Subject: Re: [Manycouches] IETF Slack workspace

From: Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2020 00:00:10 -0700

On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 09:24:02PM -0700, Theresa Enghardt wrote:
> As an experiment, there is now a Slack workspace at https://ietf.slack.com, which provides a persistent chat platform with ad-hoc channel creation.

Is anyone preparing a review or summary of the outcome of the experiment?
(I did not participate in the experiment, myself, thus cannot contribute to
such a report.)

Thanks,

Ben

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From: Mallory Knodel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2020 09:21:08 -0400

> (I did not participate in the experiment, myself, thus cannot contribute to
Same-- I didn't use Slack during the week, but I would be very 
interested to know how it went.

-Mallory

> -- 
> Mallory Knodel
> CTO, Center for Democracy and Technology
> gpg fingerprint :: E3EB 63E0 65A3 B240 BCD9 B071 0C32 A271 BD3C C780

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From: "Salz, Rich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2020 15:31:56 +0000

IETF to bcc.

Never got a definitive answer; I posted the question last week -- https://app.slack.com/client/T03SESPS0/C03SESPT6

I don't know if Theresa and Richard had specific plans.

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2020 01:13:27 -0700

I didn’t try it. I was running MeetEcho, which pretty much consumes screen real estate and has a built-in chat capability, it seemed superfluous.

Sent from my iPad

> On Aug 4, 2020, at 8:33 AM, Salz, Rich <rsalz=[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
>>

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From: Mirja Kuehlewind <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2020 12:09:35 +0200

The point of slack is to make it easier to also chat outside of an active session. E.g. there is a systers channel which had some traffic and announcements.

However, having said that, I currently also have the feeling that we rather have too many different ways to chat and it would make it easier to keep up if we could converge to one tool.

Mirja

> On 5. Aug 2020, at 10:13, Fred Baker <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Manycouches mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/manycouches

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From: "Salz, Rich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2020 14:18:38 +0000

>    However, having said that, I currently also have the feeling that we rather have too many different ways to chat and it would make it easier to keep up if we could converge to one tool.

That's true in the real world, tho.  So there's something to be said for reflecting reality, even if it's constantly reminding us that nothing works great.

One can make the argument that the "IETF Enterprise" (sorry, Randy) could standardize on something. I believe that will just main that "shadow IT" groups will make their own tools available, probably even if the company provides such tooling.

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From: Theresa Enghardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2020 19:36:44 -0700

Hi all,

As people have asked about a report/summary on Slack usage during IETF
108, I'd like to provide some numbers, which I looked at via the Slack
analytics feature.

I think these numbers nicely supplement the anecdotal evidence/summaries
that people have already provided:

According to its analytics page, the IETF Slack workspace currently has
218 members, 111 of which have been "weekly active members" during the
last 30 days. "Active" means that they've posted at least one message
and/or read at least one direct message or channel. (Not sure how
exactly Slack defines "weekly" here, but read on for more detailed stats.)

The daily activity statistics say that, outside of IETF 108, there's a
baseline of 20-30 daily active members (i.e., reading at least one
channel/message or posting something), and up to ~10 members are posting
messages.

The week before IETF 108, we see a ramp-up to up to 80 active members a
day (Thursday), however, there's still just about ~10 members actually
posting something on each day.
During the weekend before IETF 108, activity drops to the baseline.
Then, during IETF week, each day roughly 70-90 members were active, with
20-30 members posting each day. The peaks were on Monday and Friday. On
Saturday and Sunday after IETF, activity dropped back to the baseline.

Counting unique messages, the baseline is at roughly 10-20 messages sent
each day, on some days less (down to some days with 0 messages).
During IETF week, there was a peak on Monday (170 messages), a drop to
roughly 30-70 messages, and then another peak on Friday (435 messages).
Most messages were sent in public channels (roughly 60-90% depending on
the day), but there was some usage of direct/private messages between
members (roughly 10-35% depending on the day), and private channels (up
to 20% depending on the day).

The most popular channels were #general, with the most numbers and most
views. As the name says, there were some general discussions, e.g.,
about IETF 108 (e.g., when do rooms open, when is a good time to find
people on gather.town), about tooling and the Slack itself, and
announcements of the existence of other channels.
Other popular channels include the #chat-tools and #codesprint channels,
where some discussion/collaboration happened, as well as social
channels, such as #random for more informal chatter in general, as well
as #108newcomers and #systers for particular groups. These channels were
used to complement hallway chats at gather.town (e.g., when/where to
find them), to answer questions, and for introductions, particularly
among the newcomers.
Each of the #hotrfc108-* channels was only joined by 5 to 16 members,
and only 0 - 4 messages were sent in each channel.

To summarize, there wasn't a ton of usage, but it appears that there
were some use cases for Slack.

Best,
Theresa

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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:26:57 -0400

> posting something on each day.

That's the day that I signed up.
Despite my dislike for Slack, mostly due to their abandonment of XMPP, I
signed in, and I dutifully generated some /dev/urandom data for #random.
I would have been willing to answer newcomer questions, etc. had I but
noticed them.

But, between meetecho, codimg, Telegram, Signal, Discord and sometimes
projecting slides, I had no screen real-estate for Slack.  The tab got lost
or closed, and I did not open it again.
90% of my communication was via XMPP using Pidgin, the other 10% via
Telegram, usually as the private channel to a co-chair.

I have since been informed that Slack did not abandon XMPP, but rather may
have left it to individual site owners to decide whether or not to accept
XMPP connections, or s2s messages.  This is heresay: I have no evidence one
or another.  BUT, if it is true, then I would be supportive of the IETF
moving our XMPP base to Slack, assuming it would continue to speak XMPP.

The advantages are
  1) convergence,
  2) friendliness to new participants
  3) dealing with lack of reliable jabber Registrars
  4) lack of maintained Jabber clients on some platforms

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

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From: Alexandre Petrescu <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2020 12:49:47 +0200

> I would have been willing to answer newcomer questions, etc. had I but

I do use slack for work-related discussions.  I did not use it at the 
IETF 108 meeting.

>
> But, between meetecho, codimg, Telegram, Signal, Discord

Meetecho and codimd do work on IPv6.

Slack does not work on IPv6.

Telegram.org, Signal.org  and Whatsapp presence websites are on IPv6 
too, but I dont know about the functionality on the smartphone version.

Discord does not work on IPv6.

Google Meet does work on IPv6.

(by 'IPv6' I mean 'IPv6-only', i.e. IPv4 stack turned off on the client 
computer).

Alex

>   and sometimes