Re: [Pharo-dev] Slack, fragmentation and design information

Hi Stephan,

> On 10 Feb 2017, at 10:27, Stephan Eggermont <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> The past year we have started using Slack to communicate in real-time about Pharo. It has nice (mobile) clients and makes it easy to share pictures and snippets. As a result a large part of the communication about design and how to do things has moved from the mailing lists to Slack. As we're using the free version, and cannot afford to use the commercial version, we have no long-time storage of the design discussions. This contrasts with our mailing lists, that have a long-term archive. There was some discussion about this, and I'm not aware of that resulting in an accessible, easy to access archive. Also, we have not succeeded in summarizing design discussions from slack to the mailing lists. The resulting gap in design information forms an enormous long-term risk for our community. Without the design discussions it is much more difficult to later understand why decisions were taken. We cannot afford to let this short-term ease-of-use destroy Pharo's community history, and thereby Pharo. Let us fix this.

I share many of what you say… but in the other point of view, Slack as really worked and there is a lot more happening now in Slack + mailing list than what was before just in mailing list.
But most of that is lost because of Slack policies (also Slack pricing model is impossible for a community as ours), and we need to find a solution for that.

Last days we were experimenting with @kilon again on use discord as a substitute and I find that for now it works really well and with a bit of work we can have all what you want: discord incorporated a search function (and they do not have the 10k limit) and we could do a bot that logs everything that happens there and stores that into gists (or whatever, but gists seems like a good idea).

With this we would have enhanced the availability of those discussions (it remains the fact that immediate communication is worst organised than mails, but well… we need to try)

Esteban

>
> Stephan
>
>

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Esteban Lorenzano <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hi Stephan,
>
>> On 10 Feb 2017, at 10:27, Stephan Eggermont <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> The past year we have started using Slack to communicate in real-time about Pharo. It has nice (mobile) clients and makes it easy to share pictures and snippets. As a result a large part of the communication about design and how to do things has moved from the mailing lists to Slack. As we're using the free version, and cannot afford to use the commercial version, we have no long-time storage of the design discussions. This contrasts with our mailing lists, that have a long-term archive. There was some discussion about this, and I'm not aware of that resulting in an accessible, easy to access archive. Also, we have not succeeded in summarizing design discussions from slack to the mailing lists. The resulting gap in design information forms an enormous long-term risk for our community. Without the design discussions it is much more difficult to later understand why decisions were taken. We cannot afford to let this short-term ease-of-use destroy Pharo's community history, and thereby Pharo. Let us fix this.

Yes I agree with your concerns.

> I share many of what you say… but in the other point of view, Slack as really worked and there is a lot more happening now in Slack + mailing list than what was before just in mailing list.
> But most of that is lost because of Slack policies (also Slack pricing model is impossible for a community as ours), and we need to find a solution for that.

Yes this is too expensive for the Pharo consortium ?

> Last days we were experimenting with @kilon again on use discord as a substitute and I find that for now it works really well and with a bit of work we can have all what you want: discord incorporated a search function (and they do not have the 10k limit) and we could do a bot that logs everything that happens there and stores that into gists (or whatever, but gists seems like a good idea).
>
> With this we would have enhanced the availability of those discussions (it remains the fact that immediate communication is worst organised than mails, but well… we need to try)

and move all the community on discord ? Or use an open-source slack
like : https://about.mattermost.com/
and host our own chat server.

--
Serge Stinckwich
UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/

yes it is.
Is just not prepared for open source communities like ours.

>
>> Last days we were experimenting with @kilon again on use discord as a substitute and I find that for now it works really well and with a bit of work we can have all what you want: discord incorporated a search function (and they do not have the 10k limit) and we could do a bot that logs everything that happens there and stores that into gists (or whatever, but gists seems like a good idea).
>>
>> With this we would have enhanced the availability of those discussions (it remains the fact that immediate communication is worst organised than mails, but well… we need to try)
>
> and move all the community on discord ?

this is what I would like to propose, because...

> Or use an open-source slack

the problem with this is that we have to host it… and then is more problems for maintenance, etc.

Esteban

> like : https://about.mattermost.com/
> and host our own chat server.
>
> --
> Serge Stinckwich
> UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
> Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
> http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/
>

>
>> I share many of what you say… but in the other point of view, Slack as really worked and there is a lot more happening now in Slack + mailing list than what was before just in mailing list.
>> But most of that is lost because of Slack policies (also Slack pricing model is impossible for a community as ours), and we need to find a solution for that.
>
> Yes this is too expensive for the Pharo consortium ?
>
It is per active member… which is defined as “has logged in the last 14 days”. We have 322 members. No idea how many
are active according to that definition.

Fot 322 it would be: $8 per user per month. Which means $2576 per month or $25772 per year (taking the special yearly price into account).

        Marcus

Have we actually talked to Slack and asked them if they might support an active open source community? It’s one thing what is written on a website, another if the consortium actually approached them and explained the problem - mass communication in a community who want to use their tool both personally and open-sourecy but also in industry.  The latter feels like the paid market they are after - the former might take their interest.