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

[James Cameron]

Thanks Rahul.  Please add to the plan;

- critical people; identify the critical code maintainers and note
  when they have engaged with Gitter.im on a continuous basis; in
  particular we are yet to hear from Lionel and Ibiam.

- licensing; as an open source project within the Software Freedom
  Conservancy, we should aim to promote tools that have a compatible
  license.  Devin said the web app is licensed MIT, but the service is
  All Rights Reserved.

- inclusiveness of prior contributors; we have several contributors
  who know how to use IRC, but are disinclined due to their age to
  use the modern systems; how do we continue to include them?

- further division; every time we start something new, we divide again
  the group of people talking, and the new group often forgets to keep
  the old group informed; how will the non-Gitter.im contributors be
  kept informed?  I'm not asking about the IRC contributors, but also
  people using GitHub, Wiki, Trac, Jabber, Pootle, and the mailing
  lists.

- Code of Conduct; how to make this more obvious in Gitter.im?
  Especially "If you come across a post that is in an incorrect forum,
  please respectfully redirect the poster to the appropriate" (as has
  happened already), and making sure to consult others.

I've briefly authorised and looked at Gitter.im, using Firefox on
Ubuntu, and have observations;

1.  a significant increase in mail contact attempts by other projects
on GitHub; i.e. you'll get more spam, because people have coded things
to get to you through Gitter,

2.  a daily mail message containing some of the notifications from
Gitter, but not all,

3.  the display does not scroll with page down, page up, or arrow
keys, unless you first click in the message area,

4.  it isn't clear how I can make a local log of the discussion,

5.  the network demand is substantially greater than IRC; this is not
something we can expect to scale up into schools with poor networks,

6.  the power and processing demand is higher.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/