Wiki
Expectations
- Reply in threads
- Keep it relevant
Why it matters
We know people have different ideas about what should be in-bounds for slack usage, and it’s hard to get everyone to agree. Our guiding principle is to keep slack useful for as many people as possible. After all, we’re a space built on knowledge sharing.
At time of writing, we’re approaching 600 active members. When too many people create noise that others deem unwanted and inescapable, they mute everything. That keeps them from sharing their knowledge, and it also makes it hard for leadership to disseminate important information like policy changes. For these reasons, we set out the following community standards for acceptable use of slack. They aim to keep conversations organized and relevant so that people can participate where they want to and not where they don’t. We really don’t want to be slack police, but we do need to be able to address behaviors that negatively affect the community. We expect you to do your best to comply with these guidelines, and adjust your behavior when someone points it out non-compliance or otherwise objectionable content.
Using threads🔗
We expect all users to organize conversations into Slack’s “threads” feature. Consult slack’s examples to accomplish this on your device. Here’s an example of threads working well in #general:
There are two major reasons this feature is valuable. One is notification management. Participants of a thread are automatically subscribed to new replies, but they have the option to turn off notifications when the conversation is no longer relevant to them. This is particularly useful for big channels and long conversations, like #general, #help- and #sig-. For example, we want our leadership team to be able to subscribe to all new topics in #general so that we can respond quickly to requests for help. But sometimes those requests turn into long conversations between two or three people. There’s no need to keep notifying the entire channel for every new message. This can be very distracting. It causes people to just turn off notifications entirely, which means we can’t respond promptly to other requests.
Another reason that threads are useful is content organization. As channels grow, it’s increasingly likely that multiple people need to discuss unrelated things in the same channel at the same time. Without threads, this gets very confusing. With replies in threads, all messages in one conversation happen in one place, without distraction from other conversations. This holds true even if the conversation needs to pick back up after days, weeks, or even longer.
“Also send to channel”🔗
When sending a message in a thread, you’ll see a checkbox labeled “also send to …”. You should probably not check this box.
Sending a message in a thread and also sending it to the main channel defeats the notification management and de-noising benefits of using threads in the first place. Generally, use of this feature is only appropriate when the thread needs more attention from the entire channel. That should never happen immediately after the thread was created. There are a few rare situations where it may be appropriate to use this feature, including:
- In a long conversation discussing details about a question, when a decision has been reached. Sending to channel allows other people who tuned out the detailed discussion to see the final conclusion. If additional deliberation is still needed, it’s useful to continue the conversation in the same thread.
- Bumping a thread that needs additional attention from a broader audience – but only after it’s been abandoned for a significant period and/or buried too far up in the channel history
Keep it Relevant
It’s a Sisyphean task to craft a strict definition of relevant content, but please consider the following:
- #general is not your personal loudspeaker. It’s ok to use it if you have a question about the space and you can’t find a more specific channel, or if it needs a lot of attention. “Do we have a laminator?” is reasonable. “It’s raining in the garage” is very reasonable. “Does anyone want to get pizza with me?” is not appropriate. There’s a lot of gray area in between. Do your best, and be receptive to feedback.
- Avoid posting just links, regardless of channel. Say something about why the link is relevant. If you can’t say something or the answer is “I thought it was funny”, it probably belongs in #random
- “For sale”/ “in search of” posts should generally be restricted to #community-garage-sale. Links should generally also be to things that you’re selling, rather than a good deal you found on craigslist. In rare cases it may make sense to raise a very good deal on relevant equipment or materials to a sig channel, but often it’s not as good of a deal as it seems. It can put a lot of pressure on sig leads and lead to purchase of equipment that we didn’t really want.
- Job search/networking posts belong in #looking-for-work-jobs-careers
When to use help- vs sig- channels 🔗
You have probably noticed that we have two sets of channels for our major areas, prefixed with help- and sig-, eg: help-woodworking and sig-woodworking. This is how you should use them:
All users of an area are expected to subscribe to the area’s help channel. You can expect to find any important announcements like policy changes and equipment outages here, and you should report problems there so that everyone has a chance to see that there’s a problem. If you’re not sure where the tape is, this is also great place to ask; lots of people will see your question and you’ll get the fastest response. If you only intend to use the area and you don’t care to influence its future, you should be able to find everything you need in the help channel. You can stop reading here.
Sig channels are for discussions about proposed changes to the area or other internal management needs. If you think we should rearrange an area or buy a new tool, this is a great place to start that thread. If you want to become a trainer or amend training curriculum, this is your spot. Sig leads will also use this channel to coordinate training schedules and announce meetings. Conversations here will reach a narrower scope of people that are active participants who have opinions about how things should work here. New users are welcome to join sig channels and are encouraged to contribute, but participation here is not required. Participants of this channel should keep in mind that it has a narrower scope, and that important updates and changes need to be surfaced to the help channel when they are finalized.
One key takeaway: No matter which channel you choose to post in, you should only need to post in one. The audience of a sig channel should always be a subset of the corresponding help channel, so there should be no need to “cross post” the same content to both channels “for visibility”. If you need a broader audience, post in help-. For a smaller audience, post in sig-.
Examples:
The table saw is broken. Leadership needs to know about it so that it can be fixed, but other prospective users also need to know about it so that they can plan to work on their project another day. The person reporting the broken table saw should post in help-woodworking so that everyone knows that an important piece of equipment is out of order. There’s no need to cross-post to sig-woodworking, as leaders monitor both channels.
A new user wonders “Do we have any wood glue?”. They should post in help-woodworking, because many more users monitor that channel, and lots of people can answer this question without needing to be a sig lead.
Someone wants to suggest buying corner clamps. They’ve used the space enough to know that we don’t have any, or we don’t have enough. They think it would make a nice addition. They should post in sig-woodworking. This is a suggestion about the space, and is typically going to be filtered through a smaller group of decision makers. Other users who care to weigh in on decisions like these are welcome/encouraged to also monitor sig-woodworking, so that they can provide feedback. Often though, decisions are either easy enough that a sig lead can make a decision without consulting the larger community, or they’re complex enough that the core group should pathfind the major discussion points before surfacing a few options to the broader community for input.