Sponsored Slack and role of Slack in the Neos Project

The Neos Project Tools & Operations
1

Hey everbody, i just got a response from Slack regarding the sponsorship of this account. The thing is that in the meantime they only support Non Profits with up to 100 members. They also wrote that they have been pretty lenient with TYPO3 so far, but can’t do that really for everyone in the future. However, he granted us a credit of $8000 for this account.

Anyway, I think that under these circumstances we have to rethink what we use Slack for and in my opinion it comes quite handy that we introduced Discourse. The $8000 is a gracious move, but won’t get us very far (a couple of months at most) with the Standard plan. If we continue with the Basic / Free plan we currently have, we have a limit on integrations and, a quota of 5 GB for file uploads, and most importantly, have the restriction that only the last 10,000 messages are searchable.

I think it’s obvious that we can’t use Slack then for far-reaching discussions or even decisions because they will vanish after about a week or two (with the current amount of users and messages).

I’d like to open a discussion trying to answer the following questions:

  • what can we use Slack for considering that we’ll face the limits of the Free account?
  • what would we use Slack for if we didn’t have the restrictions – and which alternative tools could we use for that?
2

Oh man, that’s quite a bummer and tbh an awkward move as bigger opensource communities will lead to more customers imho, and with the few billion slack is worth by now they should have a different stand imho. But ok, can’t change that :smile:

We can use one of the integrations for exporting / publishing everything (maybe even to discourse?) and make it searchable ourselves?

3

What would it cost to pay for the slack account?

4

Expensive… 6 euro per user per month or so. So with the current user base that would already be quite expensive.

5

that’s unrealistically expensive. The standard plan is $8 per user per month. Just taking the current TYPO3 Slack as an example (with more than 700 users), that would be $5600 / month.

6

Hey Robert,

thanks for checking that out!

I’d suggest the following (both, not either of them):

  • we embrace discourse (I feel we already do that)
  • We can push all Slack messages to AWS SQS (Queue) – and from that, dump it to some publicly searchable archive (for later)

So for me, that would be a totally fine way to go forward.

Greets, Sebastian

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7

yes, I think it’s a good (intermediate) solution to create our own public archives.

About embracing Discourse: I think we need to close a few channels in Slack in order to really do that. And we need to come up with some simple and easy to understand rules which helps everyone to decide where a discussion should go to.

8

wow, that is insane. It is a good tool, but still.

9

Maybe we can just move (yet an other time) to https://gitter.im/

This solve one big problem with Slack, the public visibility (without login)

So keep discourse for async discussion and decision making and use gitter.im for sync communication. AppService.io or Meteor use Glitter. Nice integration with github and a flexible API to build our own (jira or whatever)

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10

That looks pretty cool, didn’t know that Chat! And since our chat history becomes less important, it’s also feasible to change (again).

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11

Hey,

for me the problem with Gitter is that we don’t have any kind of private room there.

Not sure if we need it, but just don’t know.

Greets, Sebastian

12

The nice point with Gitter, it’s a single channel chat, so easy to keep the number of channel low :wink: and push people on Discourse for help / support, and just use the chat for “dumb” discussion.

Gitter can also expose the “global” activity of the community (ex: new post on discourse, new RFC, new issue on Jira, new PR, merged PR, …)

13

Before the split we don’t use a lots of private channel :wink: and I think we need to keep away from the private channel as much as we can.

Alternative solution, keep slack only for the core team … but that sound like a barrier between the community and the core team.

For security alert, we can use a internal mailing list, I’m fine with this

14

We could keep Slack for the emergency-low-usage-neos-internal channel (hey, we have $8000 credit for that!) and only use Gitter for everything else chat. But I don’t know Gitter well yet, need to play with it a little.

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15

Okay, after having played with it for a while now, I really like it. It offers private chats (up to 25 people, good enough for us), nice editing, native apps for iOS etc, IRC gateway, drag and drop for images etc. … I currently don’t see anything speaking against Gitter. Sure, Slack is nicer in several ways, but I don’t see something I would really, really miss right now.

And if we take a decision to switch the chat tool, it’s probably good to do that now.

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16

Yep no private channels needed. If you do anything private at all then just do a hangout

17

Slack is no option, that is clear.

18

I think there are very few cases when a privat channel is helpful. But it’s good that establishing one is not super convenient. Could be some Slack, Hangout Group or … shudder … Skype. Should be fine.

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Wow, we move faster than I can follow :wink:
Can someone enlighten me why Gitter should be better than Slack? (not a rhetoric question, but I wonder if we shouldn’t rather move to an open protocol if we really go to ditch Slack again)
See https://twitter.com/beberlei/status/601661156051329024