Poll: Public Slack access

Do we want vanhack.slack.com to offer invites to anyone who wants one, or keep it primarily members only?

  • open to anyone
  • members only, with manually applied exceptions
0 voters

Discussion:

Slack has effectively replaced IRC as our VHS chat mechanism. It has a nicer UI than most IRC clients, and doesn’t have quite the learning curve of IRC. On the other hand, IRC has the advantage of openness - anyone can connect to it without requiring an invitation.

We currently have the ability to generate invitations for members though Nomos, our membership interface. If we wanted to, we could move that invitation generator to a public page so that anyone could invite themselves.

I don’t know if ‘Slack spam’ is a thing or not, but @jarrett seems to think that removing spammers would be easy enough.

So do we want Slack to be more open to non-members, or are we fine with it as is?

I don’t feel strongly, but with talk being much more publicly visible/accessible than the mailing list used to be, I see that as a preferred place to welcome newcomers - as the questions that tend to get asked become searchable resources.

1 Like

Okay, I take it that there are no strong feelings either way, but generally people are happy with Slack running the way it is. Great! Best solution: stay the course.