Re: [Tools-discuss] Trial chat services: matrix and zulip

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

It might be more effective to trial them sequentially rather than in parallel. 

> On Oct 1, 2020, at 10:33, Robert Sparks <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> We are deploying trials of the matrix and zulip chat services to gain
> operational experience and get community feedback about how well these
> services meet the need for IETF related chat.
> 
> We have clear evidence from the IETF 107 post-meeting survey
> (https://www.ietf.org/media/documents/ietf-107-survey-results.pdf) that many
> IETF participants find jabber a significant problem.  This is partly due to
> difficulties in finding a free jabber service and partly due to client issues.
> There are two paths to try to resolve these problems, one is to improve the
> IETF jabber service and the other is to switch to an alternative groupchat
> solution.  The community has already taken a step on the latter path with the
> introduction of an IETF Slack space, and we want to ensure that this path is
> properly explored by widening the range of options to well established
> free/open source tools.
> 
> The installs currently have almost no local configuration or customization.
> Over the next few weeks, we will be exploring reconfiguring them to use
> datatracker credentials for sign-in, and explore bridging between these
> systems, Slack, and Jabber. One consequence of these explorations is that there
> will  likely be times, outside of meetings, when accounts will be disrupted or
> even removed and will have to be recreated. Initially, we suggest you use an
> email address for the username on each service.
> 
> We considered running these trials using instances run by the Zulip or Matrix
> communities. We went with instances operated by the secretariat to learn what
> would be needed if the community felt self-hosting chat was important in the
> long-term.
> 
> The services can be found at matrix-trial1.ietf.org and zulip-trial1.ietf.org.
> 
> Any matrix client can be used with the trial matrix server. There is also
> a web client available at at matrix-trial1.ietf.org.
> 
> Similarly any zulip client can be used with the trial zulip server, which
> has a built in web interface.
> 
> We would like feedback on how well each client meets chat needs during
> meetings, both the full online IETF 109 meeting, iterims, adhocs, and hallway
> conversations.
> 
> Around December, we will assess our experiences and the feedback received to
> inform what chat services we provide in the future and how we will operate
> them. In January, these trial instances will be taken down. We do not intend to
> preserve or migrate any account configuration or chat history from the trial
> instances as we move forward.
> 
> This does add to the potentially confusing large number of places conversation
> might take place. We hope to address that with some level of bridging, at least
> with Jabber, but have been cautioned by the respective development communities
> that bridging between Zulip and Matrix is unsatisfying since the conversation
> models in the two applications are so different.
> 
> The chat services are intended to be explorational and informal. However,
> please treat them as contexts where contribution rules apply (See
> https://www.ietf.org/about/note-well/).
> 
> We are not, at this time, planning to host jabber accounts. We may revisit that
> as an option as we continue to gather more feedback.
> 
> Please send feedback on the services to [e-mail]
> 
> 
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