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

[Dev Anand Teelucksingh]

Thanks Chris. I think the TTF would like to trial discourse.org . I've
heard about it before but no direct experience and I see that its
feature set is growing after its 3 years of existence.

Re: Slack, At-Large uses Skype group chats a LOT. The disadvantages of
Skype are that
- Skype group chats aren't discoverable outside of those in the Skype
group chat (similiar to Slack) - although, Skype now allows persons to
join a Skype chat without needing a Skype client.
- messages aren't saved. If you switch to a new desktop or mobile
device, you lose access to all of your past conversations and chats
over the years and the loss of knowledge and history is significant.
Slack having a centralised (and searchable!) archive of past messages
is much better in that regard.
- you can't search across all Skype chats, if you recall there was a
URL you posted to someone last year, you have to remember in which
Skype chat you saw the URL. And if you've switched to a new Skype
logged in account , you've lost access to those conversations.

So from those perspectives, using Slack for group chat to replace
Skype seems better. It is indeed a challenge to get buyin of any new
approach or technology.

Dev Anand





On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 11:15 AM, Chris Gift <chris.gift at icann.org> wrote:
> 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
>>_______________________________________________
>>ttf mailing list
>>ttf at atlarge-lists.icann.org
>>https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/ttf