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

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Autor: Austin English
Datum:  
To: The Tails public development discussion list
Betreff: Re: [Tails-dev] [brainstorm] What are our public XMPP chat rooms useful for? (#17956)
On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 2:41 AM intrigeri <intrigeri@???> wrote:
>
> 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.



FWIW, as a former/lapsed volunteer developer (and still active FOSS
developer), I appreciated having a public chat that I could drop in to
ask questions of the devs.

I would've greatly preferred an IRC option, since I more generally use
that. I only set up XMPP to chat with tails developers when I needed
it, but it was useful when I did use it.

If possible, I'd love to see a public chat option preserved for
precisely the reasons intrigeri mentioned.

In any event, keep up the great work! Hopefully I'll find some time to
contribute again this year :).
--
-Austin
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