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

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jun 21, 2016, at 12:20 PM, Kevin Ollivier wrote:

>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!)

I've been using Telegram lately in a couple of contexts, and I agree that it's
nice to have a less formal forum for socializing.  I'm not particularly
advocating Telegram, but I think you're right that similar systems have a
place in the universe of communication channels.  We've tended to use it for
keeping in touch at sprints ("Hey, meet in the lobby at 7pm if you want to
join us for dinner") and sending interesting little pictures, quotes, etc.
The off-line and real-time notifications are the key things that make this
useful, but the multiple ways to interact with the system (smartphone apps,
web sites) are really useful too.

Clearly we don't want major decisions happening here, but then I'd argue that
IRC isn't the right place for that either.  I am mildly uncomfortable with
using closed systems and source, but given that Telegram and similar systems
are used primarily for socializing, I think it's fine.

I prefer IRC for more real-time technical discussions because I have better
ways of interfacing with it while "on the clock".  E.g. I can much more easily
cut-n-paste URLs, code snippets, tracebacks, etc. into an IRC client, and it's
trivial for me to click on URLs to view pastebins, bug tracker issues, merge
requests, etc.  IRC does have the problem of overlapping discussions, so the
lack of topic differentiation is real, although that can sometimes be
mitigated by private chat or opening a new channel.

I don't think any one forum is going to serve all our needs.  Perhaps it's
useful to identify the types of communications we want to encourage, and the
features that promote those types of communication, then survey our options
(both existing and near-term) to see what technology can best promote those
types of communication.

Some examples:

- Socializing: off-topic; anything goes; jokes; fun Python sightings; meetups

- Real-time technical discussion: remote pair programming; live debugging;
  hashing out alternative solutions; what does this code do?; real-time
  reviews

- Asynchronous focused discussions: issue tracking; PEP writing; feature
  development

- Asynchronous unfocused discussions: brainstorming; anybody else have this
  problem?; wild ideas; this is probably stupid but...

- Asynchronous decision making: are we missing anything?; any other opinions
  before we decide?; wide as possible participation so no one feels left out
  or unheard from; pronouncements and closure.

Cheers,
-Barry