[Neos] [TEAM] Slack for November sprint

[Helmut Hummel]

Hi!

For the record:
I love Slack as it enables me to better communicate with the community[1]

On 31.10.14 13:59, Jacob Floyd wrote:
> For the record, I am opposed to using Slack. I use it when I have to, but
> (A) it's not tied with typo3.org accounts, (B) everything gets "archived"
> all the time, so good luck finding an old conversation, and (C) there are
> other open source options like IRC, or our ML/Forum/Newsgroup.

Slack is not meant to and can never be a replacement for 
ML/Forum/Newsgroup communication. But I think it is a great alternative 
for IRC (or any other immediate communication) and I will explain why I 
think so:

1. Available context of a communication any time on any device

No matter when I log in on what device, I can always scroll up and read 
what people are currently writing about right now and can decide to jump 
into this conversation without asking for the context or looking it up 
on a IRC log website.

When using IRC, I have nothing, unless opening a website with the log of 
today which can be quite tedious especially on a mobile.

2. Configurable push notifications per channel, watch words and device

I can configure messages/channels/words which are important for me (or 
my team) to be pushed to my mobile so that I can answer questions or do 
some actions immediately when required.


3. Read history of messages across devices

I don't loose time reading things I already read or searching the point 
where I left a conversion previously. This helps a lot to "stay in 
touch" with current discussions, questions or problems.

4. Integrations

Not a must, but it really nice and friendly how easy it is to share code 
snippets, screenshots, anything when using the Slack apps.
It is also possible to write integrations like t3bot[2] which helps to 
keep track of open reviews, merged changes or exchange bugtracker links.


Can all this be accomplished with IRC? I bet it could.
IRC bouncers would be a great help, in fact I also use one for IRC.
However, a bouncer only solves a minor part of the benefits I described 
above.

Additionally every person who would like to have this benefit for a 
better communication would have to set one up themselves. Can we assume 
everbody can do so in order to be able to easily communicate?

Of course we could build our own "Slack" based on open source tools, 
providing a bouncer for everybody, adding additional things to the stack 
to get timestamps of messages right and push messages to mobiles if 
needed and so on. But who has the time to build it? Is it really 
feasable to build it? I personally think it is not, if we can use a tool 
that is already there at *no cost*



I do not neglect the ciritique on Slack:

1. Message history is discarded after a total of 10000 messages
2. People need to be invited to the Slack TYPO3 team
3. No connection to typo3.org accounts/ yet another service that needs 
my "personal data"


For 1.
Slack offers a IRC connector. People who already set up their IRC stack 
with bouncer/ archiving message history can just use it and have no loss 
compared to IRC

For others we can very easily create a bot account that joins all public 
channels (or some) via IRC and puts the log file anywhere in the web 
(preferably on typo3.org)

For 2.
Yes that is a pity and we should simplify that somehow. This involves a 
bit of research and work, but would be just a breeze compared to 
building an IM infrastructure for the whole TYPO3 community

For 3.
If this is the only complaint left, I'd say this is a very fair 
compromise for getting a great IM platform for *free*



This is (roughly) my point of view. Please challenge me, point out what 
I missed or raise additional concerns against using Slack.

Thanks for reading this far ;)


Kind regards,
Helmut

[1] I'm perfectly aware that there are it is a smaller community that 
I'm going to reach by communicating via Slack than by posting an article 
or to a forum

[2]https://github.com/NeoBlack/T3Bot

-- 
Helmut Hummel
Release Manager TYPO3 6.0
TYPO3 CMS Active Contributor, TYPO3 Security Team Member

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