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If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

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Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#121

Post by fwip »

have_faith wrote: post #89

I think part of the problem is not all conversations are obviously 'short and shallow' or 'long and broad'. What starts out casual might unearth something that needs going into deeper, and going in deep on something might not have results worth documenting yet. To me this points out a gap in our software for knowledge archival. The closest concept Slack has is "pinning" a message to a channel, which has very limited…

I know that AI is a pile of buzzwords, but.... is this something we could train AI to do reasonably well? A flow like "click button and highlight conversation start/end" and it picks out the relevant messages and tries to generate a set of takeaways? (and allows user to edit them before saving).

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#122

Post by bluGill »

gregmac wrote: post #90
NationalPark wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email isn't searchable by people who weren't on the threads. In an org that uses IM well (they exist!) the chat system actually becomes sort of like a wiki, except a lot more helpful.

If someone told me "that is documented in the chat channel, just search", my response would be "ok. So it's not documented." Even with the best organization (old content deleted), I don't want to wade through the conversations about it or all the other noise. Chat is temporal, the discussion about something like "should x be updated" is immediately irrelevant after the decision is made.

Your point is valid, but not exactly correct. I don't want to know just what was decided, but why. Often I will come back to "should x be updated" again and again. Knowing the factors in the last decision is very important. More than once I've pushed to update x and had someone say "we can't for good reasons that I forget". Often I've spent weeks redoing the discussion before someone remembers/discovers why we can't do the update and we all go "whoa, I'm glad we didn't do that". Other times we discover/remember why we couldn't update and they are for reasons that no longer apply and so we do the update. Still other times we never discover any reason why we shouldn't update. Last sometimes we discover why we shouldn't have updated after it is too late and we have a mess to undo while backing out the update.

The important part is we know why a decision was made. Chat logs are not a good archive because there is too much to sort thought that isn't relevant. Better than nothing, but what is really needed is an effort to document why in a place the right people will find it when they need to know.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#123

Post by kmano8 »

gregmac wrote: post #90
NationalPark wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email isn't searchable by people who weren't on the threads. In an org that uses IM well (they exist!) the chat system actually becomes sort of like a wiki, except a lot more helpful.

If someone told me "that is documented in the chat channel, just search", my response would be "ok. So it's not documented." Even with the best organization (old content deleted), I don't want to wade through the conversations about it or all the other noise. Chat is temporal, the discussion about something like "should x be updated" is immediately irrelevant after the decision is made.

Eh, for the golden path, sure (say, having a service documented).

Slack search for is high-value in historical context that's tough to replicate elsewhere. All at once, you learn if anyone's ever asked about the error before, and if so, see the conversation on resolution.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#124

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

mumblemumble wrote: post #111
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the difference between that sort of topics and news groups or mailing lists (with archives)? If I want information on something, subscribe; if I don’t want information, unsubscribe: I can always follow/search the archive (or read digests)

It's a second level of organization/subscription so that you can have more fine-grained control over how much you get spammed. News groups and mailing lists don't scale super well, in that, when you subscribe, you then get sent everything . Maybe not terrible for the 5-10 emails a day from my kid's playgroup's email list, but absolutely awful for trying to keep up with a team of 100 people.

But the solution is exactly the same: create a new mailing list or newsgroup under the sort of circumstances where you’d add a topic to a forum or a channel in a Slack workspace. Open source projects, for example, will have foo-announce, foo-user, foo-devel, etc.

Or use digests, mail filters/folders and a convention for tagging message subjects.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#125

Post by Alex3917 »

dumbfounder wrote: post #29
legerdemain wrote: post #25

The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…

Those emails are only available to the users participating in them, and in some places are automatically deleted after a certain amount of time. The point of TFA is knowledge capture, and email isn't transparent enough for sharing knowledge.

We made FWD:Everyone (https://www.fwdeveryone.com) for this exact problem. It works via a Gmail add-on, so you can upload an email thread after it's over without having to grant OAuth access to your inbox. It makes these threads taggable and searchable within your company, and formats them to make them look beautiful.

The advantage over just copying everything to a mailing list is that most conversations aren't worth archiving, so having conversations be opt-in after the fact keeps the signal-to-noise ratio much higher than it would otherwise be.

We're still a very small platform, but since we're completely bootstrapped and grew 34x year-over-year in the past year, we're not going anywhere. :-)

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#126

Post by bt1a »

Footkerchief wrote: post #17

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.

I second this, I am actually able to find tons of important communications on Slack that happened years ago at my work. Perhaps it is not well understood by many? I somewhat agree with the author, but what is the alternative to Email or a Chat Application?

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#127

Post by have_faith »

fwip wrote: post #121
have_faith wrote: post #89

I think part of the problem is not all conversations are obviously 'short and shallow' or 'long and broad'. What starts out casual might unearth something that needs going into deeper, and going in deep on something might not have results worth documenting yet. To me this points out a gap in our software for knowledge archival. The closest concept Slack has is "pinning" a message to a channel, which has very limited…

I know that AI is a pile of buzzwords, but.... is this something we could train AI to do reasonably well? A flow like "click button and highlight conversation start/end" and it picks out the relevant messages and tries to generate a set of takeaways? (and allows user to edit them before saving).

AI (or some primitive concept of...) could be useful in some aspect, perhaps for sugggesting tags or categories the information looks like it could belong to. Actually extracting the "facts and takeaways" sounds very hard but then I'm not a linguist so maybe there are methods.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#128

Post by jcrawfordor »

nobody9999 wrote: post #103
jcrawfordor wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Thunderbird user, but I don't really think that there's a clear winner in that comparison. Outlook has features that Thunderbird has been missing for over a decade, like reliable send-in-background (and other database operations in background unlike Thunderbird that likes to interrupt you to ask permission) and a far more mature calendar product.

>I'm a Thunderbird user, but I don't really think that there's a clear winner in that comparison. Outlook has features that Thunderbird has been missing for over a decade, like reliable send-in-background (and other database operations in background unlike Thunderbird that likes to interrupt you to ask permission) and a far more mature calendar product. A fair point. As someone who has used both Outlook (professional…

I tend to really harp on send-in-background because I view it as a core feature of an MUA, but as far as I know it's still hidden behind an about:config flag in Thunderbird because it has an excessive number of known bugs, and it's been this way for many years. Another ongoing pain with Thunderbird is the inability to switch between HTML and plaintext when composing a message. Outlook lets you do this, in Thunderbird you have to copy the message, discard it, start a new one in the right mode and paste.

On the other hand, yes, Outlook Web Access is hilariously bad. It's hard to understand how Microsoft flubbed it so bad considering that their consumer outlook.com has a radically better webmail. Different teams, obviously, but you'd think they would have shared notes.

All in all, it feels a lot to me like Microsoft had a really good MUA in 2003 and hasn't done much with it since, while Mozilla had a not-quite-done-yet MUA in 2003 and hasn't done much with it since. Both feel bolted together out of spare parts but in a way that's subjectively a bit different.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#129

Post by Alex3917 »

powersnail wrote: post #107
dumbfounder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those emails are only available to the users participating in them, and in some places are automatically deleted after a certain amount of time. The point of TFA is knowledge capture, and email isn't transparent enough for sharing knowledge.

This gives me an idea. What about setting up an archiving script? After a archive-worthy discussion in email, you forward the thread to "archivebot@my-company-domain.com". The script will parse the email chain and generate a static web page hosted on a local server.

> After a archive-worthy discussion in email, you forward the thread to "archivebot@my-company-domain.com". The script will parse the email chain and generate a static web page hosted on a local server.

Unfortunately there isn't any such thing as "forwarding an email thread", at least not currently. If you hit the forward button in your email client it will only forward the last email in the thread, which sometimes contains the entire thread as quoted reply text, but only in situations where each person has only replied to the most recent email in the thread. Some email clients also truncated the quoted reply text after a certain number of messages, and it's not generally parsable.

Our email archival product uses a G Suite add-on for this reason, which provides the same benefits as OAuth but works on a thread-by-thread basis. I think Outlook extensions work the same way, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

Actually technically Gmail does have a little known "forward thread" button that's hidden in one of the dropdowns, but it doesn't work that well. (Which you'll see if you try it on any longer thread.)

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#130

Post by Communitivity »

I disagree with this article.

This is what was said about GMail when it first came out - you need folders, without folders you can't keep organized, etc.

Turns out indexing and mechanisms to make use of that indexing (labels, advanced sorts, filters) work better than folders.

Persistent chat that can be labelled, indexed, searched and filtered is amazing for work related chats, or any chat that becomes part of a long running context.

We do this where I work, and it works well, mostly - as long as people use the tags.

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