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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

#241

Post by jamespitts »

zionic wrote: post #116
jamespitts wrote: post #59

I can't agree with this essay more. In the early days of the Ethereum community a lot of open coordination was done on reddit and a threaded forum hosted on Vanilla Forums. Initially for privacy and convenience, Skype, gitter, Discord, and Telegram began to take hold, and later became the primary place for open, public discussions and some decision-making as well. Threaded forums were still used but not central. It w…

Thanks for all the work you’ve done for ETH! It has enriched my life greatly, and I am so excited to see where things go post-EIP1559 and 2.0!

You're welcome! I've only played a small part in this amazing phenomenon, mainly DevOps and community-organizing. But it has been amazing to do anything to help.

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

#242

Post by generalk »

The way I've always heard this is:

If it's important, it needs to have a URL.

Your issue tracker works, assuming you're not constantly changing your tracker. SharePoint may work but is super clunky for this purpose. Confluence or Notion or something work just fine.

Email doesn't work by itself. With some mailing-list interface on top it may, but that seems like you're stretching a bit. IM/IRC/Slack/whatever chat also don't work for this purpose.

I always think: if I want to put a link to this project's design docs, maybe some meeting notes, so new hires can come up to speed on what we're trying to do, I want it to be a URL that makes some kind of human sense, and I want the format to be conducive to communicating the right details.

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

#243

Post by tidepod12 »

alisonkisk wrote: post #222
dividedbyzero wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For email that conversation probably has taken place already. Also, lots of larger orgs have internal mail servers where this isn't even remotely true.

Orgs have internal chat servers too.

They aren't talking about internal chat. The article suggests trying out several third party SaaS discussion forums like Discourse/Carrot/Basecamp. It's unlikely most orgs have internal servers for these services. GP is pointing out that using these third party SaaS discussions forums is usually a nonstarter unless its first been pre-approved by legal (whereas email is almost certainly already approved).

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

#244

Post by kumarvvr »

I really hope the word e-mail is replaced with something else (like 'memo') and a new paradigm is introduced around the concept of offline discussions, like forum board or stack-overflow.

The purpose of such a system would be to save discussions and understandings in discussions for a long term.

I read Stack Overflow threads now and have a pretty good idea about the thought process from problem -> approaches -> solution, including solutions or approaches that were rejected.

Real-time chat is not a replacement of a meeting, because meetings have substantial outcomes and key decisions taken, that are usually recorded as Minutes of Meeting / Meeting notes.

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

#245

Post by randallsquared »

tabbott wrote: post #139
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 grea…

From looking at the tour slides, a list of threads in the current chatroom (which Zulip calls "topics") does seem nice. I have often wished I could get Slack's all-new-thread-messages view filtered by channel.

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

#246

Post by barrkel »

tshaddox wrote: post #193
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'm confused. What are the differences between Slack and email? Both are generally displayed on a relatively small list where new messages eventually cause old messages to be hidden. Those hidden messages are still accessible if you try, both with similar processes (assuming you're using an email client with text search like Gmail).

Corporate Slack retention is typically measured in days, while email retention is measured in years.

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

#247

Post by barrkel »

generalk wrote: post #242

The way I've always heard this is: If it's important, it needs to have a URL. Your issue tracker works, assuming you're not constantly changing your tracker. SharePoint may work but is super clunky for this purpose. Confluence or Notion or something work just fine. Email doesn't work by itself. With some mailing-list interface on top it may, but that seems like you're stretching a bit. IM/IRC/Slack/whatever chat also…

Slack messages all have URLs. They work both in the browser (once you're authenticated) and in the clients.

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

#248

Post by berryjerry »

GordonS wrote: post #208
bluGill wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlook takes to long to start up in the morning. If it could start instantly I'd walk into the conference room on-time, but instead I'm several minutes late. Now that I'm working from home it needs to get the chat client started instead, but the the end result is the same, if I'm not running early I'll be late to important early morning meetings. (my early morning meetings are with India, so they will quickly assume…

There is something very wrong with your Outlook and/or Exchange install if it takes "several minutes" to start. I've used Outlook in several organisations over the years, and start time has always been in the order of 5-10s.

For me it takes less than 2 seconds to start up fully. Not sure what is wrong with you guy's computers. Maybe you need an SSD or more RAM.

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

#249

Post by qwantim1 »

vinw wrote: post #220
tehjoker wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang. I never thought of email like that, but I wonder if email+git+UI would help for complex conversations.

Sounds a little bit like Google Wave.

Wave seemed to me to be an unimaginative copy of other threaded comment implementations. The indentations seemed to waste valuable space on each page. Allowing anyone to edit anyone’s post seemed insecure. If I hadn’t known it was Google, I would’ve thought it to be a bad college project.

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

#250

Post by cowpig »

I actually think Zulip is an exception to this, because its Stream>Topic hierarchy encourages organized conversations.

At my org, we consider Zulip to be an archive of sorts, and make an effort (a small one, because Zulip's UX makes it natural) to organize our communication such that it serves as a source of information for a future date.

I wrote a whole article about this a while back:

https://monadical.com/posts/how-to-make-remote-work-part-two...

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