During the Steering Committee meeting on April 26, 2022, Dan brought forward a proposal that would help improve the communication of the group.
The concern is that the mailing list alone is impeding general communication.
In particular, the mailing list is too formal, too noisy, and the archives are too slow to keep up with an ongoing conversation.
While the mailing list is well-suited to post big announcements or well-written proposals to the whole working group, it's arguably not a convenient communication channel to discuss and debate around topics.
To address this issue and allow fluent and spontaneous conversations about AsciiDoc, it was proposed to set up a new communication channel based on Zulip which serves as both a mailing list and a real-time chat.
As a committer member, I would like to propose a vote to set up a dedicated Zulip instance for the AsciiDoc WG.
Please read the details of the proposal at the end of this email and register your vote as soon as possible by indicating +1 (accept), -1 (reject) or 0 (abstain) below to the following resolution:
[ ] RESOLVED, the AsciiDoc Steering Committee approves Zulip as a communication platform.
Eligible voters are:
- Dan Allen
(OpenDevise)
- Simon Dew
(Couchbase)
- Jason Porter (Red Hat)
- Jay Bryant
(VMWare)
- Steven Anderson
- Tammy Fox (CloudBees)
- Amarantha Kulkarni
- Guillaume Grossetie
- Jared Morgan
If there's a tie, I ask that you grant Dan Allen the power to break it with his vote.
Other members of the community are free to reply or comment.
However, as representatives of that community, this is ultimately a decision that the AsciiDoc WG SC must make.
On behalf of the group, we are requesting the Eclipse Foundation to support us if the group is in support of this motion.
Best Regards,
-Guillaume
Proposal details
As a first step, this new communication tool won't replace
the mailing list.
The mailing list will still be used to post official announcements,
vote and ratify important technical decisions.
The purpose of this new communication platform would be to:
- Discuss technical topics in detail (until they reach a level of maturity)
- Encourage initiatives and innovations by bringing people together around topics
- Keep a discussion focused on one topic
- Create group of interests
- Notify someone specifically or a group of users interested in a particular topic
- Share news, experiences, blog posts or resources about AsciiDoc, parsers, lightweight markup languages, documentation and other related topics
- Lower the barrier to entry as all conversations are public by default (i.e., no account needed to follow a conversation)
- Allow informal conversations between members so they can get to know each other
- See who’s participating, who’s online and who’s interested in what topic
What's
Zulip
For those who aren't familiar with Zulip, it’s an open-source
communication platform which combines the immediacy of real-time chat with an email, topic-based threading model, that provides instant web public archives.
Each conversation happens in a topic (thread). Topics are equivalent to the subject line of an email. Like in email or a forum, messages about the same topic are shown together as a flat conversational thread.
Topics belong to a stream which is akin to a mailing list or
a project. It’s a container for topics. Lots of conversations can happen in the same stream at the same time, each in its own topic.
It’s important to note that users can subscribe to a stream
if they want to receive notifications. They can also mute a stream or a particular topic.
Hosting
Zulip provides cloud hosting and self hosting of Zulip instances.
It’s worth noting that Tim Abbott (Founder and CEO of Zulip)
and Alya Abbott (Head of Product at Zulip) have offered to host instances for the Eclipse Foundation until the EF decides how to run their own
instance.
Details of how Zulip would be hosted are being negotiated but
as you can see we have several options.
