CommunicationsTools.md

Communications Tools

• First objective: Stay in close contact with the community

• Several tools help facilitate this

• Mailing lists

  • Primary point of communication
    • People subscribe to the list (sometimes it is invite only)
  • Used for discussions
    • Architectural (how the code works at a high level)
    • Development topics
    • Community topics
  • Can have many lists - most common:
    • users
      • Where users can ask questions
      • Where other users can answer questions
      • Chat about how to use the project
      • Request features
      • Share examples/configs/whatever
    • dev
      • Share ideas about patches
      • Discuss features
      • Chat about project priorities
    • private
      • Not publicly archived - avoid when possible
      • Suggest new committers
      • Address code of conduct issues/situations
  • Archives
    • All messages are saved
    • Several mail archives exist
    • Your project can also archive them
    • Some tools help with this
    • Allows searching for already discussed topics

• Message Forums

  • Many types out there
  • Sometimes available on canned hosting sites
  • A collection of topics with conversation threads inside
    • Users subscribe to the forum
    • Can watch a "board" or "topic" and get notifications about all messages in it
    • Can watch individual "threads"
  • Can be organized just like the mailing lists above (dev, users, private, etc)
  • Generally also expected to be archived

• Realtime chat

  • Several options here
    • IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
    • Slack
    • Hipchat
    • Flowdock
  • It's chat...
    • People come and go
    • Discussions follows whoever is participating
  • NOT expected to be archived (sometimes is)
  • Some bots integrate with the room
    • Answer FAQs
    • To notify the chat room about build status
    • To kick off builds from chat
    • To provide status of services