- {{ render_markdown_path('zerver/for/working-groups-and-communities.md') }}
+ {{ render_markdown_path('zerver/for/communities.md') }}
- You may also be interested in - Zulip for open source - projects or - Zulip - for working groups and other part-time communities. -
Make good use of your users’ time, and engage your community with thoughtful, organized discussion.
+Open-source projects, research collaborations, volunteer organizations.
+ + +If you haven’t read [Why Zulip](https://zulip.com/why-zulip), read +that first. The challenges with the Slack/Discord/IRC model discussed +there are even more important for open communities: + + +- Members of open communities may be scattered all over the world and + in every time zone. Traditional communication tools like email + lists, forums, and issue trackers work well in this context, because + you can communicate effectively asynchronously. A Slack community is + a bad experience if you’re rarely online at the same time as most + other members, making it harder to be inclusive of all participants. +- Many members of open communities have other fulltime obligations and + can only spend a few hours a week on the community. Because Slack is + very hard to skim, these part-time community members cannot + efficiently use their time participating in an active Slack. So + either they don’t participate in the Slack, or they do, and their + other contributions to the community’s efforts suffer. + + +> “Zulip helped the FHIR community grow from a tiny group of dreamers to 500 active users sending 6000 messages per month, all driving the creation of better healthcare standards. Zulip’s topic-based threading helps us manage simultaneous discussions with clarity, ensuring the right people can pay attention to the right messages. This makes our large-group discussion far more manageable than what we’ve experienced with Skype and Slack.” + +> — Grahame Grieve, founder, FHIR health care standards body + + +- Many of us are busy people, who really wish we had more time to do + focus work. Because active participation in Slack fundamentally + requires constant interruptions, leaders of communities that use + Slack end up making unpleasant choices between participating in the + Slack community (limiting their ability to do focus work) or + ignoring the Slack community (leaving it effectively without their + input and potentially unmoderated). +- Writing to a busy Slack channel often means interrupting another + existing conversation. This makes it harder for newer and shyer + members to jump into the community. Often this disproportionately + affects groups that are already underrepresented. +- The lack of organization in Slack message history (and its 10K + message history limit) mean that users asking for help cannot + effectively do self-service support. This results in the community + answering a lot of duplicate questions. + +The overall effect is that Slack is a poor communication tool for +communities that want to have an inclusive, global, community and that +many busy individuals can happily participate in. + + + +When we made the switch to @zulip a few months ago for chat, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it was going to become the beating heart of the community, and so quickly. It's a game changer. 🧑💻🗨️👩💻
— Dan Allen (@mojavelinux) June 29, 2021
+ + + +Zulip’s topic-based threading model solves these problems: + +- Community members in any time zone can send messages and expect to + get a reply and have an effective (potentially asynchronous) + conversation with the rest of the community. +- Zulip’s topic-based threading helps include part-time community + members in two major ways. First, they can easily browse what + conversations happened while they were away from the community, and + prioritize which conversations to read now, skip, or read later + (e.g. on the weekend). Second, Zulip makes it easy for them to have + public conversations with participation from other community members + (potentially split over hours, days, or weeks as needed), allowing + them to fully participate in the work of the community. +- Community leaders can effectively participate in a Zulip community + without being continuously online. Using Zulip’s [keyboard + shortcuts](https://zulip.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts), it’s + extremely efficient to inspect every potentially relevant thread and + reply wherever one’s feedback is useful, and replying hours after a + question was asked is still a good experience for community + members. As a result, leaders can do multi-hour sessions of focus + work while still being available to their community. +- Topics make it easier to provide a safe, welcoming, online + community. Asking a question never has to feel like an interruption + of an ongoing conversation or like one's sticking one's neck out. + + +> “Wikimedia uses Zulip for its participation in open source +> mentoring programs. Zulip’s threaded discussions help busy +> organization administrators and mentors stay in close communication +> with students during all phases of the programs.” + +> — Srishti Sethi, Developer Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation + +You can see this in action in our own [chat.zulip.org +community](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/chat-zulip-org.html), which sends +thousands of messages a week. We often get feedback from contributors +around the world that they love how responsive Zulip’s project leaders +are in public Zulip conversations. We are able to achieve this despite +the project leaders collectively spending only a few hours a day +managing the community and spending most of their time integrating +improvements into Zulip. + +Many communities that migrated from +[Slack](https://zulip.com/help/import-from-slack), +[Mattermost](https://zulip.com/help/import-from-mattermost), or +[Gitter](https://zulip.com/help/import-from-gitter) to Zulip tell us +that Zulip helped them manage and grow an inclusive, healthy +community. We hope Zulip can help your community succeed too! + + +> “I highly recommend Zulip to other communities. We’re coming from +> Freenode as our only real-time communication so the difference is +> night and day. Slack is a no-go for many due to not being FLOSS, +> and I’m concerned about vendor lock-in if they were to stop being +> so generous. Slack’s threading model is much worse than Zulip’s +> IMO. The streams/topics flow is an incredibly intuitive way to keep +> track of everything that is going on.” + +> — RJ Ryan, Mixxx Developer + + diff --git a/templates/zerver/for/working-groups-and-communities.md b/templates/zerver/for/working-groups-and-communities.md deleted file mode 100644 index 07f22cd136..0000000000 --- a/templates/zerver/for/working-groups-and-communities.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,58 +0,0 @@ -Part-time organizations like learning communities, standards bodies, -advocacy groups, hobby groups, and alumni organizations often need different -things out of chat than companies do. While there may be some core members -spending many hours per week on the organization, much of the value of the -community may come from a large number of members or potential members who -have an unrelated job and thus may have less than an hour a week to spend on -the organization. In such an organization, making it easy for someone to -participate when they don’t have time to read everything can be the -difference between a robust, growing community and one that stagnates. - -Some of Zulip’s earliest users were part-time organizations, so we have given -a lot of thought to the problems such groups face. Zulip’s topic-based -threading - -* Makes the catching-up experience fast and fun, even if a user has been - away for a while. On Slack or email, wading through hundreds or thousands - of unread messages is taxing at best. - -* Makes it easy to respond to conversations that started hours or days ago, - so that users that drop by occasionally can contribute rather than just - lurk. - -Zulip’s topic-based threading also allows for more thoughtful discussion, -since more people are able to chime in on any given conversation. It also -makes it easy to start new threads, so digressions don’t take over a -conversation. - -If you haven’t read [why Zulip](/why-zulip), read that first. If your -organization is a technical group that will be sharing code, you may want to -read [Zulip for open source](/for/open-source) as well. Finally, one of our -earliest communities, the Recurse Center, wrote an -[extended blog post](https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip) -about how they use Zulip, which has suggestions for conventions you might -want to include as you build your community. - -Two additional points of note: - -* **Pay as you go**: We host many pro-social groups for free, and - non-commercial entities at a greatly reduced price. Even if you don’t fall - into any such bucket, Zulip only charges for users that have been active - in the last two weeks. So feel free to invite anyone you’d like, even if - you’re not sure if they’ll end up sticking around! - -* **Smart digest emails (coming soon)**: Zulip’s topic-based threading makes - it easier for algorithms to guess which messages and conversations will be - interesting to users that haven’t checked in in a while. Occasional - interesting digests sent to inactive users is a great way to bring users - back into the group. - -### Public archive. - -Allow search engines to index your chat, with a read-only view of your -public streams. Zulip’s topic-based threading keeps conversations coherent -and organized, enabling a meaningful archive indexed by search engines. - -Currently implemented as an [out-of-tree -tool](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive), though a native feature -built into the Zulip server is coming soon. diff --git a/templates/zerver/landing_nav.html b/templates/zerver/landing_nav.html index d28c923b18..03ae14d6dc 100644 --- a/templates/zerver/landing_nav.html +++ b/templates/zerver/landing_nav.html @@ -49,7 +49,7 @@ Open source projectsWe just moved the Lichess team (~100 persons) to @zulip, and I'm loving it. The topics in particular make it vastly superior to slack & discord, when it comes to dealing with many conversations.
— Thibault D (@ornicar) July 7, 2021
Zulip is also open-source! https://t.co/lxHjf3YPMe