Open Stack

On Sun, May 1, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Pančur, Matjaž
<Matjaz.Pancur at fri.uni-lj.si> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> On 30 Apr 2016, at 23:30, Shamail <itzshamail at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The Product WG conducted our meetings originally by phone meetings and used etherpads to document results, however at this point, we have switched to IRC being the norm (and we still use phone meetings from time to time (as an exception) for one-off tasks.
>>
>> I would like to second the comments made by Christopher... We have had several meetings in IRC where we have been discussing a topic and someone from the development community chimed in to enrichen the conversation.  The logs that Christopher mentioned are another benefit and the eavesdrop.openstack.org listing allows community members to create a calendar entry as well (this definitely helps people who might be interested in your working group find you).  I would also be glad to help any way I can to help the Scientific WG adjust to IRC (should you decide to use it).
>
> +1. I know it’s weird to talk  to your (younger) colleagues about using IRC, but it works, especially for globally distributed teams.
>
>>> 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?
>> I look forward to this guide!  It would’ve been very helpful during the Product WG transition to IRC.
>
> One of the things we teach in the OpenStack Upstream training (http://docs.openstack.org/upstream-training/) is how to setup/use IRC. We already have a short guide for that:
>
> http://docs.openstack.org/upstream-training/irc.html
>
> and we also cover this topic with hands on exercises during the training itself (slides: http://docs.openstack.org/upstream-training/06-irc-meetings.html).
>
> Maybe we can expand this?

Thanks for sharing this - it might make sense to expand this with a
third section for people who do not want to install any software
locally in order to provide a user experience similar to Slack.  Using
something like the free tier of IRCCloud would also allow for a
presence on IRC even when the user is offline.  The lack of persistent
presence is one thing the existing docs miss, which ends up
encouraging the use of IRC as a short term real-time communication
method when it can easily be used to provide something between the
immediacy of an instant-messaging client and the slow-speed of email.
This is what Slack gets right, and why it's become such a popular
choice.  Unfortunately Slack is far from open and has significant
scale limitations, so it would be a bad choice for the community.  The
IRC integration is also severely limited, so suggesting working groups
move to slack + IRC will not serve the purpose of integrating all our
different groups :)

My intention is to provide guidance for those who are comfortable with
Slack, but not prepared to install a local IRC client.  I believe a
free hosted solution can work very much like Slack without encouraging
a move to a whole new channel of communication which not be adopted by
the community at large.

-Christopher