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
GPG: 267B CC1F 053F 0749 (expires 2021/02/18)
