also worked in communities where almost *everything* happens on slack and IRC and the mailing lists are moribund.
Slack and IRC each have their pluses and minuses. Choosing one is something that the ASWF community is going to have to do for itself.
You also need to decide whether to have a single ASWF slack with channels for the projects, or a slack channel per project.
Again, the appropriate choice is going to be dictated by the particular personalities of the projects in ASWF.
My recommendation would be to make a quick ‘starter call’ and get something going, and then see how it goes. Some things simply require experimentation.
On August 22, 2018 at 9:45:55 AM, Thanh Ha (thanh.ha@...) wrote:
On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 9:01 AM <
sean@...>
wrote:
Hello,
I'm on the development team for OpenColorIO, and would like to
raise the conversation around project communication platforms.
Quickly looking at the Collaboration Tools list for ASWF I see the
usual options of Mailing Lists and Issue Tracking. However, OCIO
has greatly benefited by having real-time communication through a
Slack group which promotes candid responses from maintainers and
community members instead of long essays like this. I believe this
fosters a greater feeling of participation and community which was
very helpful in re-kindling development with the
project.
I'm am definitely not a proponent of Slack. In fact, I really
dislike it and am starting the conversation with our community on
switching to an alternative. When/if OpenColorIO is moved under the
care of the ASWF, I would like to see a real-time communication
platform promoted. At the moment the best option which I have yet
to use in practice is Zulip (https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/).
The features they offer seem to be a substantial gain over Slack or
alternatives.
- Apache 2.0 Licensed
- Free hosting for OSS (maybe ASWF hosts a server)
- Join without invitation
- Permalink to conversations
- Github issue links e.g. #1234
- Github/Jenkins/TravisCI integrations
- Proper nested conversations (thank goodness)
- Public archival coming soon apparently
In summary, real-time communication with
asynchronous participation is vital to project success. With
the declining use of email-lists ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.09529.pdf) I'd love to see
an option promoted and used across ASWF projects.
Many Open Source projects use Freenode IRC. Something that I
think a lot of these new tools miss is that there's no single
agreed upon server for Open Source projects in general, so if folks
want to cross collaborate with another community it's harder (need
new accounts on different systems just to join 1 channel).
If you work with 10 different project communities and have to
connect to 10 different tools / protocols it quickly get's out of
hand. I'm not sure if anyone else participates in multiple project
communities but if ASWF plans to cross collaborate with another
community (maybe dependency projects) it is much easier to just
"/join #channel" then to have to sign up for an entirely new
account on another system.
Something ASWF might want to consider when choosing a
collaboration tool.
Regards,
Thanh
