Communication, a conversation

[Jesse Cooke]

In the days before Slack and Discourse, there were mailing groups and IRC. We still, of course, have a mailing list (2000+ conversations and 1000+ members) and I'm sure there's still an IRC channel out there, but with the adoption of Slack we've seen a severe drop in mailing list traffic.

Are there better tools than email mailing lists? Sure, I think so. I'm a big fan of Discourse, but I'm not sure adding another tool to the mix will get us all conversing more. Slack has really eaten the mailing list's lunch, and I think that's OK for ephemeral conversation. Because we don't pay for it, there's no permanent history which is valuable to the group. Therefore, I'd like to suggest we converse wherever conversation starts, but decisions are made/published on the mailing list.

I've also mentioned in the past that there are better mailing list services than Google Groups. One I've used to some success is Groups.io and if anyone has other options they'd like to share, I'd be open to exploring them.

Thoughts? Comments?

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

Thank you, Jesse.  Your proposal seems perfectly reasonable; my only worry is that Slack has eaten the conversation so thoroughly that folks will keep forgetting about the mailing list.

I'm open to Discourse as a replacement for this list, especially since it can be treated sort of like a mailing list.  (I don't have the bandwidth to set it up, but I'm happy to keep on being one of the admins on whatever tools we need.)  Other mailing list software... sure, whatever.  I'm not sure we have enough traffic that it'll make a difference, but if there's a compelling feature on something else, I can help with migration.

-Sam

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[Brent Miller]

I have no real thoughts about specific tools — if we go to Discourse, or Groups.io, I’m totally cool with that, even though I have a slight bias for Slack over Discourse.:)

However, I’m seeing an anti-pattern. The troubles we have aren’t tooling problems, they’re human problems. Tooling solutions won’t address the underlying issues, and until we address the human problems we’ll be working on the wrong thing.

Brent

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[Jesse Cooke]

Yes, we spoke about this exact thing at the meeting. We're hoping that 1) better documentation and planning will help move us in the right direction for our meetings and 2) using better tools will help reinvigorate the community. This conversation is wrt the latter.

As for hosting Discourse, if we decide to go down that route, I'm sure we can get by with a cheap $5/mo VM and the community can pay me back as it does with Meetup & DNS. Or we can ask Stumptown what they have to offer in terms of stewardship.

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[Jared White]

I was at the meeting and was feeling pretty pumped about going the Discourse route, so I too am happy to aid with setup/money/etc. to get that going. Personally, I'm rather allergic to mailing lists at this point, and if there is a percentage of other folks out there who feel similarly, setting up Discourse could really bring in some fresh blood for the meetup in between the in-person gatherings.

-Jared

On Aug 17, 2019, at 8:44 AM, Jesse Cooke <je...@relativepath.io> wrote:



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