Open Stack

On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 12:48 PM, Blair Bethwaite
<blair.bethwaite at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Following on from the inaugural scientific-wg, Stig and I as co-chairs
> need to organise a regular meeting schedule going forward. Anita
> provided some useful advice/pointers here - thanks!
>
> I understand the infra team has various useful processes setup around
> IRC meetings, however I (and others) are concerned that IRC will be a
> barrier to entry for some folks wishing to participate in this forum -
> our own community cloud has experienced this, with Slack very quickly
> and popularly replacing IRC (note I'm not particularly advocating
> Slack itself here, there are a number of options).
>
> Before we consider this further ourselves I'm wondering if this has
> already been discussed or is being considered by the core
> user-committee? I imagine this is something that will need to be
> addressed soon as the user-committee births new (not-as-technical)
> community working groups.

Blair, I have been talking to many folks about the same thing,
especially regarding the perceived barriers around getting up and
running with IRC.  I had planned to write up a blog post detailing a
step by step path to getting on IRC using the online service
https://www.irccloud.com.  I wanted to respond to this message right
away though, just to share my perspective.

In my opinion getting the working groups comfortable with using IRC
will be a huge win for everyone involved.  Automatic logs of the
conversation make it easy for more people to keep up with what's
happening when they can't join the meetings.  Meetings that take place
over IRC are also often much more comfortable for introverts or
non-native english speakers who might be reluctant to speak up on a
conference call.  One other benefit is that being available on and
familiar with IRC will make it easier for us all the improve the
communication channels between OpenStack developers and all the great
people involved with the working groups.

My intention over the next week or two will be to write a detailed
guide that will make it super easy for anyone to join the conversation
on IRC :)  What do you think?

-Christopher