RFC: Migrating from Slack to Discord

[newhaven.io]

Hey all!

I hope you’re all doing well and enjoying this bout of cool weather as much as I am.

Just wanted to surface some community discussions we’ve been having around potentially moving NewHavenIO from Slack to Discord, in the hope of getting more people to chime in with their perspectives.

For a quick recap:

* There have been brief discussions around `Slack vs Discord` in our Slack over the last couple of years, and it eventually got to a point where we wanted something vaguely official to capture folks’ sentiments on the topic.

* Jake created an RFC last November about advantages/disadvantages to the switch and a few people popped in to share their views:

https://github.com/newhavenio/playbooks/issues/1

* Josh created a follow-up PR that generated a little more discussion and led to me creating a test IO Discord server so that we could explore what kind of moderating benefits we’d gain from the switch (outlined in the PR):

https://github.com/newhavenio/playbooks/pull/2

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But the reason I’m surfacing these discussions is that there simply aren’t a lot of people taking part in them. Whether that’s due to us on the board not being super transparent & forthcoming with these conversations or just folks being plain indifferent to the switch, we want to be clear that we want to hear your opinions!

NewHavenIO wouldn’t be what it is without all of our members being involved to whatever extent they wish. While some of us on the board feel that the move to Discord is a good one (and that we’re at a good point in time for the switch) we want to find a balance between what our most active users and what a majority of our users actually want. And honestly, that’s a hard needle for us to thread without actually hearing what you all think!

In that vein, I made a sister thread in the #nhvio-general channel on Slack for us all to discuss the switch together and share our opinions on it, which is linked here:

*  https://newhavenio.slack.com/archives/C02GA2MJL3T/p1664205724324779

But since we want to have a centralized place for documented discussion, we strongly encourage you to also share your thoughts on Jake’s RFC (linked above).

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We’re bound to lose some people if we were to switch, but we have a loose plan (that we’re firming up) on addressing that, which includes:

* Sending out a number of pre and post platform switch emails to our email group, letting folks know of the potential change, with the date of the cutover.

* Setting up some kind of bot that will periodically post in the IO Slack letting lurkers and infrequent users know that we switched over to a new platform with instructions on how to join us there.

Personally, I feel that we’re at such a low amount of monthly active users on Slack that we don’t stand to lose much in the switch over to Discord. If anything, it seems like there’s a non-zero number of people that say they would be more involved with IO (in and out of work hours) if we were to switch to Discord (a platform they already utilize for other hobbies and interest groups). I hope that those more active members would help us get more conversations going in more channels and lead to more topics & content for in-person events.

But anyway, if you have any thoughts or opinions to share on the topic we really hope that you’ll express them in either the RFC or the sister discussion thread in #nhvio-general. You can also email us at organ...@newhaven.io. We always value more perspectives being brought to the table and would really appreciate it if you all helped us make this decision together.

We hope to see you in there, and thanks again for making NewHavenIO the wonderful and inclusive space that it is. Be excellent to each other!