Myself @trav wanted to follow up on this chat bridging topic once more. It seems like there is support for trying to connect our various chat networks and members would like to have more convenient ways of reaching each other.
Setting up new chat tools from scratch doesn’t seem viable and has been tried (e.g. the XMPP network didn’t really take off?). We’d like to make the case for bridging existing chat tools (e.g. Slack, Matrix, etc.) to each other which meets everyone where they’re at with respect to the tools they use for everyday work organising.
Two questions:
Do people think this is a good idea to pick up & fund with the CoTech fund?
What would be a good “first step” prototype bridge? CoTech Matrix CoTech Slack? Which begs a third question, what chat tools are people actively using right now?
I’d suggest holding off for a little while on this because if we do decide that CoTech makes sense as the tech sector of the new workers.coop federation (which has incidentally just been registered and is on the agenda for Glasgow) then we might want to encourage people to use whatever chat platform workers.coop adopts and at the moment that looks like it might end up being Mattermost.
Yes, I think this could be a good use of the fund.
Just to clarify, you’re suggesting bridging the cotech slack and cotech matrix group? Not the individual co-op’s chat groups?
Code-op use discord.
I’m in the process of doing something similar, also using Matrix, connecting chat groups together for a tool called Space Tube. I’m doing a write up, I might have it posted today
Edit: for an example of what that looks like, here’s a channel on Common Knowledge’s discord where Code-Operative have wished their coop a happy birthday
I have now written an article about what I’ve done so far:
Just to clarify, you’re suggesting bridging the cotech slack and cotech matrix group? Not the individual co-op’s chat groups?.. Here’s a channel on Common Knowledge’s discord where Code-Operative have wished their coop a happy birthday
Nice @KingMob! Yeh, so, bridging whatever is most used to whatever is most used. We guess that is CoTech Slack CoTech Matrix but perhaps not? This work might some polling to figure out where people are actually at before making that assumption?
I’d suggest holding off for a little while on this because if we do decide that CoTech makes sense as the tech sector of the new workers.coop federation (which has incidentally just been registered and is on the agenda for Glasgow ) then we might want to encourage people to use whatever chat platform workers.coop adopts and at the moment that looks like it might end up being Mattermost.
@chris Nice to hear about the workers.coop progress! I’d fear that asking folks to sign up on another platform will just run into the same problems as before (platform fatigue, inactivity, etc.). Happy to hold off on this if folks want to though, of course.
Just to note that we’ve been some bridging work with Autonomic and have wired up several succesful bridges with our Co-op Cloud recipe including merging Discord, Signal, Telegram and Matrix into a single chat room. That’s been working out quite well so far! And we’re curious to see where this might be useful for other groups.
There is a lot to discuss when doing bridging, around data privacy and just explaining it all out to people using it. Like, what is actually going on? We’re so used to not having bridged networks that it can be quite disorientating for people. So we’re not in a rush. It’s more an experimental thing to see what might help improve organising work online.
A question for who set up the Slack: are we using a “Classic” Slack app, or the newer kind? Iff we’re on Classic then there is this bridge from the matrix-org Git organisation, stable for production
From the Getting Started guide it looks doable for us to get it up and running during the gathering, although for me there are some unknowns… first we need to be on Slack classic and then get one contact with access to each the Matrix and the Slack servers/configurations
I definitely like the idea of bridging, so far we only really engaged with mapping at CoTech.
Is anyone here willing to run a little session on this at the upcoming gathering? I haven’t had capacity to follow up on June Gathering 2022/Simplifying Communication Channels - CoTech
At the gathering put together https://connect.coops.tech/ and @Tucker drafted these two maps shortly after.
CoTech Slack? Which begs a third question, what chat tools are people actively using right now?
