It looks like Slack became a main communication tool, at least for some teams. I'm a volunteer contributor (who previously worked in Readers Web Team) and I'd like to have a way to contact the Readers Web Team to talk about ongoing projects.
I'm actively working on Feature Management and I'd like to have an easy way to talk with people instead of exchanging emails/text messages. Having an access to some channels on Slack (like readers-web) would be super useful for both parties.
See also:
Assuming this is about Web-Team-Backlog. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/67/ links to an IRC channel and a mailing list. If that's outdated then someone should update it, together with https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web#Contact which does not list that mailing list.
yes, but I don't think it should go to Backlog, as backlog is mostly for code-related tasks and this one is about permissions/way to access slack.
@Aklapper we use IRC but there's an increasing presence on Slack which is fragmenting the conversations. I think Office IT are leading this change but I don't know if they are on Phabricator. I think if WMF is adopting Slack as their preferred comms platform we need an answer to the question "Can volunteers use Slack?" - any idea who to direct this to?
https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Topic:Vgde2gueibjku7ua is the relevant conversation on officewiki.
I don't think OIT is leading a change to Slack, I think they are leading an evaluation to find out whether moving to Slack is the best possible option between the other alternatives after everybody agreed it's needed before we end up in a situation like this.
Access for volunteers and lack of bots are important factors that I hope are part of this evaluation.
I created a Flow thread related to this ticket at https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Topic:Vhwj8zvloalh6hj4. Apologies to those this excludes. I can't bring things from that discussion here due to the privacy expectations of officewiki, but I can take things discussed here there if needed to raise awareness.
Mozilla recently shut down its IRC server and switched to Matrix: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix.
AFAIK WMF's "Slack" is maintained by WMF IT Services (ITS), and ITS do not use Phabricator to track things, so I'm declining this (wrong place, basically).
As an "external" contributor whose productivity is being affected by my Slack account having expired, I would love to see this task closed with a link to the correct place to request access. I'm really at a loss, I've looked through the wikis, asked WMF colleagues etc. And as a non-WMF employee, I don't have any obvious way to contact ITS. Note that the staff page doesn't include group email addresses.
don't have any obvious way to contact ITS
I agree this is very unfortunate and exactly what concerns about Slack were about.
You can still try this to contact them:
https://wikimedia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us
https://wikimedia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Phabricator was literally introduced to unite the multiple RT systems, one of which was what is now ITS. This outcome still makes me sad to this day.