[Talk-us] [OSM-talk] Slack

[Luis Villa]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 10:25 AM Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 11:37 AM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Slack offers an irc gateway if you'd prefer to connect to slack from your
>> irc client. Just sign up for the slack team and look in the "integrations"
>> section for information about how to connect your irc client.
>>
> ​Our software consultancy is using Slack for communications both
> internally and with the client (who adopted it internally at our
> suggestion). In general it s very nice.
>
> 1) History evaporates quickly ... unless you have a paid account.​
>    This may be good for Corps with (anti)retention policies, but could be
> a problem for a FLOSS/OpenData project.
>

My understanding is that open source projects can get a free corporate
account that retains history (details here
<https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204368833>, I think?) That said,
as I pointed out earlier, history available only to logged-in/signed-up
members is an anti-pattern for open source communities. So some tradeoff is
inevitable there. (That said, most projects have pretty unsearchable IRC
logs as a practical matter anyway, so this may not be much of a loss.)


> 2) The Xmpp / Jabber gateway works with Pidgin etc, but is buggy and
> inconsistent in handling of advanced/new  features (re-edited messages
> don't re-send; multi-user private chat invites don't, emoji as
> :smiley-cat:, display literal as data text with `markdown` only,  ...)
> mapping down to traditional and back. I expect the IRC gateway will be
> similar. The gateway should not re seen as a a panacea; try it before you
> jump hard there!
>
> ​I do concur with sentiment of preferring to base open development on open
> infrastructure.
> ​But if the freemium product provides sufficiently better capability, it
> is not wrong to use it to enable the project.
>

+1 to this. OSM should be seeking to broaden the base of potential mappers,
and that means making sure that gateways to the community are user-friendly
- which these days includes good UX/onboarding experience and mobile apps.
Slack is a clear winner there.

Luis
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