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

[Scott Sanderson]

+1 for posting short write-ups of Gitter conversations.  I wrote up and 
example of what I think would be helpful both as a user and as a sometimes 
developer 
here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jupyter/COhsW7rZgLc.  

The basic format of the post is:

   1. Here's the problem I have.
   2. Here's my current best solution
   3. Here's what's good/bad about the current solution.

Having a clear problem and solution statement is useful users who come 
along later trying to solve the same problem.  Having a review of the 
strengths and weaknesses of the solution helps developers better understand 
what the current strong/weak points are in the existing APIs.

Hope this is helpful,
- Scott

On Saturday, June 27, 2015 at 7:34:05 PM UTC-4, Fernando Perez wrote:
>
> 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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