I think the new name is a great way to frame the conversation.
I wrote the topic referenced in the original post a little over 2 years ago.
Some notable observations:
- I wrote that 2 years ago, and you were able to find it and link to it here. Good thing I didn’t just post it in a Slack instance somewhere.
- The original post is a copy of a conversation from Slack. Good job capturing that and getting a discussion going here where it can evolve over a longer period of time!
- I wrote that 2 years ago, and it’s something we still struggle with
We have the chat integration plugin installed. Adoption of the “subscribe to a category or tag via slack” feature of that plugin is OK, but not great. The “post a transcript from Slack” is rarely used. In part because of the lack of thread support, but I think in greater part because chats just don’t transfer that well to this medium.
The more successful patterns we’ve seen are social ones, which is why I think the renaming of this topic is on target. What kinds of behaviors do you want to encourage and how can the leaders (formal or informal) in the community best model them?
Some things that I have seen work well:
- Start the discussion on Discourse, and then share the link in one or more relevant Slack channels, inviting people to participate in the discussion who’s “canonical home” is on Discourse
- When a conversation takes place in Slack that is related to an existing thread on Discourse, point out the link to the Discourse thread in Slack. Don’t try to move the conversation over while it’s in flight though – that’s often disruptive. Instead, if anything new came out of the Slack chat, summarize it in a follow-up post on the Discourse topic (in our case, we also encourage linking back to the Slack conversation, but we’re paying for archives… that probably wouldn’t be too helpful here).
- When a discussion just starts to feel like it’s the kind of thing that may have lasting value, suggest moving it at some point, “Hey, this is some really interesting stuff, you should consider posting it on Discourse so it doesn’t get lost.” Natural times to do this include when people type multi-paragraph posts in Slack, but others will just be apparent, I imagine. Another example is when people work through something kind of gnarly troubleshooting wise (“hey, glad we finally go to the bottom of this, It’d be great if you could summarize the issue and the resolution for others on Discourse”)
- Nudge people by making them aware of the value of asynchronous communication. “I’m kinda busy so I can’t help you right now, but if you post this on Discourse, I’ll try to answer later (unless someone else gets to it first.)”
Changing culture is hard, but I think that’s the necessary element to make something like this succeed, more so than any technical integrations.