On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 2:24 PM, Jeffrey Ollie <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 10:21 PM, Bryan Housel <[email protected]> > 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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