My personal opinion is that Slack can be useful for a quick ping or pointer, but on the other hand threads can quickly become unwieldy. Larger/deeper discussions flow better as email and mailing list archives make for better discoverability. Slack can also be quite a distraction. While it looks attractive to those asking the "quick question", what does that mean for those that are supposed to respond? Latency expectation tends to be more aggressive with Slack, compared to email.
Having said that, I think that Slack can be a good complementary communication channel, when used with measure. When you look at Beam, there is good activity on dev@ and user@, my impression is that some user@ traffic gets diverted to Slack but that is not necessarily at bad thing (see subscriber count). Some folks use the Slack channel just to "ping" others, but sometimes you find large blobs of text that would better live in mailing list archive, for future searches. In any case it is important that project decisions and deeper discussions remain on the dev@ list. Thomas On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 9:37 PM Vinoth Chandar <[email protected]> wrote: > Mentors, > > Need some advice on this. This was also brought up during the DISCUSS > thread. > > Currently, we have a slack channel to support our community (~50 members). > It helps us interactively work through issues. I see a couple projects > Beam/Arrow - do have slack channels. How do these project use it in > conjunction with mailing lists? What goes where? What are the tradeoffs? > > Thanks > Vinoth >
