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Despite the “asychronous” claim, you have to keep a steady eye on it and reply in realtime or the conversation will move on without you. Anyone who takes the time to ponder and respond thoughtfully with context and explanation will find that they’re too late. I like the idea of a time-limited channel. You can only reply to it during the meeting, and up to 15 minutes after. Theoretically it would force everyone to com…
Or, discuss in chat but make sure to end with a summary email detailing the relevant decisions. Maybe include a link to the chat so you can find it in the future.
IRC sucks, but it sure beats the alternative. AIM or other Pidgin-based alternatives wouldn't be too bad either, if you had your own private server with everything logged.
Edit, because I'm a really shitty commentator, apparently, who isn't allowed to post any more today:
No, your comment was completely tangential to the content of my post.
"Live chat" as it's currently implemented and widely used, a la IRC, Slack, etc, certainly has its downfalls, much of which can be mitigated however by logging to disk, with a quality search engine to index it.
Look at all the "alternatives" this guy is suggesting. It's basically "switch to a forum instead of chat." Most of the suggestions are proprietary, closed junk. Not exactly a smart formula for long data retention.
He lists all these advantages of forums, and yet seems to have overlooked the advantage of chat, which is precisely that it gives a direct connection to someone, rather than having to wait a day or a week for a response.
Better advice would be to use IRC (or other locallly hosted, open source alternative) for your team, but use discipline in your conversations so that you don't bloat the chat log with a bunch of chatter that makes searching it harder. Then perhaps designate certain persons to organize and summarize the proceedings so they are more easily referenced.
There certainly can be better improvements in chat, but "just switch to a forum" isn't it.
Better yet, stop using shitware like Slack, Matrix, etc, where all the data is kept locked behind closed doors ("in the cloud") and you can only access it through a 500 MB bloated shitware app that drags your 8 core workstation to a crawl. IRC sucks, but it sure beats the alternative. AIM or other Pidgin-based alternatives wouldn't be too bad either, if you had your own private server with everything logged. Edit, be…
Or, discuss in chat but make sure to end with a summary email detailing the relevant decisions. Maybe include a link to the chat so you can find it in the future.
Funny thing, I've worked places where emails were deleted after 30 days but Slack was forever.
I don't know, it is quite easy to search a well indexed chat for keywords in order to find important information.
I use it on a daily basis to discover the reasoning for things that happened before my time. I've never known anyone else who does this, and I've never understood why.
use JIRA as an internal stackoverflow :D
[1] - https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1217080/questions-ans...
I don't know, it is quite easy to search a well indexed chat for keywords in order to find important information.
Slack has fantastic search. It has good filtering, sorting, and pagination, and has the right degree of fuzziness. I use it on a daily basis to discover the reasoning for things that happened before my time. I've never known anyone else who does this, and I've never understood why.