[IPython-dev] Communications, mailing lists, gitter, etc...

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

sorry for the cross-post, but this is precisely about project-wide
communication.  Probably best to keep the thread on the Jupyter list.

As the project has grown, we've tried to adapt our communications channels
both to serve the community and to manage our limited resources.  Time for
email is scarce (I know I'm not the only one perennially behind), and for
certain problems real-time conversation is extremely valuable.

So we've added gitter to our mix of tools, and in some cases our gitter
rooms are very useful.  But we're also finding a problem: it's proving to
be very hard to follow the "big picture" of the project if you're not
directly participating in those conversations. Even for *me*, since these
days I unfortunately rarely have that kind of time, many parts of the
project have become quite opaque, and reading gitter logs is not the same
as reading an email archive.  While it's perfectly viable to read a long
and complex email thread to catch up on a  discussion after the fact, doing
so with a real-time chat log is, in practice, nearly impossible.

So, we'd like to fine-tune our communication practices, so that we hit a
better balance of having a "slow record" over asynchronous email, while
allowing for the more rapid-fire discussion that real-time channels like
gitter allow.

The tools at our disposal are:

- Our mailing lists (jupyter & IPython-dev)

- Our gitter rooms: we don't want to kill them, we just need to adjust what
we want to use them for, and probably reduce the number of rooms.  As the
number of repos we have grows, having dozens of rooms is probably not
manageable.

- Github: issues will continue being used by folks as a mechanism to
effectively submit problem reports that, in practice, are often questions.

- StackOverflow: not to be underestimated, it's archival, searchable, etc.


I don't want to dictate policy here, so I'll propose a rough first draft,
to allow for discussion, ideas and fine-tuning:


- We try to do a better job of communicating important ideas, questions,
discussions, etc, on the project lists.  Let's encourage our users to do
the same.  We also post key announcements more regularly here.  Everyone
should really feel comfortable

- We stop pointing people to gitter as the *first* help stop.  We should
point them to the mailing list (and? OR?) StackOverflow instead.  Having a
non-archival medium be the first point of help means a vast amount of
duplicated and wasted time helping people.

- The Gitter real-time help room and repo rooms can remain active but we
try to maintain a discipline of using them only for when folks need the
real-time collaboration.  If key decisions are made here, let's try to have
a discipline of periodically posting a quick summary, even if it's just a
very short one, to the mailing list, pointing out what happened.  In the
long run, it will help us all better keep in touch with what the project is
doing.


What other ideas do people have, that can help us better communicate, both
among project regulars and with the more occasional, broader community
participants?

Cheers

f




-- 
Fernando Perez (@fperez_org; http://fperez.org)
fperez.net-at-gmail: mailing lists only (I ignore this when swamped!)
fernando.perez-at-berkeley: contact me here for any direct mail
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