Re: Thoughs about communication

[Carlos Soriano <csoriano protonmail com>]

Hey Sri,

I want to see this happen too and I encouraged Alberto to start this thread, he proposed the same as you, using #newcomers channel as one of the precursors, since is one of the first channels for new people.

However, I think #newcomers is not the best place to experiment, things are alteady all confusing and hard (from a newcomer perspective) and adding two ways of communication and in the experiment phase is going to make it worse.

Instead we can add #gnome-hackers or so, where there are quite a few people (I would love to have #nautilus too, regular contributors agreed on experimenting), and once we agree on matrix or whatever then switch #newcomers to matrix or whatever as single documented way of comunication.

Just my 2 cents :)

Carlos Soriano
-------- Original Message --------
On 26 Jan 2017, 21:56, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 7:47 AM Allan Day < allanpday gmail com> wrote:

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.

Let me add my two cents here.  I've been wanting to do something like this for some time and as Allan has alluded to, there has been discussions amongst engagement team people around this.

My two cents, and bear with me on my slight rant - I really hate the idea of depending on a web app like riot.  It's like admitting that we've lost the whole application space and that we're going browser.  I know that is not what is intended, but that will be the perception.  

I'd like to do this, but I'd like to start putting resources into creating a viable chat client that works and is designed as a competition to a web app.  Maybe that means some kind of contest or something.  I'm not really worried about actually writing one after all matrix is an open standard, but the design one that shows the advantage of running something native should be a challenge that we need to meet head on.

That said, we'll table that bit for now.  I have talked to Andrea Veri, they are kind of low on sysadmin resources and probably can't help in the immediate future in implementing something.

Seeing as I have some free time; I asked Andrea if it was okay if I could spearhead this particular project. A good way introduce myself back to devops after a long hiatus.  He seemed to agree, so I can start looking into at least creating the irc bridge between matrix and some specific rooms - #engagement, #newcomers, and #docs.  I've picked these as the kind of contributors we have tend to be quite varied, but also there are differences in culture and etiquette between irc and these other technologies that can be disruptive.

sri