I have a different concern than Ian: I think that a mailing list (which is how I interact with Google Groups) is a better format than group chat.
As it stands, I am happy to read a few emails a day, schedule permitting. It's a nice break from other work. Chat, though is a different matter. It's an active interruption into what you are doing and a demand for your attention. Of course, I can turn notifications off, but when posting to a chat room, the expectations are much different than when sending an email, regarding response time. If I am not going to pay attention to the notifications and read about them later, how is this different than reading email? I can actually see it being worse for me: If there was an interesting topic that I want to contribute to a few days later (much like this post), it's fine on a mailing list, but I think it would be awkward on a group chat. In my experience, whenever I have tried to use the IRC channels for open source projects, I get no response or engagement at all. The channel is filled with people, who are doing other things and don't pay attention to it at all. The one time I had success, was when I pinged a particular developer by name directly and caught his attention, but felt somewhat awkward because of the demands I was putting on his attention. Another benefit I see with mailing lists is that conversations are nicely threaded into topics. I don't really have an objection with setting up group chat. I just don't think I would participate in it. -- Ylan Segal [email protected] On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 9:37 PM, Ian Young <[email protected]> wrote: > +0 from me. Which is to say, I certainly love Slack as a business tool and > am not necessarily opposed to the idea of an SDRuby Slack channel, but it's > something that should be done with intention and not on a whim. Slack's > business model is decidedly awkward for OSS communities > <https://medium.com/@jedwatson/slack-and-oss-communities-130489aae8#.m479igi2m>, > and since Slack is essentially a competitor to the established and open > protocol of IRC > <http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/24/slack-is-quietly-unintentionally-killing-irc/>, > I would like us to have a solid justification for why it's better to open a > Slack channel than to establish an IRC channel and link to a user-friendly > IRC web client. I know San Diego JS has been grappling with this question, > so if there's interest I could probably ping them to find out if they've > landed on a resolution and what led them to it. > > Also, food for thought: San Diego JS' IRC channel is basically a ghost > town, and last I checked their Slack channel was similarly quiet, despite > their user base being substantially larger than ours. It's possible an > SDRuby chat room would suffer the same irrelevant fate—we're a wonderful > community but a small one, and not everyone idles on chat all day. Again, > I'm not opposed to the idea, but before launching I'd like to see a plan > for how we plan to encourage enough participation to reach a critical mass > of interesting-ness. > > > On Sun, Jan 31, 2016, at 06:34 PM, Alex Egg wrote: > > +1 for setting this up > > On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 3:29 PM James Hall <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Guys, > > I was wondering if you guys have a slack setup? > > -James > > > -- > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "SD Ruby" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "SD Ruby" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > > -- > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "SD Ruby" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SD Ruby" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
