Didn't know about the At-Large chat, i'm on the ISOC one. It's not so much formal versus informal, though yes - it's easier to post a detailed substantive reply in an email than in a chat. More important for me is that you can't (not easily) separate, fork or rename threads on a chat. Everything but the kitchen sink is rolled into one chat thread. For example, with the ISOC chat on Skype, i will only rarely check to see what the last post was about. I will tend to check more often if i know that "something's up", and sometimes the heads-up for that "something" comes to me via email lists. With email lists, i can at least readily scan the subject lines. Also, when it's a substantive discussion, i will send it to a group of people via email so i can more readily file and retrive it for later reference. WYn P.S. Locally, we use instant messageing for more immediate stuff - coordinating meetings, back channels during hearings, etc. Our problem here is we have too many apps - little if any on Skype, some WhatsApp, more on Viber and lots on FB Mess (which last i uninstalled from my phone within 48 hours of first installing it). On 2/21/2017 3:32 AM, Joly MacFie wrote:
Since nobody else has mentioned it, for some years, after having been birthed as a backchannel during ICANN Meetings, the At-Large Community on Skype (128 participants, admin:Evan Leibovitch) has functioned as pretty much the default chat channel for At-Large worldwide. It is browseable, but not searchable AFAIK, I doubt anybody ever bothers. Skype chat also is very flexible when it comes to forming ad hoc groups.
Question. Does a chat channel work better for free discussion than email? It may be subjective, but it seems the flow of conversation from chat to more formal minuted calls works well. Outcomes are then recorded on the wiki.
Lastly, I will say that, in ISOC, while we hook up in a variety of manners, we pretty much exclusively now use Zoom for calls.
j
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 1:57 PM, Carlton Samuels <carlton.samuels@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 3:20 PM, Joly MacFie <joly@punkcast.com> wrote:
it's main and important function is to provide shallow water for new joiners to get their feet wet, get an idea of the community, and a sense of belonging. A newbie playground. The idea being that the keen ones may graduate to traditional vectors such wg's, email lists, wiki's etc
I would not argue that there are more efficient ways to organize the communications. But email is always considered a 'come direct to me' mode instead of the 'come find me' mode of the website/wiki/portal modalities for communication.
When an ALS is ratified by the ALAC, the email subscription by ALS representative to at least the Worldwide list comes with that ratification. It follows for pretty much the same reasons -flipped - that Joly outlined in the ISOC context.
Just by modeling of a traditional message, a subject line is meant to indicate channel. The response to the subject line in the content body would have been a useful indicator of interest and, driver for that channelized discussion.
But um...........well.....
-Carlton
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