[technology taskforce] Techcrunch: Slack announces it’s building voice and video chat

[Chris Gift]

Slack remains my favorite team collaboration and communications tool it’s fantastic at many things. But I remain skeptical on its applicability to the multistakeholder model for a few reasons.

First, it’s a synchronous communication model and the community, due to timezones, work schedules, etc., work asynchronously. Second, as most synchronous models, the medium is conducive to short messages, sometimes with attachments and/or links. It’s not good at lengthy, thoughtful discussions. And third, is that it’s not open and transparent. I really have no idea how we could let people inspect the discussions happening within Slack. And as for archiving offline somewhere, again, I have no idea how that would work. Note that they have a robust API we could work with to resolve some of these issues.

Having said all the above, it is a tool we should continue to keep an eye, and perhaps even experiment with once they get voice and video.

Of all the tools I’ve looked at over the past few years, the one I remain convinced is a good fit for the ICANN community is discourse.org. It’s a modern replacement for the forum with many features that overlap with listservs. I tried deploying this twice, once with 1Net — remember that??? :) — and once with one of the IANA transition groups. Both times community members resisted and asked us to revert to a standard listerv. Which we of course did.

Chris Gift
ICANN
M +31.06.2787.6232
Twitter @cgift






On 3/1/16, 23:43, "ttf-bounces at atlarge-lists.icann.org on behalf of Dev Anand Teelucksingh" <ttf-bounces at atlarge-lists.icann.org on behalf of devtee at gmail.com> wrote:

>Via www.techcrunch.com/2016/03/01/slack-roadmap/
>
>"Slack laid out its plan to stay ahead of its workplace chat
>competitors today with new products for its 2.3 million daily active
>users, up from 2 million in December. The big changes will center
>around message enhancements, greater Usability, and voice and video
>chat.
>
>That last one is huge. You’ll soon be able to switch directly into a
>voice or video chat inside of Slack. This could strike a heavy blow to
>Skype, Google Hangouts and other multi-media collaboration tools.
>Slack says it will begin testing these features very soon."
>
>Dev Anand
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>ttf at atlarge-lists.icann.org
>https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/ttf
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