In general, I agree with these concerns. The media team has had good results with interacting with the community/developers/etc on IRC, and that works because they're there, they use it. Lots of important things that have helped us relative to Chrome in the eyes of web developers have happened because we're much, much more helpful and accessible than the Chrome developer team.
Yes, slack is slick. Yes it avoids loss of backtrace (mostly; finding things there can be hard, and the UI does not always help you in dealing with backscroll). However: Slack is external. There are hard-to-evaluate sec issues with it. Also, though not a primary issue, they have tools in Slack that simply don't work in Firefox (audio/video calling) that they simply are uninterested in fixing, even after (literally) years and multiple attempts to offer our help in fixing their problems. This does not make me happy with our supporting them (and they have impact on many other corporations and open groups using slack - pushing all of them towards Chrome). An open slack-like tool is an option, especially if there are options to make channels internal-only (and likely things mentioned here, like HR, finance, etc may want to be internal-only, not internal+NDAs). Or we can stick with IRC with slack for really-needs-to-be-internal - which is not 95% of what goes on in Slack. While there are occasional IRC spams, it's never been really problematic. I understand the issues mentioned about validation of users, but again I can't think of any significant problems we've had with that on IRC. Of course we always could, and having a plan for if it does happen (4chan decides we need spanking) is probably good (lock down to registered users temporarily, for example). I'll note that even when Brendan left, we didn't get that sort of problem that I recall. (IIRC the original primary argument given publically for slack was "we have teams using it anyways, and we should unify them into one group" - which didn't address the "should they be using it" issue. Some do use it outside of the Mozilla slack instance (devtools for example), but they're open.) -- Randell Jesup, Mozilla Corp remove "news" for personal email _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
