On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 2:41 AM intrigeri <intrig...@boum.org> wrote: > > Hi, > > (dropping my facilitator hat for this message) > > intrigeri (2021-01-03): > > So, my question is: > > > > What would we lose if we did not have any public chat room? > > > In other words: > > > > What new problems would we face if we did not have any public > > chat room? > > I think we would lose: > > - some of our soul and identity, i.e. "we work in the open" > > - a place where friendly bystanders can lurk and follow our work: > FOSS developers, users, etc. > > - a little bit of the efforts we've put into dismantling the > long-standing myth that Tails is produced by some sort of secret, > unapproachable group of anonymous people > > - a place where existing contributors who don't have access to our private > communication channels can get a feeling of belonging, by hanging > out with the rest of us > > - a place where we can meet new contributors, get to know each other, > collaborate and build trust until the project is comfortable with > giving them more privileges > > Practically speaking, my main concern is that the implied subtle > cultural shift and newly closed doors would make the boundary between > in-group folks and kind-of-outsiders even harder to cross. > > This would make it a bit harder to go from "volunteer contributor" to > "paid worker" (such transitions are rare in our recent past, but there > are a few noticeable ones if we look further back in time), or from > "unprivileged contributor" to "full-blown project member". > > Finally, note that we already lost quite some of this when we moved > from IRC @ OFTC (where lots of FOSS contributors hang out already) to > XMPP (which for many people would require extra setup work). IMO the > status quo, in all these respects, is not great.
FWIW, as a former/lapsed volunteer developer (and still active FOSS developer), I appreciated having a public chat that I could drop in to ask questions of the devs. I would've greatly preferred an IRC option, since I more generally use that. I only set up XMPP to chat with tails developers when I needed it, but it was useful when I did use it. If possible, I'd love to see a public chat option preserved for precisely the reasons intrigeri mentioned. In any event, keep up the great work! Hopefully I'll find some time to contribute again this year :). -- -Austin GPG: 267B CC1F 053F 0749 (expires 2021/02/18) _______________________________________________ Tails-dev mailing list Tails-dev@boum.org https://www.autistici.org/mailman/listinfo/tails-dev To unsubscribe from this list, send an empty email to tails-dev-unsubscr...@boum.org.