Hello NIME Community!
Wow, this was fast! I’m so happy that we now have a Discourse for the community, this is going to be awesome!
I am opening this thread to discuss if and how we should port the Slack workspace created for NIME2020. There were a lot of insightful conversations and discussions going on there and it would be a shame to lose them. At the same time, now that we have a NIME Discourse, it would be better to shut the Slack Workspace down to avoid confusion.
Any feedback is appreciated! Really excited about what’s next for this community!
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Do you think we have to shut down the slack? I kind think the chat type interface works better for quick interaction during a conference.
That said, many of the conversations there really should be continued here, perhaps by starting topics for some of the most used channels?
I think there’s a pretty clever slack/discourse integration plugin: Official Slack integration for Discourse
The way they put it is as follows:
We think Chat and Community are two great tastes that taste great together, and we’re happy to extend Discourse to better accommodate both. Our goal is for Discourse to become long term memory for your most important conversations, both for internal team members and your outside community, too. We’re only just getting started, but keep reading to learn about what is currently possible with the v1 of our Slack integration, and what’s coming up.
So I guess my view would be, change the NIME2020 slack to a NIME-conferences slack and keep it around to re-use next year 
(also Hi @NiccoloGranieri! 
)
Hey @charlesmartin!
The slack/discourse integration plugin is a dream! Love it, will take a look and let you know.
In terms of rebranding the existing Slack, I don’t know how I feel about it. Isn’t it easier for each year’s committee to create their own Slack (if they want to use it) in order to have straight away admin access to it? This would also enable each committee to create a brand new one without having to worry about previous structures: no need to delete channels, message history, etc.
While I know that keeping Slack would mean maintaining the users that have already subscribed to it, I’m wondering if it would turn out to be more of a hassle than anything else.
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This is a good question, which also ties in the ecosystem discussion. My immediate response would be that it is good to separate between the intense time-limited conference experience, and the more general discussion in the community.
I think Slack worked great this year, but next year’s organizers may find that another tool works better. So perhaps better to leave the Slack 2020 channel as a historic archive, and move the more general discussions into new channels here in the forum?
Yep, good points both, when I think about all the little channels for each session, it’s clear that we can’t really just take the same space into next year 
Maybe it would be better to reach out to those involved in good discussions and expand them here rather than try to copy in all the discussions from the slack?
Agreed with all the above @charlesmartin and @alexarje. However, I’m wondering if it’s worth keeping the Slack workspace as an archive, or if it’s better to export the conversations and archive them somewhere. Maybe even process the data removing all the faff that nobody reads to read again.
Re: reaching out to those involved in good discussions, that would be a great idea but only the thought of it makes me think that it would require an enormous amount of time. Maybe we should find a way for the community to do this, and we review the requests? We could ask the community to go through the Slack Workspace (or archived equivalent) and propose topics that should be ported into Discourse. A reviewing team could then review these proposals and approve/reject requests.
@NiccoloGranieri I think that both would be a good idea. That is, archiving everything is interesting to keep a memory of the conference experience (if Slack allows for it somehow?). And asking the community to help with copying (and distilling) good points from the Slack discussions to the forum, would also be great. Not sure if people follow the Slack any longer now after the conference ended, so it may be part of a post-conference e-mail update to participants?
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So Slack doesn’t allow to “archive” a workspace per se, but it lets the admin download a full textual copy of the workspace. The Slack has been silent for almost a week now, so I think it’s safe to say that we can start thinking of how to download / archive everything that’s on there.
I think post-conference email update sounds good. I’ll discuss it with my team and see what we can do.
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@NiccoloGranieri, is there a way to keep the Slack channel accessible, but prevent new posts?
My thought is that any discussion outside the time-limited conference should be made somewhere else (this forum?). Sometimes people resurrect old channels that stayed inactive for a long time, and it’s hard to keep track of multiple communication methods.
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Hi @edumeneses, @lamberto and I have been discussing this yesterday. I don’t think Slack enables one to transform it into a read-only space, but most importantly Slack is currently showing the latest 10k messages (hiding the first 4k or so). So in my opinion, keeping the Slack workspace is not a solution. We should find a way to move the threads elsewhere enabling a “read-only” mode of consumption for those who are interested.
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My suggestion is that as soon as we appoint one or more NIME Communications Officer/s we ask them to sift through Slack and identify the best threads to be ported to separate topics on discourse so that they can be kept alive in between conferences. I like the idea of a community-based review of the best content, but Ian individually-curated selection made by one or more committed community members is probably the most effective way forward.
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Did this a while back, but forgot to post about it. I have ported the entirety of the NIME Slack Workspace on the NIME website. All the history is now searchable, readable and subdivided into the original channels. It’s not clean, or perfect, but it’s better than nothing!
https://nime2020.bcu.ac.uk/slack-html/index.html
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