[OOTB-hive] Use of / switch to Discord server?

[Axel Faust]

Hello everyone,

in his last mail to this list, Younes has mentioned that we as the Board
have been looking into improvements of the internal communication. One
aspect of this is that we have setup a Discord "server" for the Order of
the Bee, created various rooms and played with / implemented some
integrations. All of this was done as an evaluation or at least an
interim solution (with regards to how the new Board communicates among
its members), but with this email I want to start the discussion about
this potentially becoming a permanent solution.

Now, some of you may ask "Why Discord?" and "Don't we already have an
IRC channel?" / "What about our Mattermost
(https://chat.orderofthebee.org) server?". So let me give some arguments
on why we have looked at Discord:

  * In IRC we currently have one public channel on freenode. Some of the
    discussions (especially among the board members) may not fit in that
    central, public space. Having the ability to host multiple channels
    was also a reason behind the 2016/2017 trial of using Mattermost.
    This is also true for Discord, though other than in Mattermost there
    is no additional / superfluous concept of teams that separates the
    channels and you don't need to explicitly add/join to channels, so
    accessibility-wise it feels to be slightly better.
  * Using Mattermost requires us to run and maintain our own service on
    our infrastructure. Since we currently have infrastructure sponsored
    by Magenta Apps, the cost is not the main concern here, but the
    available resources in terms of people in charge of administration /
    maintenance. This was initially covered by the INFRA committee
    composed of Marsbard, Daren, Lanre, and Heiko. But as most of our
    committees, the level of activity has approached near zero over
    time. As the board, we felt it would be better to rely on a free,
    hosted solution to reduce our internal effort / dependencies, and
    allow any renewed activities in the INFRA committee (or any
    successor team / constellation) to be focused on more productive tasks.
  * Our internal Mattermost server has seen no activity since the
    2016/2017 trials, and even then the interaction was extremely light.
  * We recognize that Discord is not open source as opposed to
    Mattermost. Still, it is a platform with a proven track record among
    open source communities, has a - in my eyes so far - mostly fair and
    transparent business practice, and - most essentially - provides
    unlimited chat history in the free tier.
  * A significant portion of the #alfresco IRC channel members have made
    the switch to a Alfresco Discord "server" created by Bhagyas Silva,
    which may at some time in the future be designated the official
    community channel by Alfresco. By having our own Discord server, we
    make it easier for members of #alfresco to engage in our
    organisation as well, without requiring separate credentials on a
    disconnected system.

Currently we have the following channels on Discord:

  * #general: the main channel, synchronized with IRC via a bot, so that
    we can keep the IRC channel alive without cutting anyone off
  * #github-updates: collecting notifications from GitHub about events
    on any repository in the OrderOfTheBee GitHub organisation
  * #board: a private channel for members of the board to discuss /
    organise their activities
  * #support-tools: a channel dedicated to the OOTBee support tools
    addon, which may obsolete / succeed the previously separate Gitter
    channel (a custom integration with GitHub events provides the same
    type of notifications we had in Gitter)
  * #alfresco-irc-bridge: a read-only channel dedicated to keeping a
    complete history of #alfresco on IRC (chat.alfresco.com runs on a
    private server of Richard Esplin and may stop to work at any time
    when alfbot breaks or Alfresco demands the server be shut down /
    moved to a different name)

There are also a couple of channels for specific tests that may come and
go, i.e. a bridge to the Alfresco-internal Slack system to allow for
interaction with Alfresco staff.


TL;DR: We have set up a Discord server for evaluation
(https://discord.gg/kbPSjum), I outlined the reasons why we chose it and
what channels we currently have, and we want to know your opinions on
this subject before we call for a vote on making it "official".


Regards and my apologies for not being able to write a shorter mail...

Axel

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