[Sugar-devel] Suggestion on moving from IRC to Gitter

[Rahul Bothra]

I am proposing a change in the communication medium from IRC to Gitter.
I've made a Gitter Community at https://gitter.im/Sugar-Labs, for people to
try it out. In case people don't like the change, we can shut it down and
stick to IRC.

Following are my reasons for the change;

New users can't see the past conversations, which is useful at times

Many active contributors don't run an all time online instance,
and can't read unresolved doubts asked when they were offline

If a new user doesn't get a response for some time, he tends to
quit IRC (observation) and it's difficult to look him up and resolve
his query. This *might *lead to contributors thinking that the org is i
nactive

Since we are diverse, we can use different channels for each;
Sugar, Sugarizer, Music Blocks, Design, Website.
This will make discussions more organised and easy to look up
Implementing this on IRC could increase problems of inactivity
even more.

D. Joe gave a reason[1] against the switch that every other chat
systems has their own advantages.
I don't mind using any chat system which can curb these issues.

I am now comfortable in using IRC because:
 - I *somewhat* understood how it works, but it took time to figure out
 - I now know at what time might a contributor come online,
   but it took time to figure out
 - I now know which contributor works on what, so I can ask via mail,
   if IRC doesn't help, but it took time to figure out

There are obvious workarounds for all these, but then it's better if new
contributors devote 'time to figure out' code instead ;-)

[1]:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2018-February/055064.html
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