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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">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">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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