[IDEA] Transition IRC to Slack/Gitter/Discord

[Zachary Quintana]

I'm new to this project, so go easy please. I searched through the group history and I saw that back in 2016 someone proposed moving the the group discourse to one of those chat apps as the primary tool. I can see why that might not be the best idea. That said, I'd to see what anyone here thinks of moving from IRC to one those. It certainly would be much easier than trying to use IRC. Also it seems like the IRC chat is largely dead. No one seems to be active on that server. As an alternative would the community here consider opening a slack/discord/gitter chat as an alternative to IRC? Either way. I think you could expect to see a lot more participation if you were using one of those.

[Asmir Mustafic]

Hi, 

This is my personal opinion, and not as secretary.

I understand that the mailing list might be not the ideal, Slack might bring more people to talk, but the fact that after some time/messages you lose the history of the conversations is a no go.
It should be always possible to track the history of a decision.

I'm not familiar with discord, does it have the same issue? 

Asmir

On Mon, 9 Nov 2020 at 18:19, Zachary Quintana <zach.q...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm new to this project, so go easy please. I searched through the group history and I saw that back in 2016 someone proposed moving the the group discourse to one of those chat apps as the primary tool. I can see why that might not be the best idea. That said, I'd to see what anyone here thinks of moving from IRC to one those. It certainly would be much easier than trying to use IRC. Also it seems like the IRC chat is largely dead. No one seems to be active on that server. As an alternative would the community here consider opening a slack/discord/gitter chat as an alternative to IRC? Either way. I think you could expect to see a lot more participation if you were using one of those.

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[Grzegorz Korba]

Hi,

Discord does not have message history limit but has its own cons like lack of threads.

Personally I think such chat apps are not designed to have technical discussions that require voting or/and have final decision. Also registering requirement is IMHO blocker since all discussions and decisions should be publicly available as-is, without need to create any account.

But on the other hand I agree that mailing list / google group isn't friendly and should be changed. I think that enabling Issues feature in https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards (or creating https://github.com/php-fig/discussions for that purpose) could solve the problem - use Pull Requests for PSRs and other technical things that require code changes, use issues for general discussions. That way:

• anyone could read all discussions without having Github account
• anyone registered could join discussion (unless configured other way in the settings)
• discussion history would be available
• with help of some conventions (emoji reactions) there could be some voting system

Alternative could be self-hosted system like Jira (free for open source → https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license-request) that could be extended with plugins to help managing stuff. But this probably would be overkill, Github should be enough.

[Ben Ramsey]

My $0.02 as one who lurks on the mailing lists:

Chat programs, whether it be Slack or Discord or Rocket.Chat or Mattermost or whatever, are inherently bad at transparency, which is paramount to open source. They’re difficult to search, do not provide an easy means to browse through the history, and they almost always require an account to access the history. Mailing lists, on the other hand, provide search, archival browsing, and all discussions can be made public.

I think chat is great for ad hoc discussions and meetings, but when it’s time to make any decisions, everything (including ideas discussed in chat) needs to move to a medium that can support transparency and openness. Right now, that’s mailing lists.

Cheers,

Ben

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[Andreas Heigl]

Am 16.12.20 um 17:38 schrieb Ben Ramsey:

> My $0.02 as one who lurks on the mailing lists:
>
> Chat programs, whether it be Slack or Discord or Rocket.Chat or
> Mattermost or whatever, are inherently bad at transparency, which is
> paramount to open source. They’re difficult to search, do not provide an
> easy means to browse through the history, and they almost always require
> an account to access the history. Mailing lists, on the other hand,
> provide search, archival browsing, and all discussions can be made public.
>
> I think chat is great for ad hoc discussions and meetings, but when it’s
> time to make any decisions, everything (including ideas discussed in
> chat) needs to move to a medium that can support transparency and
> openness. Right now, that’s mailing lists.

I second that!

And IIRC this has been a discussion on this list several times and so
far the result was always to stay with the mailinglist format!

Cheers

Andreas
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[Grzegorz Korba]

> I think chat is great for ad hoc discussions and meetings, but when it’s time to make any decisions, everything (including ideas discussed in chat) needs to move to a medium that can support transparency and openness. Right now, that’s mailing lists.

Github issues / pull requests ARE transparent (don't require account to read), searchable, offer structurized history (while chat have rather linear and mixed), so all requirements set up by mailing list are met.

All of this while providing much more readability (code syntax, formatting), they don't include all the noise from quoted previous messages or signatures (rolling eyes emote), can link issues between each other (with automatic references in issues' timeline), every user can set his own notifications policy (on project level) or subscribe to single issue/PR.. Mailing lists are so raw that in 2020 many people won't use them "just because".

As for IIRC - I don't know how many people use it and how many discussions had been taken there, but honestly I doubt that there is as much discussion as would be inapropriate for Github issue. I don't say IIRC should be abandoned completely, people can talk there as much as they want but there shouldn't be taken any serious technical decisions. IIRC should be a place for friendly talk (like Symfony's Slack) and even if some serious discussion is started there, final result should be documented elsewhere. And by "elsewhere" I don't mean mailing list.

[Ben Ramsey]

Grzegorz,

I was responding to the OP and not your response about GitHub issues/pull requests. GitHub also recently released a new feature called “discussions” that might work, too. It appears to provide threaded discussions, and I agree with you that these tools meet the openness requirements of open source communities.

Here’s an example: https://github.com/github/docs/discussions

Cheers,

Ben

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[Grzegorz Korba]

Ben, thanks for the link to Github Discussions, I did not see those before but it looks very promising! Another advantage over mailing list :-)

PS. Andreas, instead of talking behind the back (https://twitter.com/heiglandreas/status/1339278560574525449) you could simply have challenged my arguments. I was typing in rush and used IIRC instead of IRC because of your message, where you used this initialism ;-) Not to mention your tweet contains false narrative because topic is about switching IRC to chat, not mailing list to chat (and as a side topic I was talking about moving from mailing list to other system, not chat).

[Paul Dragoonis]

On Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 16:41 Andreas Heigl, <and...@heigl.org> wrote:

Am 16.12.20 um 17:38 schrieb Ben Ramsey:
> My $0.02 as one who lurks on the mailing lists:
>
> Chat programs, whether it be Slack or Discord or Rocket.Chat or
> Mattermost or whatever, are inherently bad at transparency, which is
> paramount to open source. They’re difficult to search, do not provide an
> easy means to browse through the history, and they almost always require
> an account to access the history. Mailing lists, on the other hand,
> provide search, archival browsing, and all discussions can be made public.
>
> I think chat is great for ad hoc discussions and meetings, but when it’s
> time to make any decisions, everything (including ideas discussed in
> chat) needs to move to a medium that can support transparency and
> openness. Right now, that’s mailing lists.

I second that!

Thirded.

And IIRC this has been a discussion on this list several times and so
far the result was always to stay with the mailinglist format!

Cheers

Andreas
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+---------------------------------------------------------ooO-(_)-Ooo-+
| Andreas Heigl                                                       |
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[Andreas Heigl]

Hey Grzegorz.

Am 16.12.20 um 23:18 schrieb Grzegorz Korba:

> Ben, thanks for the link to Github Discussions, I did not see those
> before but it looks very promising! Another advantage over mailing list :-)
>
> PS. Andreas, instead of talking behind the back
> (https://twitter.com/heiglandreas/status/1339278560574525449) you could
> simply have challenged my arguments. I was typing in rush and used IIRC
> instead of IRC because of your message, where you used this initialism
> ;-) Not to mention your tweet contains false narrative because topic is
> about switching IRC to chat, not mailing list to chat (and as a side
> topic I was talking about moving from mailing list to other system, not
> chat).

One of the great advantages of mailinglists over chat is that you are
not in a rush. Unlike in a chat, where you might miss the connection to
a previous statement, you have much more time to read the arguments of
the others and then rethink and phrase your answer.

So as Ben already mentioned, he was answering to the OP and perhaps you
realized that I was answering Ben. So my discussion was not about IRC
but about the Mailinglist as well.

And I still think that Maillinglists are the best tool for discussing
topics that are not related to existing code snippets. For the later a
PR is for sure the better discussion base. And I'm really looking
forward to testing Github Discussions. But for OpenSource we still
should think about whether we want to have the base for our decissions,
the discussion, in the hands of one company. Yes, the GoogleGroups is
also in the hands of one Company, but the base is the mailinglist, which
can (and should – who is taking care of that?) be archived elsewhere as
well.

To be fair: The mailinglist is already a weak replacement for a system
that would far better support the opensource collaboration and
discussion. But who would want to use NNTP again, especially as there
are almost no decent clients around.

Cheers

Andreas

PS: On a personal note: I can not understand, why you consider a tweet –
which by it's very nature is public – as "behind the back". My main
issue – and the main narrative – of that tweet still stands and you also
stated it in your email as well: You mixed up IIRC and IRC. Why that
happened is not that much of interest to me. But it happened. As the
written discussion is the only discussion we have, it shows why
proofreading is important. And yes: I am worried when someone talks
about IRC and mixes up IRC and IIRC.

> środa, 16 grudnia 2020 o 19:48:48 UTC+1 Ben Ramsey napisał(a):
>
> Grzegorz,
>
> I was responding to the OP and not your response about GitHub
> issues/pull requests. GitHub also recently released a new feature
> called “discussions” that might work, too. It appears to provide
> threaded discussions, and I agree with you that these tools meet the
> openness requirements of open source communities.
>
> Here’s an example: https://github.com/github/docs/discussions
>
> Cheers,
> Ben
>
>> On Dec 16, 2020, at 12:32, Grzegorz Korba <wir...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>

>> > /I think chat is great for ad hoc discussions and meetings, but

>> when it’s time to make any decisions, everything (including ideas
>> discussed in chat) needs to move to a medium that can support

>> transparency and openness. Right now, that’s mailing lists./
>>
>> Github issues / pull requests *ARE* transparent (don't require

>> account to read), searchable, offer structurized history (while
>> chat have rather linear and mixed), so all requirements set up by
>> mailing list are met.
>>
>> All of this while providing much more readability (code syntax,
>> formatting), they don't include all the noise from quoted previous
>> messages or signatures (rolling eyes emote), can link issues
>> between each other (with automatic references in issues'
>> timeline), every user can set his own notifications policy (on
>> project level) or subscribe to single issue/PR.. Mailing lists are
>> so raw that in 2020 many people won't use them "just because".
>>
>> As for IIRC - I don't know how many people use it and how many
>> discussions had been taken there, but honestly I doubt that there
>> is as much discussion as would be inapropriate for Github issue. I
>> don't say IIRC should be abandoned completely, people can talk
>> there as much as they want but there shouldn't be taken any
>> serious technical decisions. IIRC should be a place for friendly
>> talk (like Symfony's Slack) and even if some serious discussion is
>> started there, final result should be documented elsewhere. And by
>> "elsewhere" I don't mean mailing list.
>>
>> środa, 16 grudnia 2020 o 17:41:27 UTC+1 and...@heigl.org

>> <http://heigl.org/> napisał(a):

>> | https://andreas.heigl.org <https://andreas.heigl.org/> | 

>> +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
>> | https://hei.gl/appointmentwithandreas | 
>> +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
>>
>>
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[Grzegorz Korba]

Andreas, thanks for the clarification.

> But for OpenSource we still should think about whether we want to have the base for our decissions, the discussion, in the hands of one company. Yes, the GoogleGroups is also in the hands of one Company, but the base is the mailinglist, which can (and should – who is taking care of that?) be archived elsewhere as well.

I understand this PoV, this is actually a good argument IF we consider "discussing topics that are not related to existing code snippets" are important as much to be archived. But on the other hand, if those discussions had taken place on a different platform (e.g. Github Discussions) it probably would be possible to create automated processes to archive them somewhere else. Of course if required, because IMHO the most important part of this Group takes place on Github already* (pull requests) and is reflected on https://www.php-fig.org/

* well, not actually → https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards#github-usage (and this is something that had bring me here because personally I think this approach is not as friendly as it should be).

Let's sum it up:

• I would move all the technical discussions to Github's PRs (so mailing list wouldn't be required to process them, GH notifications + emails should be enough to keep track on them)
• I would keep mailing list for discussions about overall processes
• I would monitor Github Discussions and check if those are good for moving there from mailing list
• I wouldn't do anything about IRC (let people use it if they want) but wouldn't use it for any important discussions (only Github PRs + mailing list/GH discussions for that)

> You mixed up IIRC and IRC. Why that happened is not that much of interest to me. But it happened

It was simple typo, hard to proofread because it looks almost the same. Don't get me wrong, I had good laugh after your tweet, but it doesn't change the fact it was behind the back since you went to different platform with it and I saw it only because my colleague showed it to me ;-)

Have a good day, everyone!