On 18.5.2024 23.34, Philippe wrote:
Dear members of the The Document Foundation,
I am writing to you with a proposal that I believe could significantly
enhance our organizational efficiency and communication methods.
As we all know, effective communication lies at the heart of any
successful foundation. Currently, our primary modes of communication
largely rely on email and IRC. While these platforms have served us
adequately in the past, I believe it's time for us to consider adopting
a more modern and versatile solution: Matrix.
Hello Philippe. It is normal to come with expectations to a new project.
I was certainly prejudiced against the LibreOffice communication
channels when I joined as a volunteer. Over time I was able to let go of
my bias, especially in the case of mailing lists.
I am against the proposal as it would make onboarding new contributors
more difficult. Currently the new contributors I interview do not have
to create any account for their first chat. Having to create an account
just to hear what I have to say would create inertia and would lead to a
decrease in people agreeing to the interview.
We have used Matrix for several years in internal TDF communication and
there have been constant issues due to the confusing/broken UX regarding
encryption. Messages randomly don't get distributed to all participants
in a room. Adding new devices becomes a small project in itself, with
the verification process sometimes turning into an infinitely failing
loop and leading to giving up and just living with the distracting alert
messages. The idea that I would have to deal with these issues while
mentoring ~200 people per year concerns me.
The issue with the IRC network we use is that mobile clients don't get a
good experience as an active connection from the client side is
required. One solution would be to host our own multi-user bouncer.
However, the network is actually planning to switch to a new server
software and offer always-on presence with unlimited chat history to all
registered users. This is the software being developed:
http://github.com/Libera-Chat/sable
When it comes to email, a chat solution is certainly not a replacement
for it. We need asynchronous communication for long form discussions
that might span over long periods of time, like a clear paper trail we
can return to. An alternative to mailing lists is forums and we do
deploy Discourse. However, web-based forums have shortcomings that make
life difficult for people having to deal with a large volume of
messages. An email client is superior to a forum in filtering and
organising and even writing replies (anyone who ever tried writing an
inline reply in Discourse knows this).
Both IRC (with text-based logs) and email clients offer very efficient
searching capabilities for power users.
Ilmari
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