Meta post about Communication (Status, Slack, Discuss and ...Email?)

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Discuss: I found the ‘categories first’ view quite confusing and frustrating, it was difficult to find what was the global recent discussions and I kept having to go to latest to see what was going on. I changed it back before I noticed it was changed in this thread! Hope people don’t mind - if there are particular important topics we can also leverage stickies.

Email doesn’t seem like a terrible backup idea, and as @arnetheduck says there are mailing lists. This is quite common in the OSS world, for example it’s how a lot of the coordination in Linux works. Google groups is also a set of mailing lists under the hood IIRC.

Another way that I have seen work is to make sure all important communications go out at least two ways (pick two out of Email+Status+Discuss, etc). E.g. confidential: email+Status PM/group chat. Public: Status public chat +Discuss.

We can also consider a bi-weekly/monthly newsletter format to deal with important announcement. This way someone could live in a cave somewhere and still know what they should do about Devcon.

If I understand the multiple Discuss instances correctly, I’d be against it. Seems like a lot of complexity and overhead for what’s (right now) a fairly low volume forum.

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Side note: many discuss threads have fewer “views” than we have contributors so we can be sure the information is not always getting to intended people.

+1 to a two-method distribution of important info.

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Thanks everyone from the great discussions and ideas. Some takeaways for now:

  1. All important comms go through multiple channels. i.e. Status + Discuss post w/ auto-email to [email protected]
  2. Increase adoption of Discuss by improving categorisation, encourage more people to post updates, minutes/notes from meetings and other longer form content here.

We should keep this discussion going, especially as we start to spend more and more time in Status.

*Re: Newsletter. I feel like our Town Hall should be the equivalent of the newsletter. All the important things should be there, and we should just make it clear what things are actionable.

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