Who registered plone.slack.com?

I'd like to chat about Plone on Slack.com, and I see that plone.slack.com has already been registered. Is that anyone we know? It looks like plonemarketing.slack.com also exists.

The Plone marketing / communications team uses that second Slack.

I just filed a support request with Slack to find out if it's possible to contact the team owner (for plone.slack.com).

Just got this back from them:

Hello! I'm afraid we can't give out details of who owns Slack teams. Were you looking to possibly use the url plone.slack.com ?

How about open source, self-hosted alternatives? http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-reaches-1-0/

This all begs the question: do we really want yet another place to check in on? Big advantages of Slack (and compatible alternatives) over IRC is that you can upload files and paste screen shots easily, plus you can add integrations to github and the like. Down side is that Slack team participation (as we've seen) is by invitation only and there is no transparency about how to ask to be invited! That's not very community friendly. And hosting an open source alternative is one more thing for our admins to run.

So if we start talking about our own platform - shouldnt it be Plone Intranet then?

But think about it well, such an platform needs maintenance and support for years. Just a quick setup isnt enough.

To use Plone Intranet for this I'd recommend to wait until we have a notifications system in place that allows smartphone push and email updates. We have that roadmapped but not implemented.

We have no plans to support IRC or Github bridges.

Hi Kim

do we really want yet another place to check in on

Yeah, it's neverending, but what can you do .. At least Slack is

intelligent about notification (keeps track of what you've seen across

devices, sends email for @mentions ..) and you can dip in and read the

backlog (it remembers where you left off), in contrast to IRC where

you might have logging configured, which might be logging all the

netsplit noise too ..

And if you want, you can just use the IRC bridge.

team participation

This is easily enough solved:

GitHub - rauchg/slackin: Public Slack organizations made easy

An Incomplete List of Communities on Slack | by Angela Cois | Medium

hosting an open source alternative

Yes, that's not something we want to do unless it will be making us stronger.

I'd love to see Plone Intranet used, and I suspect it could be wired in
in some way, but fully agree that committing to run it for years would
be a thankless task unless it's done as side effect of a big existing
ploneintranet-as-a-service.

I'd love to see a ploneintranet-as-a-service... in fact, many! :smile:

A problem with free Slack is once you hit 10,000 messages, they start scrolling off the back, ie. the searchability of the messages is not what you think it should be.. this means it's fine for short term use but to get the (very useful) ability to see past history, you need to pay, and it's per user.

I looked into Slack's non-profit policy. They give you a good plan for free, but only up to 100 users (beyond that you have to ask): https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204368833

If this is something we want to pursue, we will also have to deal with the fact that someone (who isn't watching this forum) has already grabbed plone.slack.com.

The very nice support person at Slack wrote:

I've gone ahead and freed up the plone.slack.com url - it was a dormant account and hadn't been accessed in a very long time. You should be able to register it for your team now.

so I went ahead and grabbed it. We now have http://plone.slack.com.

What's the next step? :smile:

Heh, awesome :slight_smile: In the meantime, I created https://ploneorg.slack.com/ also .. but I think that's redundant now.

Next: add some more admin or owner users to enable delegation, and add all the well-known Plone companies for self-signup.

Slack allows history export, so we should periodically export chat archives.

There should also be a process using https://api.slack.com/outgoing-webhooks importing messages to a read-only Plone Intranet or Mattermost or ...? instance, to enable browsing and searching of chat history, while Slack does the heavy lifting of catering for many active users, mobile clients, etc.

That said, 10,000 searchable messages is approximately infinity times better than the very fragmentary history of #plone IRC.

FYI.... we're working on a slack inviter next month at PythonJamaica for our website sprint.

Everyone, let's please continue the discussion over at Alternatives to IRC