Propose new functionalities for Decidim software
#DecidimRoadmap Designing Decidim together
Latest update: we're test-driving Matrix using Element.io. There's a community with two rooms setup here: https://matrix.to/#/+decidim:matrix.org.
Waiting on response from the association committee to move forward with more rooms and migrate in practice.
I've updated the title of the proposal to reflect where it's currently at.
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(This not a feature proposal - posting it here as it seems to be the best option at this point. It's definitely meta, at least)
So, I propose migrating community communications now done on Telegram and Gitter over to a new Decidim Slack.
I believe this would greatly improve support to users and developers, better enable water cooler conversations and brainstorming, where a lot of good ideas come from, and increase overall governance transparency. It'd strengthen community integration.
Though I like the intention of Gitter and the fact it's now on Matrix, it's still very clunky and it'lll be a long while until it's on par with Slack. The Telegram groups are hard to find (a lot of people posting on Gitter, Meta and Github don't know they exist) and don't allow for separating topics into channels that can be easily browsed.
With Slack we can have channels like 'new-to-decidim' or 'getting-started', 'core', 'deployment', as well as 'product' and 'general' (for announcements, participatory ecosystem news, etc). Also, specific topics like 'e-voting' or 'participatory-budgeting', and even locale or region-specific channels.
We can have automated notification channels tracking Github activity (commits, issues, PRs, etc), and even Metadecidim proposals. Integration for the latter would need to be developed, but it could come handy to Decidim instance communities as well.
It wouldn't need to be persistent (the conversations are meant to be ephemeral and can be thrown away), so it doesn't need to be paid.
For some context, this idea is something I discussed privately with @andres a couple of months ago, and briefly mentioned to @carol as well. We agreed it was better to wait a little bit before starting this discussion until after the holidays, with the association in place and with the election for the coordination committee over.
@carol also said there might be alternative proposals floating around - so perhaps this can start a conversation on the different options and relative benefits.
Rocket.Chat might be one, or even Matrix itself. I've never used them myself and so can't really vouch for them. I know OSP uses Rocket on their daily work, perhaps they might chime in with their experience with it here. I suspect Matrix is hard to use, but I could be wrong. Another option is Discourse, but then we wouldn't have the quick, real-time chatter that Slack offers.
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Conversation with Andrés
I agree that we need something better than what we have at the moment, although I'm not personally a Slack fan.
I don't like Telegram as you need to have a phone number to create an user account and depending on where you live you may not have it installed, and it'd be difficult to expect that people install it to only use it for Decidim. About the discoverability, the thing is that we're not publishing them also (like mention it in the README, in docs, in Meta, etc).
There are two features that I like about Gitter:
1) Log in with GitHub account
2) Its conversations are discoverable by search engines (like Google or DDG)
But I agree that feature-wise seems like Gitter is not on par with other chat platforms.
Whichever decision we make I'd want to close Telegram and Gitter in the migration process, as I don't want to have more apps/websites.
Mattermost was also mentioned.
In the past @verarojman also proposed using Discord for the voice capabilities.
This is a very interesting discussion. For the Amsterdam program "cities for change" we're working on a Decidim implementation and complementing with Chat is very desirable. I would argue for Matrix, as it is the only decentralised chat server that works. One can be on many matrix.org compatible servers and in your Element.io or whatever server of your choice you can have a combined view of the various chat channels and personal messages you are engaged with. In the past it may have been hard for average users, but today it's pretty acceptable for families, teachers, civil servants and other non-techies.
my 2 cents (and would love to test any work that can be done to integrate this)
I'd love to be able to use Matrix. Have you used it on a daily basis?
Hi Oliver! Since last year we're using it in a few collectives, at meet.coop, in the association of families from my kids' school and with a team in the municipality of Amsterdam. Of course not everybody is keen in changing habits, some are still on Telegram, Signal or even Whatsapp.
The comparison with slack, mattermost and rocket.chat is also interesting, as in Matrix servers you can create your "community" and group the channels that belong to that community. With meet.coop we use a public matrix channel plus a private channel for each of the circles of work (our intention is to work following sociocracy, but in our intent we are all learning and hope to get there one day ;-))
When I click the meet.coop community in my Element.io webclient, desktop client or mobile client, I get these various channels and the others are hidden. Another click and I get all the others back in view again. I hope you find it worth trying out!
I've been playing with Element for a while and I think that's the best-suited solution for our use case:
PROs:
- It's multichannel (multi-room)
- You can set roles per room
- Since it's multi-room, we can have dev- and support-related channels, even different support channels in different languages (thinking about non-dev users here)
- You can set the UI in your own language (Catalan included)
- It allows individual chats
- Has web, desktop and mobile clients
- Offers integrations with Jitsi and GitHub (although I don't know if that's useful)
CONs I could find:
- I *think* the chat rooms are not discoverable by browsers
Again, that's just my opinion :)
@mrcasals: couldn't agree less ;-)
One observation though: the last aspect you mention about rooms: when rooms are public you can search for them, so they're discoverable. And here comes the beauty of the decentralised architecture: you can have a room with multiple "addresses", for example our general meet.coop room is at
#meetcoop:matrix.org
but was first created as an IRC room, with this address:
#freenode_#meetcoop:matrix.org
And if I am not mistaken, you could set up your own server and point a local address of that server to this room. So the rooms "live" between all servers in a way.
Ah, cool, I didn't know they were that discoverable! I saw they were shareable with some specific addres, but I didn't try to discover new rooms, thanks!
I wonder if they're still trackable by search engines, though...
When searching for a room, you can opt to search all public rooms, on all matrix servers.
As room admin you'll need to have this option activated so that the room is indeed discoverable: "Publish this room to the public in matrix.org's room directory?" Try it out for yourself.
I'm not sure about the search engines, we should investigate that part ;-) Feel free to open a room and invite me so we can play and research together: https://matrix.to/#/@wtebbens:matrix.org
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