[Inpycon] Chat platform-Zulip for Pycon

[Sanchit Balchandani]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 8:38 AM Aditi Prakash <ap2205 at gmail.com> wrote:

> This year for PyCon India, we are planning to have a forum setup for
> attendees to interact. We are considering Zulip, an open-source chat
> platform similar to slack. Currently there's only PyCon India mailing list
> but this includes the organizers and not the attendees. The reason for
> having this in-place is to connect attendees and we believe it'll be
> especially useful when planning commute by pooling, accommodation, etc.
>
> Zulip allows users to create channels and have topics within channels, for
> example: "On Road Bangalore" could be a topic under #travel channel. Easy
> search, better organization of channels and topics. Further, new users can
> read history and the chat limit is not as bad as Slack.
>
> Additionally, we are planning to create a separate channel specifically
> for women attendees which is sort like community support amongst women.
>
> We will also include a channel for announcements that will be linked to
> PyCon India Twitter account.
>
> Any thoughts/suggestions on this are welcome!
>

My opinion on this-

I was part of Social Media team during PyCon India 2018, I personally and
few other folks felt that Discord didn't work well for us. We kept discord
only for volunteer communiction but there were following issues -

   - Lot of people were not familar with Discord platform
   - Discord lack some basic features like 'reply in thread mode' etc
   - Pinning of message is not very straight forward
   - Volunteers joined discord but lot of them were not active because -
      - either they didnt want to have another IM platform installed
      - or they didnt find the platform easy to use
   - When we reached closer to event, we ended up having a WhatsApp group
   for onsite volunteers, though discord could have worked if it was
   everyone's first choice

Secondly, we created a Slack workspace only for participants, which I think
worked pretty well and more than 1000 people joined it.

So, I'd suggest not to introduce a new platform and instead stick to
something which is already popular among people and easy to use.
Slack/Telegram could be a good choice as its quite popular among people and
lot of people may already be using it. Also, I think a SINGLE platform
shall be used for both participants and volunteer communication, that also
help us avoid sharing the same info at multiple places.

Thanks,
Sanchit


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