[technology taskforce] Evaluation of Group Chat services as a replacement for Instant Messaging/Group Chat like Skype

[Dev Anand Teelucksingh]

Dear All,

With the At-Large Social Media WG (formerly the At-Large Curation WG) for
the At-Large Social Media Strategy established, one of the challenges has
been how to coordinate updates from the Social WG to At-Large Staff during
the ICANN and ATLAS II meeting in London.

While Skype allows for instant messaging chat in groups and its in use by
At-Large,
there are significant disadvantages to Skype:

- there is no way to separate topics inside a group, the only way is to
create a new group to discuss the issue.
- difficult to share files with the group - often the workaround is to link
to the wiki or dropbox
for everyone to click on
- Skype on mobile drains battery (at least on iOS)

I believe I found a solution that could be a game changer in the way
At-Large works. These type of solutions are a form of group chat with the
ability to create multiple groups where members join and send and receive
messages and files. Many of these services offer mobile apps so you can
send and receive messages (and files) on your mobile phone.

There are 4 services I've noticed

- https://slack.com/
- http://www.hipchat.com/
- http://unison.com/
- https://hall.com/

I've only looked at two Slack and hipchat and so far, I'm very impressed
with Slack as I think it solves the problem for the Social Media WG to
collaborate during the ATLAS II.

I'm almost sorry for not scheduling the TTF call on June 2 but I think we
can perhaps get a head start by looking at slack.com and then perhaps for
future TTF calls, evaluate the other solutions.

For Slack.com, who's interested in testing it out? :-)


Kind Regards,

Dev Anand Teelucksingh
TTF chair
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