This was brought up in the email thread announcing the beta for the Discourse, and I wanted to copy it over here - partially to see how Discourse compares to the email thread for this sort of discussion, and to kind of demonstrate the issue at hand.
Paul Beltrani brought up that we currently have a large number of communication and documentation platforms - by his listing,
email lists for
“members”
“general”
each shop
Discourse
Wiki
Slack
Discord
Nexudus
His complaint/suggestion - and I’m inclined to agree - was that things are currently too divided amongst them, and we need to have a more firm rule on what platforms we use and to get everyone on them. It kinda reminds me of that one XKCD comic.
Anyhow - I figured I’d bring it up here to see what other people think.
(My opinion would be to ditch the Discord and Slack, discourage communication on Nexudus (I think I remember hearing we wanted to move away from that platform, anyways?), and keep the mailing lists as a sort of ‘legacy’ option, with the Discourse being the main communication channel.)
Also: I feel like once we reach more of a consensus, it’d be nice to have a big, obvious poster in the lobby of both buildings with links/QR codes to the official resources. I have to wonder how many people only ever reach AA by physically visiting. I’d be down to design something like that, if the time ever comes.
A key point that I forgot to include (which Sadie added later) is that Discourse is intended to replace email as a discussion platform. This is not to say we shouldn’t communicate via email at all. Email has its uses, just not for community-wide discussions.
What this means practically is that discuss@ and members@ should get completely discontinued. But important announcements to the entire community should still get sent out via email through Nexudus or its replacement to all members (as members@ and Discourse are self-subscribing which doesn’t necessarily have all members on it)
The Wiki as several pointed out is not a communication platform, its an information repository. Discourse could also be used as an information repository in a less static and more informal way.
Slack, I thought was dead, which is why the Discord was made.
Discord, I have mixed feelings about. The Chat/Channel features on Discourse are not the best as they don’t give mobile notifications very well. It has a couple minutes of delay. So Discourse can’t replace Discord in the same ways. True that the channels are not very active, but I find DM’s to still be helpful.
Nexudus - I don’t know why people are using that. True that staff is looking at other CRM alternatives. But I’m glad there’s some activity there in the very least- it can very well move over to Discourse.
So to address this concern of division, I don’t envision keeping those with redundant functions. And its totally optional to participate (except email). So if you don’t want to deal with anything but email, that up to the member. You can still participate in Discourse via email, once you set up an account.
I agree (as I posted earlier today in Members) that it would be good to shut down the Discord and Google groups (after appropriate notice) and avoid Nexdus…
Presumably it would be possible to have mailing list of some sort to all members for use by staff only for ‘AA wide’ announcements.
Personally I see very little benefit to a chat app in general, but especially in a relatively small area like AA where it seems quite possible to actually chat IN PERSON or via VOICE Phone…
I do see a use for a chat client… As a shop lead/shop worker I would rather be dm’d via a chat client then texted to my personal phone number. I’d prefer not to be called on the phone at all, Although I don’t mind calling people back sometimes
I personally love the deluge of emails I get from this org. I understand this is not a popular opinion.
I will also add that we have more communication platforms than just that; I have been added to projects on Monday.com and Taiga as well. At one point, somebody added me to a project on Notion.
Additionally, Deskies use Google Drive, sticky notes, and we have the mostly-obsolete physical notebook as well.
I thought of that exact same XKCD, Yali (;
Echoing what ART said, my biggest concern with Discord is privacy. I despise that decentralized wikis/forums have largely been replaced by Discord, which tracks us and sells all of our data.
There are settings in your profile that let you turn on and off the email notifications so you can have fairly good control over what you want to see and when…
At this point, our primary remaining use for Nexudus is billing of memberships and studio rental. (We shifted to Eventbrite for event and resource scheduling and billing.) Once we find an alternative for that we’ll probably drop it altogether. We already have a MailChimp subscription that we can use for the email blasts of important info.
Like cthulhu, I do see a use for a chat client, especially since we now have two buildings. Walking between Holton and Antwerp can get tired pretty quickly. And sometimes you want a communication channel that isn’t quite as in your face as talking in person or on the phone, and also has a bit more permanence of information.