On 3/27/20 2:29 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
Slack is a really easy solution to the problem, though—I don’t think
better jabber is worth spending time on, honestly.
I find Slack almost completely unusable, so much that I now hesitate to
take paying gigs with clients who want to use it [*]. Maybe it would
be okay for the narrow purpose of facilitating conversation in a WG
virtual meeting, but I think it would be a slippery slope toward
tremendous dysfunction. The poor searching capability, lack of
effective cross-referencing and metadata, vendor lockin, and needing to
check Yet Another Messaging Service in addition to all of the others,
all make it maddening to me to try to use Slack to get useful work done.
Of course the tools alone don't make the conversation effective, it's
the combination of the tools and the discipline employed in using them
that make the conversation effective or ineffective.
For almost every new discussion medium that I see people touting, I find
email more functional overall, _except_ for the immediate back-and-forth
response of a chat session precisely because email has effective
searching and archiving capability (granted, it could be better), is
vendor-independent and can be moved between service providers. When
people gravitate to some sort of interactive medium or "social network"
and put their conversations there, IMO there is a tremendous loss.
What I want is a chat system that has direct ties to email including
archiving. Maybe for a WG session (that has a definite beginning and
end) that's almost as simple as automatically emailing a copy of the
jabber transcript to the WG list. Though it would be better if the
chat used the same IDs (names and email addresses) for participants as
the WG mailing list. So maybe if you sign up for an IETF mailing list,
you could automatically get a jabber account on an IETF jabber server?
Keith
[*] It's not the only popular collaboration tool that has that
characteristic but for the sake of staying on topic I won't gratuitously
mention the others.
