[Tools-discuss] Zulip Trial & the IETF
Tim April <ietf@tapril.net> Wed, 23 December 2020 20:11 UTC
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From: Tim April <ietf@tapril.net>
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Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2020 15:11:40 -0500
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Subject: [Tools-discuss] Zulip Trial & the IETF
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Hello IETFers. As the chat system trials continue, I figured I would add my thoughts on how the Zulip service might fit into existing IETF work flows. If there are any comments / questions / suggestions about zulip or the text below, please let me know. (I have also posted this text to the Zulip trial server [here](https://zulip-trial1.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/19-trial1-feedback/topic/Zulip.20Trial.20.26.20the.20IETF/near/15457)) Thanks, --tim ## Overview of Zulip First, if you're new to Zulip, I would recommend reading the [Getting Started with Zulip (~300 words)](https://zulip-trial1.ietf.org/help/getting-started-with-zulip) documentation found on the Zulip trail server. This is a quick intro written by the Zulip developers and some of its users. I would also suggest going a little deeper into the documentation, specifically reading about [Streams and Topics (~300 words)](https://zulip-trial1.ietf.org/help/about-streams-and-topics), which covers the Zulip conversation model. The most important difference, in my opinion, between Zulip and most of the other popular chat systems is their conversation model. With most systems, like Slack, Matrix or even XMPP, conversations are separated into channels, rooms or chat rooms respectively. For some of the newer chat systems, threads have been added to conversations as an after thought, but in Zulip, threading was an initial design feature so the system was built to support threading, in a similar way to email. Zulip started out as a web based re-implementation of [Zephyr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)) to allow better separation topics within a conversation, very similar to how there are threads within a mailing list. As Zulip has grown over the years since it was introduced, the threading model has remained nearly the same, and in the 6 years I have been an active user, I have found that it helps quite a bit with focusing on the topics I need to focus on while letting me go back and review other conversations as I have time. ## Proposed use of Topics Since the new chat system trials have started, I have spent some time thinking about how the IETF might make use of Zulip if it were to be selected as the replacement for XMPP. Below are my thoughts on how conversations might happen in the tool. It is important to note that the way conversations happen in Zulip tend to drift towards a set of roughly agreed on norms rather than any hard and fast rules. ### Working Group Use For each working group, I would think that it would start out with two Zulip streams, one would be for the mailing list mirror and the other would be for other discussions like what exists in XMPP right now. For the mail mirror, I would imagine that this stream would be set up to receive messages from each of their respective mailings lists. As an example, in the trial system, the stream named "list:dnsop" receives any messages to dnsop@ietf.org. Additionally, another stream would be setup for discussion within a working group which might just be the working group name like "dnsop". In the working group stream, conversations about current work could take place with its own topic in the stream for each piece of work. In addition to using public streams, a private stream could be employed to allow working group chairs to communicate with each other. Depending on their work flows, the working group chairs may wish to have their mailing list(s) copied directly into Zulip, or to just use the system as a chat replacement. It is also worth noting that additional streams could be used to further separate some work items, such as focused work on a particular draft. In the case where a draft has its own stream, there might be different topics for each work item that is open for the draft. If the draft is using GitHub, there might be a conversation in the stream for each of the GitHub issues to better separate each of the conversations. Speaking of GitHub, Zulip does have an extensive set of [integrations](https://zulip-trial1.ietf.org/integrations/), including GitHub which can send all sorts of events directly into Zulip as changes happen to the repository. ### Non Working Group Lists Like working group use, non-working group lists can have similar integrations using the "list:" prefix for the email mirror and then a separate stream for chat based discussions. ## Archiving One concern that might come up is archiving messages sent to Zulip, similar to how all email messages are archived. There is a [zulip-archive](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive) tool maintained by the Zulip developers which can export all messages in public streams to a HTML format for archiving. Other alterations to this tool could be made to archive directly into the mail archive maintained by the tools team if it would seem valuable.
- [Tools-discuss] Zulip Trial & the IETF Tim April