How to use Slack more fittingly to our values


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Proposed by
Contributors 
Statusdiscussion
ReferencesSlack post


Summary

Private channels and direct messages should not be used to discuss information relevant to the project and generally as little as possible.

This concerns the use of Slack and the transparency displayed in it.

We, the signers of this letter, would appreciate the routine use of public channels for everything wupp-related. On the one hand private messages are for chatting and thus information that is irrelevant. But all information conveyed through nonpublic direct messages also carries the feeling of being kept from the public eye.

On top of that, the livelyness of the public parts of Slack is extremely diminished by the extensive use of direct messages in our community: 70% of messaging takes place via DMs! This is not only one person's fault, of course, but if you - yes you! - would refrain from using private messaging for communication about concrete tasks, it would definitely help directing the main load of yunity work-related talks to the public channels.

For new contributors who join our Slack it can seem dead at times, even though we do a lot of things. This is due to us mostly using the private #core-team channel for overall project-related discussions and - as said before - the loads of private messages. People who are rather shy and try to get an overview just by reading in will probably think that we don't do much, or that we don't communicate about it, because #product for instance is dominated by unpersonal trello notifications, although i'm sure that a lot is happening in that area all the time.

This letter is a request to change to the public channels with clearly wuppy conversations and a reminder to everyone to watch their personal chatting behaviours, so that we can give more life to our Slack altogether!

Let's live the transparency we always talk about and make information accessible!

Concrete demands:

  1. Let's archive #core-team and use #general instead!
  2. Let's only resort to DMs for spam talks that would disturb the workflow!
  3. Sensitive information can be coveyed through private wiki pages!

Thank you for reading these lines, please sign if you support the demands!

Signers:

Janina Abels



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