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<p>A quick follow up: To show that the Discord server is still in
evaluation and even I have yet to learn more about it, I
accidentally included the wrong invite link in my last email. If
you want to check out the Discord server, please use
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://discord.gg/wEvSqDG">https://discord.gg/wEvSqDG</a> instead.<br>
</p>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 14/09/2018 13:07, Axel Faust wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:f44f5cad-52c8-a3fc-e580-5683aa768bf1@googlemail.com">
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<p>Hello everyone,</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Now, some of you may ask "Why Discord?" and "Don't we already
have an IRC channel?" / "What about our Mattermost (<a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://chat.orderofthebee.org" moz-do-not-send="true">https://chat.orderofthebee.org</a>)
server?". So let me give some arguments on why we have looked at
Discord:</p>
<ul>
<li>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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Our internal Mattermost server has seen no activity since
the 2016/2017 trials, and even then the interaction was
extremely light.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<p>Currently we have the following channels on Discord:</p>
<ul>
<li>#general: the main channel, synchronized with IRC via a bot,
so that we can keep the IRC channel alive without cutting
anyone off<br>
</li>
<li>#github-updates: collecting notifications from GitHub about
events on any repository in the OrderOfTheBee GitHub
organisation</li>
<li>#board: a private channel for members of the board to
discuss / organise their activities</li>
<li>#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)</li>
<li>#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)</li>
</ul>
<p>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.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>TL;DR: We have set up a Discord server for evaluation (<a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://discord.gg/kbPSjum" moz-do-not-send="true">https://discord.gg/kbPSjum</a>),
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".</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>Regards and my apologies for not being able to write a shorter
mail...<br>
</p>
<p>Axel<br>
</p>
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