[pgrouting-dev] Too many chat channels

[Daniel Kastl]

Hi Steve,

I know I'm the cause for this email ;-)

Well, I think you can't prevent people from using Facebook and Twitter for
asking for support. Nobody may answer, but that's the problem of the person
who asked ;-)

I think the pgRouting website states pretty clearly the "supported"
communication channels: http://pgrouting.org/support.html
This is mailing lists and Stackexchange. I will place a few comments inline:


> pgrouting-users list
> pgrouting-dev list
>

We could reduce it to 1, but I think there is only small overhead to
subscribe to 2 lists. And I guess "users" may be bothered by discussions
that usually happen when working on releases for example.

I think there is some barrier for users to first time subscribe to a
mailing list. It's also easy to get annoyed by mailing lists of projects,
that you're not so much involved in.



> github issues
>

I'm always annoyed by support questions that come as issues.
It's just the wrong place to ask questions.
But I think there is no alternative to issue trackers for development.



> irc channel
>

Sorry, my fault. I'm probably using IRC the wrong way, but I just don't get
familiar with it. And I forget login credentials to administrate persistent
IRC channels.

I think there are more comfortable tools nowadays that are better than IRC
and easier to use for people like me ;-)

I would like to close those IRC channels if I knew how to do this. But I
guess they are unused anyway. I assume that someone asking there while
nobody else is in the chat room will soon realize, that this is the wrong
place to get support.



> stack exchange
>

It seems to be a platform, that a lot of people like. Very low barrier to
join for new users, it seems.
But the nice thing is, that other users answer questions (people, I never
saw on the mailing list). The motivation to help on Stackoverflow is very
high. There seem to be quite a few "support addicts" (to collect badges and
points).

I think we don't need to monitor it, because it usually works and someone
answers. I wouldn't worry about it, even if you and I won't participate
there.



> redmine channels
>

This one is new to me.



> twitter
>

(or Facebook). I sometimes use Twitter for announcements.
But if someone expects to get answers through Twitter or Facebook ... well,
we don't need to care, I think.

glitter
>

Well, I became a big supporter of chat tools, that are easier to use than
IRC. And Glitter might be an interesting way to achieve a few things:

   - Avoid longish and hard to read email threads
   - Allows chats but keeps the history (with IRC I need to configure a bot
   and have to spend hours to keep a chat history somewhere)
   - It seems to allow to fetch information from other resources (maybe
   also notifications from Stackexchange or Twitter?)
   - Seems to integrate well with Github, has something called "Activity
   stream"

Definitely there are disadvantages of chat tools. And you can abuse them.
It doesn't replace a mailing list for example. It would just turn into
chaos.

I think a chat tool is the right tool, when you think, that it would be
better now to call this person. You can also abuse a mailing list for that
purpose ;)

So in short: using the right tools is important. And they should be open
for community matters.

If there are too many channels and it's worth to monitor them, then there
are for sure tools to do this. Using a mailing list for that (I know of
projects, which send every commit to the mailing list) is bad in my
opinion.

I'm evaluating Gitter now, because I think it's better than the other chat
tool I use. Otherwise I only care about ML and Github issue tracker (and
I'm subscribed to Stackoverflow RSS for "pgRouting" tagged questions).

My preferred setup would be 2 channels:

   - "old-style" mailing list (mailbox)
   - easy-to-use chat group tool, that collects notifications from other
   channels as well (ie. Github notifications, Stackoverflow RSS, Travis Build
   notifications, etc.).

Hope that makes sense,
Daniel

-- 
Georepublic UG & Georepublic Japan
eMail: daniel.kastl at georepublic.de
Web: http://georepublic.info
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