Open communication and Slack

2018-08-16 Thread Dão Gottwald via governance 
The use of Slack at Mozilla has bothered me for a while. So far I managed
to pretty much ignore Slack. I feel left out sometimes but it hasn't been a
big deal, as far as I can tell. (Of course, since I don't have an account,
I don't know how much exactly I've been missing.)

Now this issue came up again in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460248#c18 when a user asked
a question about a UX design that I implemented. These kind of discussions
in closed bugs usually don't go anywhere, so I asked the user to take it to
a mailing list or IRC. The user posted to #ux and never got a response.
This can happen in channels with low usage, but Timvde let me know that
this IRC channel has effectively been dead since the team has moved to
Slack.

I'm using the above merely as an example. I don't want this e-mail to be
about the UX team. Instead I'd like to revisit why we allow if not
encourage people to use Slack rather than IRC in the first place.

AFAIK Slack is only available to Mozilla staff and volunteers who've signed
our NDA. It's my understanding that communication at Mozilla should be open
by default, and the rest is sufficiently covered by e-mail, private
meetings and restricted bugs. Why are we on Slack?

Thanks,
dao
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Re: Open communication and Slack

2018-08-16 Thread Benjamin Kerensa via governance 
It’s definitely a problematic situation and I think it demonstrates how Mozilla 
is drifting more and more from its manifesto and values towards a more 
corporate and closed community. Mozilla embraces more closed practices today 
than it did just a few years ago.

And it’s surely not benefitting the contributions as we have less contributors 
today than we did a few years ago.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Kerensa
On Aug 16, 2018, 7:38 AM -0700, Dão Gottwald via governance 
, wrote:
> The use of Slack at Mozilla has bothered me for a while. So far I managed
> to pretty much ignore Slack. I feel left out sometimes but it hasn't been a
> big deal, as far as I can tell. (Of course, since I don't have an account,
> I don't know how much exactly I've been missing.)
>
> Now this issue came up again in
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460248#c18 when a user asked
> a question about a UX design that I implemented. These kind of discussions
> in closed bugs usually don't go anywhere, so I asked the user to take it to
> a mailing list or IRC. The user posted to #ux and never got a response.
> This can happen in channels with low usage, but Timvde let me know that
> this IRC channel has effectively been dead since the team has moved to
> Slack.
>
> I'm using the above merely as an example. I don't want this e-mail to be
> about the UX team. Instead I'd like to revisit why we allow if not
> encourage people to use Slack rather than IRC in the first place.
>
> AFAIK Slack is only available to Mozilla staff and volunteers who've signed
> our NDA. It's my understanding that communication at Mozilla should be open
> by default, and the rest is sufficiently covered by e-mail, private
> meetings and restricted bugs. Why are we on Slack?
>
> Thanks,
> dao
> ___
> governance mailing list
> governance@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
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Re: Open communication and Slack

2018-08-16 Thread Andrew Halberstadt via governance 
Thank you for bringing this up Dão, this is something that has
been bothering me for a long time as well.

It used to be the case that supporting our community of
volunteers was somewhere at the fore of Mozilla's priorities (we
used to say "our community is our biggest strength"). It's
become clear to me that for better or worse, this is no longer the
case. In my view, the use of Slack is a symptom of this larger
organizational shift.

To be clear, I think there are a large number of (mostly non
developer) teams whose day to day communications need to be
private. Using Slack in those instances seems absolutely fine to
me.

But if we're serious about supporting our community (and I really
hope most of us still are), then we need to be crystal clear about
when it is and isn't appropriate to use Slack. Simply having any
sort of official policy on this would go a long way!

Cheers,
Andrew

On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 10:38 AM Dão Gottwald via governance <
governance@lists.mozilla.org> wrote:

> The use of Slack at Mozilla has bothered me for a while. So far I managed
> to pretty much ignore Slack. I feel left out sometimes but it hasn't been a
> big deal, as far as I can tell. (Of course, since I don't have an account,
> I don't know how much exactly I've been missing.)
>
> Now this issue came up again in
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460248#c18 when a user asked
> a question about a UX design that I implemented. These kind of discussions
> in closed bugs usually don't go anywhere, so I asked the user to take it to
> a mailing list or IRC. The user posted to #ux and never got a response.
> This can happen in channels with low usage, but Timvde let me know that
> this IRC channel has effectively been dead since the team has moved to
> Slack.
>
> I'm using the above merely as an example. I don't want this e-mail to be
> about the UX team. Instead I'd like to revisit why we allow if not
> encourage people to use Slack rather than IRC in the first place.
>
> AFAIK Slack is only available to Mozilla staff and volunteers who've signed
> our NDA. It's my understanding that communication at Mozilla should be open
> by default, and the rest is sufficiently covered by e-mail, private
> meetings and restricted bugs. Why are we on Slack?
>
> Thanks,
> dao
> ___
> governance mailing list
> governance@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>
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Re: Open communication and Slack

2018-08-16 Thread Eric Shepherd (Sheppy) via governance 
On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 10:38 AM Dão Gottwald via governance <
governance@lists.mozilla.org> wrote:

> AFAIK Slack is only available to Mozilla staff and volunteers who've signed
> our NDA. It's my understanding that communication at Mozilla should be open
> by default, and the rest is sufficiently covered by e-mail, private
> meetings and restricted bugs. Why are we on Slack?
>

I wonder this as well. Having so much of what we do transitioning (by
intent or by chance) to Slack seems contradictory to our openness
standards. It also is causing a fracturing of our conversations for no good
reason. We now have some conversations about a topic on IRC and others on
Slack and keeping track (if you're even on both at all) is an unnecessary
chunk of additional overhead to our days.

>
> Thanks,
> dao
> ___
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> governance@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>


-- 

Eric Shepherd
Senior Technical Writer
Mozilla
Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sheppy
Check my Availability 
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Re: Open communication and Slack

2018-08-16 Thread Sean Stangl via governance 
It's worth noting that there are reasonable open, company-backed
alternatives to Slack.

For example, https://zulipchat.com/ presents a Slack-like interface. It's
Apache2 licensed, allows for self-hosting, is backed by a company, has
web/desktop/android/iOS apps, and has the same service agreements that
Slack offers.

In addition, it's free for open source projects -- Firefox would likely
qualify. It's not invitation-only -- you can optionally make it available
to the public, so non-Mozilla-internal employees could reasonably join
conversations there. It has moderation, so people can't disrupt
communications.

It also has slightly different functionality from Slack that makes it
particularly helpful for remotees. Messages are organized by topic, and
it's very easy to go back to a channel after ~48 hours out of the loop, and
go through and catch up, even if multiple conversations are interleaved.

I'm using this for a personal project and really like it. It's maybe worth
considering looking outside of Slack to organizations that would better fit
out unique open structure, at least for evaluation.

Regards,
Sean Stangl

On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 8:18 AM, Eric Shepherd (Sheppy) via governance <
governance@lists.mozilla.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 10:38 AM Dão Gottwald via governance <
> governance@lists.mozilla.org> wrote:
>
> > AFAIK Slack is only available to Mozilla staff and volunteers who've
> signed
> > our NDA. It's my understanding that communication at Mozilla should be
> open
> > by default, and the rest is sufficiently covered by e-mail, private
> > meetings and restricted bugs. Why are we on Slack?
> >
>
> I wonder this as well. Having so much of what we do transitioning (by
> intent or by chance) to Slack seems contradictory to our openness
> standards. It also is causing a fracturing of our conversations for no good
> reason. We now have some conversations about a topic on IRC and others on
> Slack and keeping track (if you're even on both at all) is an unnecessary
> chunk of additional overhead to our days.
>
> >
> > Thanks,
> > dao
> > ___
> > governance mailing list
> > governance@lists.mozilla.org
> > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
> >
>
>
> --
>
> Eric Shepherd
> Senior Technical Writer
> Mozilla
> Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/sheppy
> Check my Availability 
> ___
> governance mailing list
> governance@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>
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Re: Open communication and Slack

2018-08-16 Thread Peter Saint-Andre via governance 
On 8/16/18 3:52 AM, Dão Gottwald via governance wrote:
> The use of Slack at Mozilla has bothered me for a while. So far I managed
> to pretty much ignore Slack. I feel left out sometimes but it hasn't been a
> big deal, as far as I can tell. (Of course, since I don't have an account,
> I don't know how much exactly I've been missing.)
> 
> Now this issue came up again in
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460248#c18 when a user asked
> a question about a UX design that I implemented. These kind of discussions
> in closed bugs usually don't go anywhere, so I asked the user to take it to
> a mailing list or IRC. The user posted to #ux and never got a response.
> This can happen in channels with low usage, but Timvde let me know that
> this IRC channel has effectively been dead since the team has moved to
> Slack.

Aside from the question of Slack vs. IRC (or other), we might want to
address the multiple points of failure in this scenario (do a better job
of monitoring conversations in closed bugs, shut down dead channels,
update our documentation about communication venues, etc.).

Peter




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