Use sameroom.io to close the gap between preferred channels.

[mbbroberg]

I had an idea to use sameroom.io to span Slack channels and IRC. It caused a ruckus 😃

My goal: allow people to communicate with "our community" from their preferred channel.

Response to FAQs:

• What's the goal? Close the loop on open conversation. There is a growing audience of people adding to the Riak community. We, as a culture, must remain open to new users. My goal is to enable that. I see this as a successful option.
• Why doesn't Basho run their own Slack channel instead? Because there's no advantage to sharding communities. It adds administrative burden where none is needed. Let people discuss Riak wherever they prefer. The dist-sys.slack.com community is well adopted and growing. Let's make the most of it.

Proposal

• Setup a pipe between #riak channel on dist-sys and the #riak channel in IRC

Gotchas

• All posts will come through as the same user, appended with information on the speaker on the secondary channel. For example:

<mjbrender_> [Stabby Cutyou, dist-sys] What are the goals of the freenode channel?
<mjbrender_> [Matt Brender, dist-sys] +1 

Initial thought on workaround:

• Define a user (name TBD) that is used for posts on IRC
• For those who want to participate on either side, it's your responsibility to keep track of people tagging you. This can be easily achieved on both Slack and IRC services like irccloud.com

[StabbyCutyou]

In general, I'm in favor of a "1 room" solution, regardless of what it happens to be. Unless a given room is only interested in talking about a particular subset of Riak and nothing more, it seems like overall it would be a net positive to enable easier discovery of interesting conversations.

In that context, I am also in favor of a world in which Basho has an "official" channel, even if they do not own or administrate it (with appropriate disclaimers stating this), simply to guide interested parties to the place where they're most likely to engage with others.

That said, it does seem like the implementation details of the slack-irc bridge are less than ideal. Since the IRC users get the short side of the stick (slack handles this much better on it's end, giving people guest accounts/statuses), I would say that it is on them to decide if they're comfortable with the integration. Conversely, I would also be in favor of finding a better alternative for the bridge, if such a thing is possible (it's possible the limitations of IRC make the user issue something of a take-it-or-leave-it situation).

[jonmeredith]

Couple of questions:

1. AFAIK, #riak on Freenode is Basho's 'official-ish' public chat channel. Do we think the barrier to using IRC is too high and that people are unable to use it.

2. Is the dist-sys.slack.com channel Riak specific? If it's a general channel on distributed systems issues it absolutely should not be connected.

[StabbyCutyou]

1. IMHO, which is worth 0 cents, IRC is not really the most modern form of communication - certainly a well understood and established one, but I definitely see a trend away from things like mailing lists and irc channels, and more toward things like flowdock and slack. This could be confirmation bias speaking, however.

2. The slack itself has many channels. One such channel is specific to talking about Riak. It's a cross section of people who are interested or active in the dist-sys space, and also interested or active in using Riak.

[mbbroberg]

@jonmeredith

1 - it is 'official' in the sense that we strongly recommend chatting there. I do see it as a barrier compared to Slack. Connecting these channels greatly lowers the barrier of entry.

2 - The dist-sys channel is specifically Riak. I agree that it would be foolish to span the general conversation.

The additional elements of Community goodness:

• This would be a hat tip to the hard work of the dist-sys team. They've gathered a great group of people and we should respect that it's a valid place for community conversation
• This tool is built in Erlang and I value supporting this work

IRC is important. Slack is increasingly important. I see great opportunity and little harm by the opportunity to invite others in without asking them to leave their preferred platform.

[jrwest]

I think Basho using Slack to reach more people and grow the community is great, but it should build its own, not use the one built by Kelly and Henry for engineers to have many discussions on topics not directly related to Riak. The Riak room in the channel was created by Basho employees early in the channel's existence and has been rarely used -- save for troubleshooting for existing users which would also work in the existing IRC channel or in a newly minted slack Riak channel. The majority of the discussion in the Slack channel is not riak related.

I don't speak for the original organizers or any member of the dist-sys slack but personally I go there to have discussions with other engineers of dist. sys/dbs as well as users, not vendors.

[mbbroberg]

I can say as the person who would be creating "an official" Slack channel that I have no interest in doing so when there are well-adopted teams (in the slack terminology) that we can connect.

@jrwest what harm do you see in connecting the channels?

What I see: If the channel is little used, it will increase the usage. It lets people in dist sys span the gap into Riak conversations. We shouldn't pipe the general thread to IRC - we all agree there, so it's a non-issue.

[sargun]

If the channel becomes unreadable due to piping between systems that are not compatible with IRC and #riak, people will stop using it. IRC is meant to be super simple. The mechanism that you have of joining the rooms together breaks things like unique colouring for nicknames, and the ability to filter / ignore people.

In addition, #riak is very specific to Riak. Although the total conversation in the channel is low, the SNR of the channel is pretty good. IRC is largely an acceptable form of communication in the community.

I don't see a harm in another channel like Slack, or else. I imagine that there's a different type of audience that uses IRC and Slack.

[StabbyCutyou]

I would put forth the opinion that while it is possible a "different type" of audience uses IRC vs uses Slack, the distinction there is likely one of age / familiarity, and not one of content (ie: people don't use one VS the other to find certain types of info about riak, they use one VS the other because it's what they know).

Personally, having not used IRC for about 13 years, I think Slack is a great modern alternative to what I remember IRC being. That said, if the community at large decides IRC is more convenient and not worth the effort to move off of, then we should respect that choice.

[jonmeredith]

Still strongly disagree on connecting the two, re-enforced by what @jrwest said - vendors hijacking forums for discussing engineering tradeoffs are about as welcome as barely-related job postings.

Maybe I should try this slack thing... what my computer needs is another app to talk to another system :)

[hazen]

FYI - The #riak channel in the dist-sys is Riak-only. I threw it out there to complement the #cassandra, #hadoop, etc. channels. Since it looks like it's not a general-purpose forum, I'd agree we shouldn't link them. If we did want a Basho-owned Slack presence, then linking might make sense.

[StabbyCutyou]

@jonmeredith if you don't mind me asking, where does the concern around a vendor hijacking a forum come from? I'm not exactly sure what you mean, although it certainly doesn't sound like a good thing.

[jonmeredith]

Apologies - was an understanding (and basic reading of text) issue by me - didn't realize there were channels within dist-sys until I signed up for it.

Vendors discussing their product in channels dedicated to their product is fine with me. What I thought we were talking about was connecting together a general distributed systems like with the Riak IRC channel.

However, the people who constructed and built that community should be receptive to it - and I've no idea if they are. Any integration should be seamless and not cross pollute with messages unrelated to the other system, and I'm not sure if that's possible either.

[StabbyCutyou]

Gotcha, thanks for clarifying.

I agree that this is entirely a community driven decision. As we're likely not going to come to full consensus, we'd need to stick to that tried and true quorum approach :)

The dist-sys slack, from what I've seen, is very hands-off w/r/t those who created it. I can't think of a time I've seen anyone try to dictate what is / is not acceptable in terms of integrations, but I also believe this is the first time the issue has been broached as well.

The seamless-ness aspect is the major sticking point for me. The IRC side gets the short end of the stick, and I think if we do find a way to bridge the two, we'd need something that works on the IRC side a little better.

[jrwest]

Yea just to be clear I was just expressing my opinions, not those of the larger group. I had brought up the specific rooms previously and no one seemed really bothered and I think they will end up being put to good use. The connecting of the the irc channel I thought to be a little much because for me I had joined that channel for different purposes, and I believe if Basho wants to build a slack presence they should do that (and the same goes for other vendors). The choice to connect the two makes the dist-sys team/channel less appealing to me but ultimately that is my problem to deal with and no one else.

[mbbroberg]

Thanks for all those who clarified. To make another position a bit clearer as well: Basho as a whole has no opinions on the matter. I see value in being more inclusive of other people and that must inevitably lead us to new channels.

Belief system wise, I stand by rejecting any "ain't broke; don't fix it" approach to community. We must continue to evolve and I haven't seen a reasonable scenario that shows this breaks the expectation of participants on either platform. There's no need to fear a change like this. Maybe it won't work perfectly on day one. We, as a community, will work to improve it.

Unless something catastrophic is uncovered here, I see the following happening:

• We run a trial period for a month
• A pipe between dist-syst Riak-only channel will connect to freenode Riak
• The username on freenode will be [sameroom]
• Lessons will be learned and we may change the naming convention
• If participants find it leads to an inability to use the tool well, it will be shut down after the month