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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

#151

Post by pwdisswordfish0 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #129
powersnail wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> Unfortunately there isn't any such thing as "forwarding an email thread"

Mailing lists have for years offered mailing list archives that you can read directly in your client, exactly as if the messages had been hitting your inbox from the beginning. The bigger problem with email is that messages are not as easily addressable, unlike links on the Web.

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

#152

Post by jayd16 »

I think an interesting difference between chat clients like Slack and email is this.

With email every user must organize a single firehose of an inbox. Chat channels area already a default compartmentalization but beyond that, chat services default to shared organizational structures like channels and threads.

In email each user must manage the conversations themselves through labels or what have you. In successful chat systems, you can passively benefit from the organization of others. Mailing lists help but aren't enough in their current, aging incarnation.

It might be possible to disrupt the email space by recognizing and adopting these UX differences.

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

#153

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

mumblemumble wrote: post #150
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, that's the top level. The 2nd level would be more analogous to individual email threads within those groups. Once you get down to the individual conversation level, the fine-grained management bits you talk about are not good UX, they're band-aids for dealing with bad UX.

Well, whether they’re good or bad UX depends on assumptions about whether the second-level categorization is more meaningful organization-wide or on a user-by-user basis.

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

#154

Post by ajsharp »

There's a great rule of thumb for workplace communication mediums I saw long ago. It was something like this:

- Email: Not urgent. Expected response: ~1 day. - Chat: Somewhat urgent. Expected response: Building on the points OP makes re the problems thinking one line at a time in chat, in this little mental model there's a whole lot of daylight between email and chat. And there's lots of problems with email that make it not a great communication medium for semi-urgent things.

My sense is that we need a better primitive inside chat platforms to differentiate between "this is important and we need to have this discussion now" and something closer to email-ish pace.

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

#156

Post by alach11 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #117
a-dub wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

amusingly, my understanding is that the original goal for slack was to be an archive. slack originally stood for: searchable log of all communication and knowledge but then in practice, i saw message retention locked down to 30 days or less, which kinda defeated the point. other modern tools, like trello, also seemed to have gaps when it came to logging/searching/archiving what happened. trello is fantastic for organ…

I don't know of any productivity tool that handles archiving well. You can store done tasks in some way, but all the context is lost. Over time, it's annoying even on a small - individual - scale.

I think Azure DevOps handles context pretty well. I can look at old tasks and see associated commits, conversations, and related work.

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

#157

Post by nicktorba »

There really needs to be some sort of mix between chat and a collaborative note-taking app.

How can we transform chats into a reasonable, permanent reference materials?

Maybe it would be possible to build a slack-bot that could identify which part of these threads are the most important, and even move them to a more permanent storage.

Or, slack channels could add functionality to allow users to vote for which messages are most pertinent, or should be moved to longer-term storage or a featured position for everyone.

I think there is probably value in these rapid fire IM's, but I feel the Mike's (the author's) pain. I skip over threads everyday because reading them never feels worth it.

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

#158

Post by NationalPark »

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.

That's just not true, Slack in particular is quite searchable. Anyway, weren't we talking about email, which is even less searchable?

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

#159

Post by u678u »

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 --…

Talk to your lawyer on this too. Our lawyer said emails with the lawyer in the conversation will have client attorney privilege, is not court admissible. I dont know about IM.

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

#160

Post by u678u »

biztos wrote: post #135

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 t…

Nice I haven't seem bugzilla for a while now, it looks good maybe we can use to replace Jira. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home
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