Consider Slack-like set-up?

#1

Just curious - is there any consideration of supporting a Slack-like community in addition to the forum-based platform? One of my favorite things about the #rstats Twitter community is that, as a feed, I often happen across interesting and useful tidbits that I wasn't specifically looking for. Something Slack-like would have the same novelty/discoverability of Twitter but would be superior in searchability/preservation.

I do like the forum format as it's very well-organized, but it seems less easy to stumble across interesting topics.

#2

I was wondering the same thing. I imagine the RStudio team thought pretty hard about how they wanted the community to interact and decided a searchable forum they could customize would be more aligned to their vision than another slack group.

From my experience of trying to actively participate in 5 slack teams, it can be a real hassle. Slack tends to favor people who use it synchronously (real word?) -- that is a few people tend to dominate the conversation just by hanging out and talking. That behavior can actually be pretty great if the goal is answering a bunch of random beginner questions. It can also fall apart pretty quickly if gets off topic and turns into a free form conversation rather that a guided, focused conversation. I'm really liking the format and feel of the community so far and excited to see where it goes from here.

#3

One of the slack teams that I am in actually has a forum setup just like this integrated into the slack team itself. So broad topics (such as Office Hours, for instance) can push conversation from the forum to the slack group.

That said, I'm kind of in the middle. I like slack and I like the forum structure. I prefer the forum for topic-based discussion though. It's designed more naturally for this type of communication.

#4

Totally possible that I'm just bad at Slack, but I think this setup seems :+1: to get useful responses from people with "expertise" without their needing to stay up on what's going on in all the threads.

Bias: I'm in like 4 R-dominant Slack groups, and I find it hard to keep up with it all.

#5

I definitely agree - Slack can be good for some things, but definitely not all.

Also, Slack teams are probably waaaay more difficult to administer and enforce.

#6

Yeah -- actually, as this community has evolved more over the past week and as I have read more of these comments, I definitely would reframe my prior comment. Overall, I can see that this set-up is much more conducive to meaningful, in-depth discussions.

However, I'm still left contemplating how best to browse it or make it more "discoverable". (Then again, finding plenty of good stuff already, so it may be best for my general productivity that I'm not seeing every interesting/trending thread at once :joy:)

#7

Here's an idea which will probably destroy my already flagging productivity: how about an R package that allows us to view this forum in RStudio? :sunglasses: