[Talk-us] Slack: Do we need an Alternative (was Planning an import in Price George...)

[Ian Dees]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 2:24 PM, Jeffrey Ollie <jeff at ocjtech.us> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 10:21 PM, Bryan Housel <bryan at 7thposition.com>
> wrote:
>
>> > I'm also interested in how others feel about Slack. Is it good for the
>> community or should we look elsewhere?
>>
>> Glad you asked!  I think Slack has changed the way I work for the better.
>>
>> Here are some advantages..
>> * lower barrier to entry for less technical folks
>>
>
> Signing up for a mailing list is really that hard?
>

Mailing lists and forums solve a different problem than chat systems like
Slack or IRC. All of these systems can co-exist at the same time and
support people who want to communicate in different ways.

But to answer your question, I assist at least one person a week with
figuring out how to subscribe to the OSM mailing lists I moderate. The
mailman system we're using is rather confusing, especially to people who
haven't experienced mailing lists before.


> * works well for both sync and async chat
>>
>
> I completely disagree on the async chat. Maybe it would work if people
> took advantage of the conversation threading features that Slack and some
> other clients offer but they rarely do. Therefore you're stuck scanning
> pages and pages of comments looking for needles in haystacks and trying to
> reconstruct the conversations.
>

What's interesting to me about Slack is that if someone mentions you while
you're away, you'll get an email or phone notification with a link to the
context of the mention. This lets me follow important conversations or
answer questions if someone asks me directly. If I want to, I can skip over
everything else very easily. This goes back to the difference between
mailing list/forum-style communication and real-time communication with
IRC/Slack. All of these systems can (and should) exist together to support
people who prefer different styles of communication.


>
>
>> * decent search
>>
>
> It has search, but the fact that Slack's (and many others are the same)
> search is a walled garden makes its use limited.
>

Sure, messages aren't indexed by Google by default, but I've never once run
into a useful search result from IRC logs in Google. Slack's built-in
search is very useful and I use it all the time from within the app.


>
>
>> * everyone is on it
>>
>> I really can’t imagine going back to something else.  I’d happily pay for
>> it if they asked me to.
>>
>> There are currently over 800 people on the OSM-US Slack, and over 3000 on
>> the GIS Spatial Community Slack.  I have no idea how many people are
>> subscribed to the talk-us mailing list.
>>
>
> 800 people signed up for an account, but only 20 or so have a client open.
> I hadn't even logged in since September 2017 when this discussion started.
> Doesn't really sound to me like everyone is making use of Slack.
>

There are 806 people signed up and our weekly active user count is around
160 with ~4500 chats sent in the last month. There are 506 people
subscribed to the talk-us mailing list, with approximately 15% not
receiving any messages from the list and around 50 messages posted over the
last month. I think both are healthy communities and, as I said above, it's
totally OK for them to co-exist and support people who like to participate
in different ways.

-Ian
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