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The easiest way is just to make sure product/business discussions happen over email rather than Slack. This way those discussions can be searchable and discover

The easiest way is just to make sure product/business discussions happen over email rather than Slack. This way those discussions can be searchable and discoverable by anyone within the company at any point in the future. We make software for this (FWD:Everyone), but there are dozens of other similar solutions as well. That's the great thing about email, because the standards are open you'll be able to extract more value from that same data with each passing year using products that haven't even been created yet. Conceptually this is similar to having a wiki, except for that unless your company has people whose full time job it is to maintain the wiki then it will always be out of date and inaccurate; just deploying some wiki software tends to be pretty useless, and even in the rare cases where they are maintained the medium inherently doesn't preserve the tacit knowledge contained within the decision-making process itself.

mooreds 7y ago
Why is email superior to slack (or other chat solutions)?
- remexre 7y ago
  Can you export slack logs as plain text, or something easy to process like JSON? (Haven't used it in forever, so I don't know). Being able to grep -A3 -i foobox -r /nfs/info | grep -i rpc is useful. Similarly, you can shove plaintext into a more advanced search engine easily.
  - Alex3917 7y ago
    > Can you export slack logs as plain text, or something easy to process like JSON? I think you can, the main issues are that: - Conversations aren't forced to be threaded, and there is no way to go back and do anything with conversations that weren't threaded; it's just lost data. - Because Slack doesn't export data into a standardized format, there isn't a big ecosystem of tools to do stuff with Slack data. And it's not clear that there will be in the future either -- Slack's growth has started slowing substantially and it's only around 13M DAU, which isn't really big enough to build a business on top of.
    - tehlike 7y ago
      Part of the problem with slack is it sells itself to small conversations, fast responses, the "im" type. It is all good and well, but email lets you think slightly more and keep topics contained and searchable.
    - simonw 7y ago
      13m DAUs at $6.67 per month is $86,710,000/month, or $1,040,520,000/year - seems like a pretty big business to me!
      - Alex3917 7y ago
        Yeah if you can get 13M people paying you then obviously you're doing amazing, but even Slack only has 6M paid seats. But I meant more like if you can get 1 / 1,000 email users paying you $10 bucks a month then that's $480,000 per year, whereas 1 / 1,000 Slack users is $1,560 per year.
jbn 7y ago
I never quite understood why companies don't just setup an NNTP server with newsgroups to capture conversations, rather than email (which is difficult to search IMHO).
- throwaway3563 7y ago
  They do, it’s just called Slack and Teams these days
simonw 7y ago
I've encouraged teams to switch from email to Slack precisely because it takes non-searchable content and makes it searchable. The amount of institutional knowledge that ends up in personal inboxes of a tiny subset of the team (who then eventually leave the company, causing their emails to be lost entirely) has always terrified me. If you can set up a culture of everyone subscribing to internal mailing lists with searchable archives and wide distribution then I could see it working - but my experience is that the easiest way to get that culture is to switch everyone over to Slack.

mooreds 7y ago

Why is email superior to slack (or other chat solutions)?

remexre 7y ago
Can you export slack logs as plain text, or something easy to process like JSON? (Haven't used it in forever, so I don't know). Being able to grep -A3 -i foobox -r /nfs/info | grep -i rpc is useful. Similarly, you can shove plaintext into a more advanced search engine easily.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  > Can you export slack logs as plain text, or something easy to process like JSON? I think you can, the main issues are that: - Conversations aren't forced to be threaded, and there is no way to go back and do anything with conversations that weren't threaded; it's just lost data. - Because Slack doesn't export data into a standardized format, there isn't a big ecosystem of tools to do stuff with Slack data. And it's not clear that there will be in the future either -- Slack's growth has started slowing substantially and it's only around 13M DAU, which isn't really big enough to build a business on top of.
  - tehlike 7y ago
    Part of the problem with slack is it sells itself to small conversations, fast responses, the "im" type. It is all good and well, but email lets you think slightly more and keep topics contained and searchable.
  - simonw 7y ago
    13m DAUs at $6.67 per month is $86,710,000/month, or $1,040,520,000/year - seems like a pretty big business to me!
    - Alex3917 7y ago
      Yeah if you can get 13M people paying you then obviously you're doing amazing, but even Slack only has 6M paid seats. But I meant more like if you can get 1 / 1,000 email users paying you $10 bucks a month then that's $480,000 per year, whereas 1 / 1,000 Slack users is $1,560 per year.

jbn 7y ago

I never quite understood why companies don't just setup an NNTP server with newsgroups to capture conversations, rather than email (which is difficult to search IMHO).

throwaway3563 7y ago
They do, it’s just called Slack and Teams these days

simonw 7y ago

I've encouraged teams to switch from email to Slack precisely because it takes non-searchable content and makes it searchable. The amount of institutional knowledge that ends up in personal inboxes of a tiny subset of the team (who then eventually leave the company, causing their emails to be lost entirely) has always terrified me. If you can set up a culture of everyone subscribing to internal mailing lists with searchable archives and wide distribution then I could see it working - but my experience is that the easiest way to get that culture is to switch everyone over to Slack.