[SAC] Slack and OSGeo

[Jeff McKenna]

On 2015-08-23 7:36 PM, Alex Mandel wrote:
>
> IRC on Freenode is still the main place Open Source
> projects/developers/etc talk.
>
> Slack, Gitter, Hipchat are essentially glorified IRC clients running on
> their own servers and are more common among commercial developers and
> specific communities (Gitter to Github and Hipchat to Atlassian
> (Bitbucket, Jira etc). They are also more user friendly for
> non-developers. Sidenote, many of the services can be hit via and IRC,
> or XMPP client also.
>
> #telascience will still remain the main SAC place to chat, partly
> because it is not logged.
>
> The rest of the the osgeo IRC channels will also continue, #osgeo,
> #qgis, #gdal, etc (at least the ones that are currently in use).
>
> I think having the options is fine for each project to decide which
> places they'd like to push their community to communicate under. IRC
> never really took off for some and probably never will.
>
> Thanks,
> Alex
>
Thanks Alex, this is what I was thinking as well, exactly.

Could an OSGeo project or incubating project choose to use the OSGeo 
Slack to hold its meetings? Of course.

Could the next OSGeo Board discuss the possibility of holding their 
monthly meeting through the OSGeo Slack?  It could.

We can't predict the future, but, we can allow communication to happen 
and allow community members some choice.

To those sending me direct messages worried about what this new "OSGeo 
Slack team" means and how it affects our IRC use - I don't even know the 
answers.  Right now IRC is there, we use it, and now Slack is there, it 
might be used or it might fade away.

-jeff