{"id":2337,"date":"2017-04-12T13:58:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T19:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=2337"},"modified":"2017-04-12T14:29:31","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T20:29:31","slug":"the-four-kinds-of-slacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2337","title":{"rendered":"The Four Types of Slacks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

I have been using slack for a few years now, but have really noticed an uptick in the last year or so. \u00a0(If you aren’t familiar with slack, here’s an\u00a0intro to slack usage<\/a>, and if you are, here’s a great\u00a0code of conduct<\/a>\u00a0for public slacks.)
\nIt seems to me that there are four main types of slack groups.<\/p>\n

The first is the company\/department slack<\/b>. \u00a0This slack is long lived, contains many channels, and is multi purpose. \u00a0There are channels for ops, marketing, etc. \u00a0This slack is typically limited to the employees of a company, though contractors are also given access. \u00a0The main purposes of this slack are an ad-hoc knowledge base and to reduce email. \u00a0Depending on IT, this slack may be under the radar and compete with other solutions like hipchat, wikis or internal mailing lists.<\/p>\n

The next type is a project slack<\/b>. This is related to the company slack, but is less long lived, and has fewer members and channels. \u00a0It is used for coordination amongst disparate people, often a set of contractors. \u00a0May be maintained by the client or prime contractor, also serves as an ad-hoc knowledge base, but is primarily a means for coordination of effort.<\/p>\n

Both of the above slacks may have other integrations with systems (CI\/CD, monitoring, etc). \u00a0These integrations with external systems can make the slack a one stop shop for corporate knowledge and memory, especially if the members are on paid accounts.<\/p>\n

The above types are obviously limited in membership. \u00a0The next two types of slacks are more public.<\/p>\n

Another type of slack is the event slack<\/b>. \u00a0This slack replaces or augments Twitter as a way for people at a conference to communicate. \u00a0May exist between events, but is quiescent while events are not happening. \u00a0Here channels may be related to aspects of the event or tracks, and the slack is typically owned by the event coordinator and provided as a service to the conference attendees.<\/p>\n

Slack can also be an email list replacement<\/b>. \u00a0I have been a member of several email lists for user groups\/meetups in the front range, and it serms much of the activity on some of them have been driven to slack (the BDNT meetup is a good example). In addition, I see a lot of new slacks being created that would, a decade ago been email groups. \u00a0(Facebook groups are also a replacement for email groups, depending on your audience, but I have found slack to be far superior in searchability.). The number of channels is typically related to member list size and length of existence. \u00a0I have found these slacks be on the free slack plan, with its limits. I have also heard of slacks of this type charging for membership.<\/p>\n

What has been your slack experience? \u00a0What did I miss?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been using slack for a few years now, but have really noticed an uptick in the last year or so. \u00a0(If you aren’t familiar with slack, here’s an\u00a0intro […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,4,37,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-tech-meetup","category-technology","category-tips","category-useful-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2337"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2410,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337\/revisions\/2410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}