Open Stack

Christoper, 

> On 01 May 2016, at 17:28, Christopher Aedo <doc at aedo.net> wrote:
> 
> 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

Yes, I agree. This is also important for (unlucky) users that can’t install anything at all on their laptops unless their IT approve it first. Please do submit a patch for this. I can help if you need any guidance for the process.

> 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.

I agree with you that persistent presence on IRC is a nice feature. Not so sure about IRCCloud though. It’s free tier has only 2 hours of persistent connection after a user’s inactivity. 

There are many similar solutions (for the “no install necessary” web IRC client part at least), some are also OpenSource, like kiwiirc.com, webchat.freenode.net, etc. Maybe we can include them in the text? 
Or, for more advanced users, include steps necessary to use one of the (free?) bouncer services?

Matjaz

> -Christopher