[Overload-sig] Issue tracker vs. real-time chat

[Kevin Ollivier]

Hi all,

Sorry guys, also just did a reply all, following suit here and re-posting my reply on overload-sig. 

From:  Overload-sig <overload-sig-bounces+kevin-lists=theolliviers.com at python.org> on behalf of Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>
Reply-To:  <guido at python.org>
Date:  Tuesday, June 21, 2016 at 12:02 PM
To:  <overload-sig at python.org>
Subject:  [Overload-sig] Issue tracker vs. real-time chat

(We accidentally started this discussion on private email. I assume noone has a problem with me reposting this to the sig.)

I'd like to put in a vote *for* systems or paradigms that behave more or less like issue trackers (AFAIC even Reddit and StackOverflow fall in this pattern) and *against* group chat systems (IRC, HipChat, Zulip, Slack, Skype, Hangouts).

To be sure, I'm fine with the existence of chat systems, but I find participating in them exhausting, and they tend to have a very high noise level. They exacerbate the problem that only those who can keep up with the traffic know what's been discussed already (scrollback features in Slack etc. notwithstanding). Usually the mute control is too course. AFAIK only Zulip supports any kind of "topic" selection (Slack is based on group membership, and groups are relatively static, even though membership is dynamic).

I don't consider them something everyone has to use, but I do think they serve a valuable purpose.

It's about community building. Sometimes developers should chit-chat, or post a gif meme, because when they're engaged in a big discussion later on they'll have a more holistic picture of the person they're debating with. A project named after a group famous for SPAM, holy hand-grenades, silly walks, and catapulting cows ought to have a forum for engaging in some degree of foolishness and levity, if you ask me. :) We unfortunately cannot regularly get together and share a beer together, but this is the next best thing for OSS projects.

People tend to always be very focused and serious on mailing lists, and personally I believe it's a significant contributing factor to burnout and overload. At some point, contributing simply becomes no fun. The community can start to appear as a bunch of very picky critics who pull apart your every thought. I would wholeheartedly agree that mailing lists aren't the place for chit-chatting among devs, but I think there should be such a place, and IRC isn't really the best choice these days. (At a hotel recently they even blocked my internet because the IRC protocol resembled P2P traffic!)

Anyway, that's my reasoning for it. Every community is different, so YMMV, but I will say I've seen it used somewhat heavily on the more productive and agile OSS projects I've worked with.  

Thanks,

Kevin


QUOTE from Kevin:
I think we should definitely be seeing what we can do to improve the mailing list experience. :) I've not worked with Mailman 3 myself yet but it sounds like 3.0 is a pretty significant improvement. I was pretty curious about Posterious particularly, although I didn't manage to find an example of it online. Is there a good example to look at?

In addition to that, I think we should also be looking at improvements for our bug trackers and chat software as part of this. Playing with GitHub's bug tracker may be a good start, and maybe something like Slack or Zulip for chat would be a nice improvement. I've gotten spoiled by the ability in Slack to see the conversations that happened while I was offline. I know Zulip, like Posterious, is a Django-based app, and it would be cool to have more of our infrastructure built on top of Python so long as it doesn't become a maintenance burden. Maybe the Zulip team would even be willing to help out?
-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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