[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Today's Minutes and Next Meeting Time

[Srevin Saju]

G'day!

I have a topic, which perhaps needs discussion,

We have been using IRC for many years. Recently, some of our 
communication moved to Slack, and some to Jitsi. What is Sugar Labs's 
idea of a best, unified communication platform which it should recommend 
to new developers. Right now, all the guides point directly to IRC, most 
new developers, who are interested to contributing to Sugar drop a 
message to an IRC channel, and almost never get a reply. This is 
possibly because the communication has diversified, or because of a 
community split on the basis of communication medium.

Recently, many new developers told us of the difficulties of using IRC 
clients, the need for Bouncers, etc. We (some of us) suggested them to 
use a Matrix client to connect to #sugar, and indeed they are quite 
satisfied with new mode of communication.. The Matrix protocol.

The Matrix protocol is interesting. Sugar had a matrix channel for many 
years. Recently we set up a bridge between the matrix channel 
(#sugar:matrix.org) and the IRC irc.freenode.net channel, i.e (#sugar), 
which helped a few developers to keep connected to the IRC channel 
without a bouncer and also make use of newer clients for mobile, for 
example Element Android (available  on F-droid, Google Play), and 
Element iOS. Element / Matrix has a intuitive web client which supports 
reactions and better formatting as compared to IRC, and is the best 
place for a developer to start contributing. The most interesting and 
useful feature is the IRC bridge, which helps to make use of the best of 
Matrix and maintain the connection between the IRC channel and the 
Matrix channel. The bridge is a tool which helps to convert the IRC 
protocol to the matrix protocol and vice versa.

Topic of discussion, we a Sugar Gitter channel, Sugarizer Matrix 
channel, etc. Matrix has the support to integrate everything to a single 
channel. What is your opinion?

Interesting points of discussion and helpful material:

* Pull request to add Matrix as a communication medium 
(https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/pull/203)
* Matrix Sugar Labs wiki page (https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Matrix)
* Official matrix-irc guide 
(https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Guide:-How-to-use-Matrix-to-participate-in-IRC-rooms)

As of now, many popular open source communities use Matrix as the main 
mode of communication, and all the sister nodes bridged to the matrix 
network
For example:

* Fedora
* KDE
* Mozilla Thunderbird

It would be cool, if we discuss this among a wider range of community, 
putting a lot of people's idea rather than two of us discussion [cited]. 
So, I hope this topic, would be a good candidate for the next SLOBS meeting.

Regards

On 12/9/20 11:48 PM, devin at ulibarri.website wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> The date and time of the next SLOBs Meeting 
> <https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Next_meeting> is 
> 12-23-20 at 19:30 UTC.
>
> For the next meeting, the agenda is up at 
> https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2020-12-23 
> <https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2020-12-23>
> We will be discussing a possible "Sugar Labs Code-in", so it would be 
> great to have your input.
> I recommend that, if you are interested in attending the meeting, you:
> 1. Mark your calendar. I do my best to send reminders, but today my 
> email got trapped in spam and I did not have the time to troubleshoot.
> 2. Please let us know soon if you plan to attend so that we may send 
> you a link in advance. Please send your request to 
> slobs at lists.sugarlabs.org <mailto:slobs at lists.sugarlabs.org>
> As for today's meeting minutes, they are up at:
>
> https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2020-12-09 
> <https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2020-12-09>
>
> Best,
> Devin
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel

-- 
Srevin Saju
Sugar Labs
https://www.sugarlabs.org