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> move your internal “how do I do X” chatter from Slack to email lists and maybe a StackExchange installation, and you end up with multiple indexable, searchabl
by quacker 9y ago
> move your internal “how do I do X” chatter from Slack to email lists and maybe a StackExchange installation, and you end up with multiple indexable, searchable sources of long-form documentation.
Really, those stores of "long term" documentation complement chat rather than replace it (whether it's Slack, IRC, or whatever). Over time, you should be developing that documentation, so when you have repeated "how do I do X" type of questions in chat, you can often direct people straight to the docs.
But documentation is never foolproof. It's inevitably incomplete, it goes out of date, etc. And for the information that the docs don't cover, you want a real time asynchronous discussion that's not as heavy-weight as a meeting or as slow as email, which is a good fit for chat.
- philwelch 9y agoChat is many things, but “asynchronous” is not often one of them.
- quacker 9y agoChat is absolutely asynchronous. It supports synchronous discussion, but I specifically like chat because I can ignore it until I dedicate a few minutes to look through the notifications.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoYou're lucky then. IMs are by their design pretty asynchronous, but there is this common dysfunction in many organizations - expecting you to be constantly on the chat and participate in real-time. That's the organization turning an asynchronous tool into a synchronous one, true, chats tend to facilitate that dysfunction much more than e-mail.
- ebiester 9y agoIn my experience, it's chat that drives the documentation.