Re: [Tails-dev] [brainstorm] What are our public XMPP chat r…

Hi,

(dropping my facilitator hat for this message)

intrigeri (2021-01-03):
> So, my question is:
>
> What would we lose if we did not have any public chat room?

> In other words:
>
> What new problems would we face if we did not have any public
> chat room?

I think we would lose:

- some of our soul and identity, i.e. "we work in the open"

- a place where friendly bystanders can lurk and follow our work:
FOSS developers, users, etc.

- a little bit of the efforts we've put into dismantling the
long-standing myth that Tails is produced by some sort of secret,
unapproachable group of anonymous people

- a place where existing contributors who don't have access to our private
communication channels can get a feeling of belonging, by hanging
out with the rest of us

- a place where we can meet new contributors, get to know each other,
collaborate and build trust until the project is comfortable with
giving them more privileges

Practically speaking, my main concern is that the implied subtle
cultural shift and newly closed doors would make the boundary between
in-group folks and kind-of-outsiders even harder to cross.

This would make it a bit harder to go from "volunteer contributor" to
"paid worker" (such transitions are rare in our recent past, but there
are a few noticeable ones if we look further back in time), or from
"unprivileged contributor" to "full-blown project member".

Finally, note that we already lost quite some of this when we moved
from IRC @ OFTC (where lots of FOSS contributors hang out already) to
XMPP (which for many people would require extra setup work). IMO the
status quo, in all these respects, is not great.

Cheers!