Movement communication outside the wikis largely relies on email and IRC which are not very well suited to running open, collaborative communities at scale. The result is disfunction, fragmentation (IRC vs. Zulip vs. Telegram vs. Conpherence vs...) and a slow exodus to modern but philosophically misaligned (closed-source, privacy-invasive, disempowering) tools like Facebook and Slack. We can do better than that.

There has been an effort recently to set up Discourse (a modern, community-oriented forum software with decent email integration) and Matrix (a modern IRC-like federated chat system) as suitable alternatives. The aim of the session is to connect people interested in the topic and - depending on the mix of participants - test the new communication tools or hack on them.

Some possible tasks:

• Discourse:
  • T215052: Add MediaWiki login support to Discourse
  • T215053: Write an extension for displaying Discourse feeds on mediawiki.org
  • T212676: Show Discourse notifications in Echo
  • Figure out whether we can use Discourse as a mailing list software
• Matrix:
  • T186061: Evaluate Matrix / Element as the recommended chat system for Wikimedia
  • T222458: Evaluate Element as recommended IRC client
  • T215042: Set up a hosted Matrix.org / Element instance on modular.im
  • SUL integration

Time & place: Sunday 11h (rescheduled), in Education Center
Slides: https://bit.ly/wmhack19-commtools