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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

#131

Post by bluGill »

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.

You don't want a bot to archive it. You want a human (or an AI smarter than what exists today) to create a summary.

Everything you have in your archives will be taken out context, misinterpreted, used against you in court.

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

#132

Post by welterde »

Const-me wrote: post #105
emidln wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many organizations seem to use Outlook/Exchange and configure Exchange to make it difficult to use other mail clients (not enabling imap, not enabling caldav support so that a separate calendar and email client need to be used unless you use exchange, etc). Outlook is truly awful as a mail client and it would make one want to use anything else.

I've been using Outlook for 20 years or so, and I generally like it. Lots of features, some of them are borderline unique. For instance, I wonder which e-mail clients allow to create complicated rules that are then running on the mail server as opposed to that client? The necessary conditions are (1) one needs to learn it. Too many features are making UX non-intuitive. (2) fast connection to e-mail server (3) ms exch…

That feature of course needs support server-side, but Thunderbird does have a Sieve add-on (in case sieve is enabled/available on the server). I don't use it myself, since I prefer to edit the sieve filter file directly instead of using a GUI for it, but the option is there.

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

#133

Post by withinboredom »

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 --…

So, you're worried about this

> 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?

Yet you suggest using email where it basically goes (or can be coerced to go) across the internet in plain-text where anyone can read it?

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

NationalPark wrote: post #34
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 --…

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.

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by biztos »

It’s probably an unpopular opinion, but the best online technical discussions I’ve ever seen in a company were done in Bugzilla.

Every bug or feature request was a ticket. Tickets sometimes had quite long discussions.

The advantages were:

* Permanent, so you thought about what you wrote.

* Public, same effect.

* Sequential, so it was very rare for people to reply over each other.

* Goal-oriented, you wanted to move towards resolution, which was then archived forever.

* Opt-in for following, so you had some control over your attention.

* Available, so you could search and see old attachments etc etc.

* Safe, Local, easily self-hosted and backed up.

* Customizable, e.g. easy linking to the repo even if you change repos.

The more things moved to various forms of the all-consuming Jirapoly, the attention sink of Slack, the anarchy of mail+chat, the less useful and (importantly) the less productive these conversations became.

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

#136

Post by acjohnson55 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #125
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.

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 wor…

Hi Alex! Glad FWD:Everyone is still going strong. I'm still waiting for it to become the dominant way of presenting email correspondence in media, like embedded tweets :)

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

#137

Post by wussboy »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #40
emidln wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many organizations seem to use Outlook/Exchange and configure Exchange to make it difficult to use other mail clients (not enabling imap, not enabling caldav support so that a separate calendar and email client need to be used unless you use exchange, etc). Outlook is truly awful as a mail client and it would make one want to use anything else.

Is it really that bad? I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference.

It’s the worst. Unless you have to use any of the other ones.

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

#138

Post by jayd16 »

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.

And email solves that? Or you are suggesting both chat and email do not solve the issue?

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

#139

Post by tabbott »

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 --…

Slack and all its clones are based on the chat room model, which structurally has the problem described in this article (and many others for productivity, such as wasting attention). Fundamentally, the chatroom model pioneered by IRC is poor for asynchronous communication because you can't sustain temporally overlapping conversations in a channel.

However, you can't "just use email" -- Email's threading model is great for asynchronous work, but it is poor for synchronous communication and also doesn't support modern features that make it easier to communicate ideas efficiently (shared history, markdown formatting, image previews, emoji reactions, etc.). It's essential to be able to have (semi)synchronous written conversations with people you're working with, especially if you don't want to spend your days burning out on video calls.

This is why we created Zulip -- it's designed as a real-time communication tool with email's threading model and all the nice features of modern chat apps that email lacks. And the reading user experience is actually a lot better than email, because Zulip provides is designed with the goal of saving time when prioritizing, skimming, reading, and replying to conversations. It's also 100% open source software (not open core!).

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

#140

Post by FalconSensei »

jrockway wrote: post #51

I have always thought that Slack is designed to make information go away, and that's why people like it. Email never goes away unless you archive the thread. If you have a bunch of things that are going on, you open your inbox and realize just how behind you are, every time you open it. Slack, conversely, scrolls up and always looks the same. If you miss something, the world moved on without your input, and you feel…

> I have always thought that Slack is designed to make information go away, and that's why people like it.

I think it's exactly the opposite?[0]

People like it because, except for the free plan, you can find anything that was ever discussed.

[0]: https://slack.com/pricing

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