Open Stack

Sylvain Bauza wrote:
> 
> 
> Le mar. 18 sept. 2018 à 14:41, Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org 
> <mailto:fungi at yuggoth.org>> a écrit :
> 
>     On 2018-09-18 11:26:57 +0900 (+0900), Ghanshyam Mann wrote:
>     [...]
>      > I can understand that IRC cannot be used in China which is very
>      > painful and mostly it is used weChat.
>     [...]
> 
>     I have yet to hear anyone provide first-hand confirmation that
>     access to Freenode's IRC servers is explicitly blocked by the
>     mainland Chinese government. There has been a lot of speculation
>     that the usual draconian corporate firewall policies (surprise, the
>     rest of the World gets to struggle with those too, it's not just a
>     problem in China) are blocking a variety of messaging protocols from
>     workplace networks and the people who encounter this can't tell the
>     difference because they're already accustomed to much of their other
>     communications being blocked at the border. I too have heard from
>     someone who's heard from someone that "IRC can't be used in China"
>     but the concrete reasons why continue to be missing from these
>     discussions.
> 
> Thanks fungi, that's the crux of the problem I'd like to see discussed 
> in the governance change.
> In this change, it states the non-use of existing and official 
> communication tools as to be "cumbersome". See my comment on PS1, I 
> thought the original concern was technical.
> 
> Why are we discussing about WeChat now ? Is that because a large set of 
> our contributors *can't* access IRC or because they *prefer* any other ?
> In the past, we made clear for a couple of times why IRC is our 
> communication channel. I don't see those reasons to be invalid now, but 
> I'm still open to understand the problems about why our community 
> becomes de facto fragmented.

Agreed, I'm still trying to grasp the issue we are trying to solve here.

We really need to differentiate between technical blockers (firewall), 
cultural blockers (language) and network effect preferences (preferred 
platform).

We should definitely try to address technical blockers, as we don't want 
to exclude anyone. We can also allow for a bit of flexibility in the 
tools used in our community, to accommodate cultural blockers as much as 
we possibly can (keeping in mind that in the end, the code has to be 
written, proposed and discussed in a single language). We can even 
encourage community members to reach out on local social networks... But 
I'm reluctant to pass an official resolution to recommend that TC 
members engage on specific platforms because "everyone is there".

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)