**What is the problem?**
There is currently a well-attended Slack team for Enterprise MediaWiki developers (enterprisemw.slack.com). It provides an excellent venue for communication and relationship building. There are several Wikimedia Foundation staff who participate in the Slack team, but there would be broader Foundation participation if FOSS software were used. There are limitations to IRC that prevent enthusiastic adoption by some of the third-party community.
Note that this task can be thought of as a companion to {T181377}. Q&A and persistent chat software serve complementary purposes.
**How does success of this task look like? How do we know when we are done?**
Success would be identifying appropriate software and standing up and advertising an instance of it.
Software Requirements:
- real time, unstructured, online interactions
- FOSS
- persistence (logging of conversation history)
- search of past conversations
- ability to create multiple channels
- threaded conversations
- user mentions with notifications
- visually appealing user interface
- web client and preferably mobile clients
- visual indication of agreement/disagreement (reactions/emoji)
- bonus for any level of integration with the Q&A platform
**Is there any goal, program, project, team related with this request?**
[[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technology/Goals/2017-18_Q3#Program_4:_Technical_community_building | Q3 Technology Goals, Program 4, Outcome 3, Objective 1]]
**What is your expected timeline from start to end? Is there a hard deadline?**
Anticipated task completion is the end of Q4.