As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance communication and collaboration among our local WordPress communities, we propose that WordPress Community Support WordPress Community Support PBC is a Public Benefit Corporation, created specifically to be the financial and legal support for WordCamps, WordPress Meetup groups, and any additional “official” events organized within the WordPress Community Events program. considers adopting our local communities, currently on free Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. plans, into a consolidated Enterprise Grid plan. More information: An introduction to Slack Enterprise Grid and Guide to the Enterprise Grid admin dashboard.
In alignment with @Matt Mullenweg’s proposal at the State of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. 2023, where he suggested adopting a few polyglot channels by saying about free Slack spaces for local communities: “you shouldn’t need to do that”, this initiative to transition to an Enterprise Grid could be seen as an extension of that vision. By consolidating our Slack workspaces, we not only enhance our ability to support multilingual communication but also significantly broaden the scope for cross-community interactions. This proactive step would further integrate diverse voices and expertise into our global WordPress community, supporting our collective growth.
It follows a post in December 2023 by @tobifjellner on the Polyglots P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. How can we best handle local channels in WordPress global Slack? and a comment by @mkismy suggesting the Enterprise Grid. It was also mentioned in a Community Team meeting in May 2024, suggesting this proposal. It also follows the pause in the transition to Matrix, see the related post by @akirk.
It’s important to note that many of our local WordPress communities currently operate on free Slack plans. The list of known communication platforms for local communication can be seen here: Local Slack Teams.
These communities, which are pivotal in promoting WordPress and offering support at a local level, are indeed especially important for Polyglots but not only: Support, Community event organization and many more conversations happen in those Slack workspaces. Local communities face significant limitations in terms of message history and integration capabilities under the free plan model, with access to the conversations limited to 90 days. As Slack moves towards deleting older than 1 year historical data for free accounts, our community’s valuable discussions and resources risk being lost. Transitioning to an Enterprise Grid plan would safeguard our archives and enhance our operational capacities, ensuring that every local community has the tools they need to thrive.
Key Benefits of Moving to Slack Enterprise Grid:
- Data Continuity and Access: By migrating to Enterprise Grid, we can ensure that all historical data — including messages, files, and customizations — is preserved. This is critical as Slack’s upcoming policy change will delete older than 1-year history for free workspaces starting 26 August 2024.
- Enhanced Security and Compliance: Enterprise Grid offers advanced security features, compliance settings, and administrative capabilities that are not available in free Slack plans. These include SAML-based single sign-on, and comprehensive user and channel management.
- Improved Collaboration Across Workspaces: Enterprise Grid allows for better integration across different workspaces. This is especially beneficial for communities that are segmented by region or interest group, facilitating smoother communication and resource sharing across the entire network.
Implementation Considerations:
- Timeline: The transition should ideally be completed before 25 August 2024 to avoid any disruption caused by the deletion of message history for free plans. However, we understand that this deadline is short and even if it is not feasible in that timeframe, this proposal is still valid, with the workspaces recovery of 1 year of historical conversations.
- Community Feedback and Support: It is crucial to involve community leaders and members, as well as free local Slack “owners”, in this transition process to ensure their needs and concerns are addressed.
- User accounts: Address the concern of user accounts as people might already have accounts in several of those Slack workspaces. See with Slack if some sort of consolidation and merging user accounts are possible without losing user history in all the workspaces they belong to.
- This change would hugely benefit the communication within the community, but it doesn’t solve all problems. For example, Slack refuses users and domains linked to certain locations, like Iran, Russia, etc.
- Slack being a third-party proprietary application, we need to take into consideration these concerns, and talk with them about data ownership: Slack’s use of traditional machine learning models. If we move to an open source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. solution at a later date, with this proposal we will at least have consolidated the existing Slack workspaces.
Call to Action:
Let’s consider this proposal and provide feedback on the feasibility of this transition, and if this is possible before 25 August 2024, in the comments below before July 12, 2024 for collaborative decision-making.
This proposal has been written by @patricia70 and reviewed by @markhowellsmead, @mazzomaz, @mielbu and @tobifjellner
The draft was submitted for feedback to other community members as well, with participation/OK from:
@estelaris, @francescodicandia, @kcristiano, @mkismy, @nilovelez, @nukaga, @sippis, @zzap
+make.wordpress.org/polyglots/
#community-management,
#community-team,
#international-communities,
#proposal
