Tips on using Slack

Slack can be used to great effect within a community. It can be a fun, chatty way to communicate, but it can also become a dog pile of random stuff. Slack is a chat tool. The users decide how valuable it is.

In our case, members (and some non-members) join interest groups ("channels") and talk about things of interest to them. We organize some standard channels around our equipment suites (lasercutters, woodshop, metalshop, textiles, 3dprinters, etc) and organization (openorclosed, mod-help, it, class-requests, etc) and around topics that anyone can find several people to discuss with (boardgame-night, live-auction, fusion-360, foodhaxx, etc). People chat and support each other, and generally have a good time. Feel free to join as many channels as you want. If you want to create a new channel, first have a chat in #general to see if others are interested in joining you in a new discussion channel; too many channels makes it hard to new people to find their place.

NOTE: Maker Nexus members can use their @makernexus.org email to join our Slack server

Our Slack server is good for contemporaneous communication between groups of people. It is not a good archive for building knowledge. If you search Slack for something you are most likely dropped into the middle of several interleaved conversations that took place several months ago. It is hard to digest this, so people looking for an answer will just post their question to Slack again.

We have to recognize several things about our community.

1. Many of our members are not on Slack, by their choice.
2. Many of our members only look at Slack once a week. Some even less. When they do look, they don't read all the voluminous history; they read a few things.
3. Many of our members on Slack have disabled alerts.

All these mean that we cannot expect a policy change announced on Slack to be read by all our members. A policy change announced on Slack might reach only 25% of our members, at best. A policy change voted on in Slack is only a vote of, at most, 25% of our members - and of only those who use Slack.

There are ways we can all use our Slack server to make it more productive for everyone. The points below are taken from a medium sized start up that used Slack very effectively. Of course, as a company they were able to enforce the behaviors noted below. We can't do that, but if we all try to live by these then our Slack will be a better experience for everyone.

1. Never reply to a post in the channel, ALWAYS start a thread on the comment.
2. Never reply with a "great", "super", "love it", "go!", "I agree" and other low information notes, unless in a thread where the poster was asking for this kind of feedback. These bits clogs up the channels for everyone else. Use the reactions instead. In addition, all those alerts cause people to turn off their notifications, which means they miss important things.
3. Slack is not to be used for important things with a life of more than a day. If something is important it needs to be communicated and saved in a less ephemeral media. Email, newsletters, documents, signs in the makerspace, the website, and the wiki; important things belong in those places. (To help reinforce this we set our company Slack to delete all messages after one week.)
4. Never have a dialog with someone in a public channel. Direct Messages are for little huddles that don't involve everyone. Or create a new, short lived channel. Don't force everyone who isn't interested to wade through your chat.
5. Archive unused channels regularly. If a channel hasn't had any posts in a month, get rid of it.