[Tools-implementation] Draft 2 (was Rough draft of message to the community re Zulip and Matrix)

[Robert Sparks <[e-mail]>]

I think this reflects the comments so far, with the exception of not 
talking about the potential delay for the zulip email message. Lets wait 
for Glen to have an opportunity to look/tweak before we talk about that.

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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.

The secretariat is operating each instance. We've chosen this path for these
trials over third party hosting to learn what would be needed if the 
community
felt self-hosting was important in the longer 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, virtuals, 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]