[Pharo-dev] Slack, fragmentation and design information

[Stephan Eggermont]

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.

Stephan