Future of this Google Group

[James Turk]

Hello Everyone,

We've been talking a bit within the core team about the various communication channels we have and the best way to use them & manage them. 

To recap, most discussion occurs on:

- GitHub (https://github.com/openstates)  - for data issues & conversations about new features

- Slack (https://openstates-slack.herokuapp.com/) - for more ephemeral things and discussion among contributors

and we make all of our our announcements via some combination of:

- our Blog (https://blog.openstates.org/)

- our Twitter (https://twitter.com/openstates) for announcements

- our announcement mailing list (http://eepurl.com/csjDef)

...and then there's this list, which in the past has been used for announcements and people asking questions that would likely do better on Slack or filed as GitHub issues.  It feels like Slack/GitHub are better for those things respectively and the blog/twitter/mailing list are more than adequate for announcements.

To help out, we've also put together a guide on where different types of communications happen: http://docs.openstates.org/en/latest/contributing/communication.html 

So right now we're considering sunsetting this group in favor of the above channels of communication.  Of course, there's a chance that there's something we've neglected to consider, and we're open to hearing feedback before this is final- but given the relatively low activity on this list compared to other channels we feel that it might be best to steer people towards either filing GitHub issues or discussing more ephemeral things/making their own announcements on Slack.

[Aaron Kreider]

I'm only an occasional user for Fifty States (I'm using the API, but so long as it is stable - no complaints and thanks for everyone's work!).

As such, I really don't want to learn Slack and rarely use Github. Slack looks overly complex for my purposes. Ex. I go to openstates.slack.com and I don't see any content.  By contrast, a Google Group is a well understood and easy to use form of technology. It's easy to do Q/A and search - which are the key features for me.

I also love the stackexchange approach to Q/A.

Aaron

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[Kory Payne]

slack also does not archive old convos for everyone to search. i like having he gmail thread. 

that said, you guys are doing the heavy lifting, so whatever works...

Sent from my iPhone

[James Turk]

Thanks guys-

The lack of archive/signup requirements for Slack are a completely fair concern and one we discussed prior to this.  Our general intent is that things that benefit from a permanent record will be steered towards GitHub (which meets the criteria of being searchable and available without login), but that isn't a perfect solution for every use of this list, but hopefully 95%.

Stack Exchange is an interesting idea too, I know some other projects have adopted it.  It is certainly worth looking into.

On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 7:13 PM, Kory Payne <kory....@gmail.com> wrote:

slack also does not archive old convos for everyone to search. i like having he gmail thread. 

that said, you guys are doing the heavy lifting, so whatever works...

Sent from my iPhone

On May 9, 2017, at 1:10 PM, Aaron Kreider <aa...@campusactivism.org> wrote:

I'm only an occasional user for Fifty States (I'm using the API, but so long as it is stable - no complaints and thanks for everyone's work!).

As such, I really don't want to learn Slack and rarely use Github. Slack looks overly complex for my purposes. Ex. I go to openstates.slack.com and I don't see any content.  By contrast, a Google Group is a well understood and easy to use form of technology. It's easy to do Q/A and search - which are the key features for me.

I also love the stackexchange approach to Q/A.

Aaron


On 5/9/2017 9:17 AM, James Turk wrote:

Hello Everyone,

We've been talking a bit within the core team about the various communication channels we have and the best way to use them & manage them. 

To recap, most discussion occurs on:

- GitHub (https://github.com/openstates)  - for data issues & conversations about new features

- Slack (https://openstates-slack.herokuapp.com/) - for more ephemeral things and discussion among contributors

and we make all of our our announcements via some combination of:

- our Blog (https://blog.openstates.org/)

- our Twitter (https://twitter.com/openstates) for announcements

- our announcement mailing list (http://eepurl.com/csjDef)

...and then there's this list, which in the past has been used for announcements and people asking questions that would likely do better on Slack or filed as GitHub issues.  It feels like Slack/GitHub are better for those things respectively and the blog/twitter/mailing list are more than adequate for announcements.

To help out, we've also put together a guide on where different types of communications happen: http://docs.openstates.org/en/latest/contributing/communication.html 

So right now we're considering sunsetting this group in favor of the above channels of communication.  Of course, there's a chance that there's something we've neglected to consider, and we're open to hearing feedback before this is final- but given the relatively low activity on this list compared to other channels we feel that it might be best to steer people towards either filing GitHub issues or discussing more ephemeral things/making their own announcements on Slack.

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[Kory P]

noted on github, will start using that.  thanks 

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