[gmx-developers] team communication tools for GROMACS

[Szilárd Páll]

I personally think that starting to use a collaborative platform by
severely restricting who can participate partly defeats the purpose of the
new tool. Such a restriction will severely limit the possibilities for
interaction with new people. Whatever we choose, I think it's crucial to
allow wide participation with as low barrier as possible while ensuring
that the features code-devs want are well-supported.


I wonder how important is a saving history for very long periods?

I see a few use cases:
- Casual and semi-formal dev interaction on various channels; typically
short-term chats, I imagine e.g. discussing a/some of changes (e.g.
switching form gerrit for more interactivity, starting a quick hangout from
there if needed)
- Help and support channel for non-core/code devs, e.g. method developers,
people interested in using the code for their research, infrequent
contributors, HPC center sysadmins, distro maintainers, etc.
- Longer-term planning, decision-making and discussion e.g. on a planned
feature.

It seems to me that some of this, in particular the first two do not
necessarily need archival (or information could be dumped from the lack
channel when it seems useful/necessary).

Cheers,

--
Szilárd

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 12:41 AM, Erik Lindahl <erik.lindahl at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 01 Oct 2015, at 23:33, Roland Schulz <roland at utk.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 5:32 AM, Szilárd Páll <pall.szilard at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 4:08 PM, Roland Schulz <roland at utk.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> There are a couple see for example:
>>> http://beebom.com/2015/04/slack-alternatives-for-team-communication
>>>
>>
>> I've seen this list, unfortunately none of those listed seemed to offer a
>> great deal more/better functionality than slack - except perhaps HipChat
>> with 25k history limit, or Pie with no limits _but_  data lock-in due to
>> lack of export in the free version - , but I have to admit, I only browsed
>> briefly.
>>
>
> I think the pricing structure for slack is quite bad for us. I think the
> 10,000 is not sufficient in the medium term. And it is probably to
> expensive to use anything other than their free plan. And if we hit the
> limit and can't afford upgrading, then even if they let us allow to export
> data, we would loose all experience, integration, and training with that
> system.
>
> Bitrix24 has a first paid plan which might be affordable and a limit which
> is probably sufficient even in the medium term. The free plan is sufficient
> to test.
>
> We might want to ask for some of them whether they would be willing to
> offer us a plan as a academic open-source project which is discounted. And
> we should make sure that the pricing plan is sustainable for the long term
> so that we don't need to switch later.
>
>
> Slack appears to offer educational plans with 85% discount, which might
> work.
>
> To keep the number of accounts manageable, I think we could do something
> where active developers (basically those who frequently commit code) get
> personal/paid slack accounts on our tab, and then there are features where
> we can invite guest users into open channels so anybody can participate in
> those discussions even though they might not be as active developing.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Erik
>
>
>
> --
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