Thoughts on synchronous communication (calls)

Interested in participating in calls, but tbh I don’t know how.

  • First, I don’t (atm) have a Discord profile. Is there a way to just join the call via a link?
  • Second, I don’t know when the calls are. Is this data somewhere on the forum?
  • Third, the format of the calls makes it hard to participate, both synchronously and async. Would be great if every call had it’s own thread. The initial post would be a wiki with the date, time, link to the call, agenda, and a notes section. Then people would have 1 place for all the info on the call. This would make it easier to participate, esp if community members wanted to weigh in on topics asynchronously pre or post call. This would also make it easier to flow Cred to call discussion topics and distributions. Also, it would be cool if the calls were not recorded. You can edit and update a post, but you can’t edit and update a call (at least not without significant effort). Just doing the notes would make it easier to contribute, easier to flow cred to, and easier to edit/update.

Potential Call Agenda Template

Meeting Info


Date:

Time:

Link to call


Agenda


Discussion Item 1

Discussion Item 2

Discussion Item 3


Notes


Action Item 1

Action Item 2

Action Item 3


Attendees


  • person 1
  • person 2
  • person 3


As mentioned, I don’t participate in calls so I don’t know if these things have been discussed before. If so please let me know how I can participate without jumping to another platform. If not, do we feel like it would be valuable to make it so that anyone across the multiple SourCred platforms (GitHub, Discourse, Discord, etc…) can participate via following a link?

Also, are the suggestions to move effort from recording/editing to note taking something we want to explore? And if so, is the template provided here of interest (I’ve found it works for lots of the calls I lead, but happy to discover other templates too :slight_smile:)

And finally, would it make sense to rename the Office Hours category to Community Calls? Might be more specific and helpful for new community members who want to get involved.

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Researched this a little. It appears that you used to be able to join a Discord server/call w/o registering, but now it’s difficult to impossible. Do you not want to join Discord for some particular reason? We could do the call elsewhere (we’ve done Google hangouts before), but find Discord works well for calls, and the Craig bot is convenient for recording.

So we have this general post Weekly SourceCred Community Call, which has the call info. But just now it took me several minutes to find myself…not ideal. Your idea of putting call info in each agenda template makes sense. Have incorporated most of your template into next week’s agenda post: Weekly Community Call (12/17/2019). Will just use this as the new template moving forward. Wondering the appropriate way to give your cred, aside from responding to this and :heart:'ing. I agree to champion in a comment here, but I don’t believe it’s a proper initiative. @Beanow am I missing something? Should I create an initiative/artifact?

I think we should keep the community calls public and record them, as a general rule. This allows more people to follow the project and increases transparency. I’ve already had a couple people thank me for posting calls, as they weren’t able to join live. That said, I do think there will be a need for having calls that are not public and aren’t recorded. For that, we may want to do calls differently (different platform, permissions, etc.).

Creating notes from the call usually takes me a bit of time (~30 mins - 1hr depending on how much re-listening I have to do), and I think is valuable. Your template (now included) I think is a good place for that. Keeping it in one place makes it easier for people to participate async, as you mentioned, and improves discoverability.

Ha. Have thought of this a number of times but was too lazy to bring it up :neutral_face: I think it’s a good idea. Am wondering if changing labels will cause issues on the backend with the Discourse plugin? @Beanow are we messing you up if we do that?

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I deleted my Discord profile a while back because I didn’t like that Discord is always watching.

That being said, I’ve started using more and more closed source apps/platforms because otherwise it’s nearly impossible to connect with people async. In the process of getting more accounts and things, however, I’m really hesitant to create yet another profile and have yet another app. Would rather keep it simple. Also, for new contributors just having a link that people can click on is 10X easier than having to create (or already have) a profile on another platform.

For an open source and encrypted call app, Jitsi seems to be the best. Requires an app on mobile, but on desktops anyone can create or join a call with just a click :slight_smile:

I don’t know what a template for calls would qualify as. Because it was so simple to make and will (hopefully) be updated by the community over time it’s probably not that big of a deal.

That being said… if part of the SourceCred game is that players know their contributions will be rewarded now and into the future, they’re more likely to do more work for the community. So for the sake of optimizing the game we should figure this out. How do we reward and recognize something that is small, but will be reused and provide value many times? (because every time someone copypastas the template it won’t get a like, but it will provide value).

Would a Supernode help, or is that just a quick workaround that doesn’t really address the heart of this particular problem?

EDIT: reading back through the Artifacts intro thread it seems like things like templates or docs might be artifacts? @decentralion @Beanow What do you guys think?

Oh great! Well then if it’s useful for people then carry on :slight_smile:

Much time! Do you not take notes while you’re on the call and then just clean them up after?

Btw thanks for doing that. The notes are very helpful.

Well, sometimes it’s not that much time. I try and take notes as I go, but my brain is not multi-threaded, and it’s hard for me to participate and take notes at the same time. I also sometimes re-listen just because it’s interesting and I gain new details/context.

From the reddit thread: “I don’t know if Discord is just flailing wildly trying to ptrace itself, or if this is deliberate Discord behavior, or if this is regular Chromium/Electron behavior (wouldn’t be surprising), or something else.” Unfortunately, a lot of this software could be just using a popular framework that’s overly grabby. Also, I suppose I just don’t want to go through the work of getting on another platform:) Would be curious if anyone else has thoughts on this.

It’s actually because Discord has a feature where it shows you what games/apps other people are using. In order to tell if you’re playing WoW or listening to Spotify Discord needs ptrace. Feature or bug, you decide lol

Totally fair!

I believe we should have an artifact for the community call, and that artifact should have an edge pointing to @burrrata’s post with the new template. Then every individual community call will have a node pointing to the community call artifact, which will flow some cred.


Changing it should be fine. When we have a Discourse Director, they can clean up existing categories as an early order of business. :wink:

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Also, my 2c on platforms: Discord is working well for the calls, it has momentum, people are able to onboard, we have easy recording. And it works well as a background chat platform for SourceCred. Given that it “just works”, I’m very hesitant to switch to a different platform for the calls; in my experience doing so is generally quite disruptive.

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Totally support that. If it’s working and the community likes it we should keep rolling with it. I’ll figure out how to adapt accordingly :slight_smile:

Changed the Category title to “Community Calls.” Also added the template used in next week’s community call to the category. This way whenever you navigate to the “Community Calls” category and then create a new topic, it will auto populate the template. Hopefully it’s cool, but if it needs to change please just let me know and I’ll update it accordingly.

Should I add a link to the original template draft in the new topic template so that it gets linked every time anyone uses the template? Or would making the calls an Artifact and linking to the template in those be enough?

You can consider this topic to be a contribution towards a community call initiative. Though the call is a fairly open-ended goal, we should discuss what sort of supernode makes sense for those. For now initiatives are likely implemented first, so you can use that for now and move it when an alternative comes around :]

Edit: deferring to below comment as that answers my thoughts above.

Artifacts are that. Perhaps we should flesh out the artifacts template a bit more. So it has a few of those concepts that Initiatives have now. Wiki by default, contributions, references, champions, etc.

Changing category names shouldn’t be an issue. Worst case we need to clear the cache (takes about 5 minutes to reload). So don’t worry there :+1:

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I have a love-hate relationship with Discord for similar reasons. It’s the old world VC backed centralise all the things with data-mongering incentives business model. I’m expecting shitty practices are a when, not if.

That said I’ve used a ton of alternatives: mumble, teamspeak, zoom, hangouts, xmpp, skype, slack, gitter, talky, and probably a dozen more I’m forgetting about right now. I think Discord outshines them all on two major fronts:

  • They have the best-in-class technology. I haven’t found anything that has a comparable feature set and level of quality to be a replacement. In my opinion it’s easier to replace GitHub in that regard than Discord.
  • The size of the Discord user base, makes it a difficult to ignore social media. Similar to GitHub, I think you’ll hurt your discoverability a lot by using an alternative.
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What does vvvv mean?

Network effects are real. If the community likes it and it’s a good way to engage a broader audience then let’s keep using it. I’ll find a way to adjust vs the other way around :slight_smile:

Meant down arrows to the quote below. Let me edit to be more clear :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks :smile: though if there’s a good way to work around it I’m open to try it out and see what I can do to help. Maybe there’s some bots to tunnel calls to connect it with another platform or something.