Hi Gabriel,

thanks for taking initiative on this topic!

Gabriel Wicki <[email protected]> writes:

> 1. We define what we (as a project) expect from the different roles.
> E.g. committers are supposed to read and acknowledge messages coming
> through the guix-devel mailing list at least weekly.  Like this we can
> expect that for example a branch freeze announced a week in advance is
> seen by everybody with the power to push.

clear definitions of roles and expectations are always a good idea imho!

> 2. We add another mailing list, that we expect committers to read before
> pushing stuff to master.

I don't think that yet another communication channel would be an
improvement, especially if the issue is people not following
communication channels closely. Adding another one probably won't
improve the situation.

> These are both fine and should definitively be considered, but they do
> not really help channeling information.  Teams can not easily add their
> information channels (who's in charge to open up mailing lists with
> gnu.org),

What would the benefit of per-team mailing lists over codeberg issues
labeled for the respective team and discussions on guix-devel be? I
think all relevant information should end up in one of these two.

> the archives are not as easily searchable as they should be

What's missing? afaik there's a simple web interface
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel (and
https://yhetil.org/guix-devel as an unofficial mirror) allowing to
search for things. If there's the need for a more modern UI, I like what
the Fedora project is doing with their mailing lists by providing
HyperKitty as an interface to their archives:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/

and it seems like HyperKitty itself is already packaged for guix as
python-hyperkitty.

> (especially for non GNU/hackers and other interested people out there)
> and maybe we could use this opportunity to decentralize responsibilities
> and enable centralization of communication channels.  So there is this
> other option (that is somewhat perpendicular to the previous two):

Having a devel mailing list and an issues tracker already is quite
centralized in terms of communications.

> 3. We try this fresh, cool tool called Zulip¹, which Sergio introduced
> us to at Guix Days.  This is not to replace current means of
> communications, but could extend in (seemingly) all possible directions.
> It can manage and archive both synchronous and asynchronous channels,
> integrates with things such as (but not limited to) mailing lists, IRC,
> BigBlueButton, git.

I don't know if Zulip adds anything for me personally as it seems to be
a web client for things I'd prefer not to do in a web client. However,
as it seem to integrate well with a lot of things, I can see how that
lowers barriers in participation which is always a good thing, I don't
see myself using it though.

-- 
Kind regards,
Wilko Meyer

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