Re: Thoughs about communication

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

I agree with pretty much everything you've written here, Emmanuele. Just one comment...

On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 1:32 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:

...

>> pros/cons irc:
>>
>> pros:
>> <snip>
>> - is widespread
>> - integrated in gnome environment (bots, bugzilla)
>
> I would argue these two features are critical to any prospective chat
> platform. If people can't access chat in a way that suits their workflow, they
> probably won't. And it'd be a step backwards if automation suddenly became a
> stumbling block.

I guess the issue, here, is whether or not we care about reaching
other people than the existing pool of contributors.

 

Attracting and retaining contributors has to be the most important consideration. It's worth noting that IRC cuts in a few different directions here: on the one hand, IRC means there's no barrier between us and all the existing Free Software contributors/projects who are also using IRC. On the other hand, for contributors who are used to modern tools, IRC probably feels like a huge step backwards - it isn't user friendly, isn't attractive, and it doesn't work well if you're not in one of the time zones that are popular with our community.

In some ways, GNOME has the worst of both worlds - we're using poor tech which has the advantage of adoption, and then we go and use a relatively isolated server, so we miss out on the additional traffic we might get on Freenode.

Allan