Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@cgwalters
Last active June 21, 2022 12:16
Show Gist options
  • Star 0 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 0 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save cgwalters/536737496d01a8bf3c641b844f0cd75c to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save cgwalters/536737496d01a8bf3c641b844f0cd75c to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Internal proprietary chat vs async public discussion

TL;DR

If you're seeing this linked because you used an internal-to-RH proprietary realtime chat system, please consider instead interacting on an asynchronous, public channel such as a GitHub issue, Bugzilla (but uncheck the "Private bug" bits), or public mailing list like fedora-devel@ or centos-devel. Another good alternative is https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/

Favoring asynchronous, public discussion

You'll see it said that Red Hat is an enterprise software company with a FOSS development model. Now, for a variety of reasons we use (multiple) internal proprietary real-time chat systems. This is understandable; not everything can be public for example.

But that said, it's way too easy to over-use real-time chat when an asynchronous conversation would work instead.

Further, since Our Code is open our development processes should be too.

If you have an important issue that should get attention, a good combination is to file an upstream issue (or BZ, email, etc.), then send a link to it via internal chat with any extra business-related prioritization (e.g. "Customer X is hitting this").

If you have to go real time

Some issues demand real-time collaboration. But, at least try to summarize after what was discussed in the relevant issue/bugs.

A related thing is this blog post on Rust governance and the "No new rationale" rule. If there's a long asynchronous debate happening, sometimes it can make sense to convert the async discussion to real-time. But, avoid making any final decision there that wasn't at least an option in the original asynchronous discussion.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment