Thoughts on feedback:
- It could be useful to do some analytics on current Rocket.Chat use. Anecdotally SIGs, WGs and Chapters don't use chat much but we don't have specific data to review
- People have strong personal preferences for a specific tool – WhatsApp, WeChat and Discord are mentioned as preferences here. Groups "will adopt where community members feel most comfortable."
- Signing up to use a non-preferred tool is cited as a burden
- There was interest in having channels on various systems marked as official instead of only having channels on one system being considered official
- Discoverability of channels was a concern
HCSIG Chair:
"Hey not a major chat needed for this, but I believe the community would benefit a ton from a Discord server and full interactions there. It's a lot cleaner and friendlier to interact with communities on Discord."
Note that #healthcare-sig is very lightly used -- last comment on Sep 10, 2021 and not much activity before that.
Brazil Chapter Chair:
We had this discussion at the beginning of 2021 and tried to change Whatsapp for Rocket, but one of your members has visual disabilities, so we continued using Whats. I myself am very fond of Discord though it is difficult to use mobile.
From a TWGC lead:
What support will be provided if we choose a chat platform that is not supported by the LFIT? Here is an idea which LFIT can help. Once the SIG/WG maintainers create a chat channel, LF can provide a certification service, to show this chat room is verified than others phishing or created by unauthorized person. It should a on-demand service than a compulsory one, only when maintainer need it.
But for most of WG/SIG, they will adopt where community members feel most comfortable ones. Those rarely have a dedicated infrastructure hosted by WG/SIG while WG volunteer is still willing to provide administrative service to keep this group compliant to LF code of ethic as much as possible. Than the official full-platform, they deserve to get a badge of "authorized" for its good-keep community chat quality than being the one official.
From a Hyperledger India Chapter lead:
Many of the members in India (Hyperledger India Chapter) prefer WhatsApp over other modes of communication. It is always a challenge to share personal information. They find signing up to use a chat platform as a burden. Also, it is not easy to find the chat room on the internet / navigate from Hyperledger's main page/wiki space. In addition, it would be nice if chat rooms can have proxy names (ex: Hyperledger India Chapter, Community India etc).
From a Latinoamerica Chapter lead:
we use WhatsApp for interact and communicate via messaging system, however I believe that this is because its more popular and you have always available as a communication Tool, from my perspective Rocket Chat has at least the same or maybe more features depending on the OS, here you will find an interesting review to compare the different tools, however I believe that the concerns strive more in how we encourage people to use the current tools available from the Hyperledger Foundation and how to perfectly use it.
https://sourceforge.net/software/compare/Rocket.Chat-vs-WhatsApp-vs-WeChat-vs-Slack/