Good news, everyone!
After the successful migration of all our discussion fora into this single instance of Discourse, expanding its use to all of the OSRA’s projects, we have moved on to our next target for improving communications in, around, and with our projects: A unified chat server.
You can now view, sign up for, log in to, and start chatting in the official Open Robotics Zulip chat server. Zulip is an organized team chat app designed for efficient communication.
Why this change?
About 2 and a half years ago, we started an official Discord server for Open Robotics and its projects. This server has been popular with some of the community; it currently has 8,662 members. The Discord server has sections for users of our projects, for community groups, and for events such as ROSCon.
Something the Open Robotics Discord server lacks is discussions amongst the PMC Members and Committers of the projects. These discussions have been held in a private Slack server operated by Open Robotics.
We’ve never been happy about all this project work happening in a closed space where no one not directly involved could see it. Slack has a well-known drawback that it is impossible to create an open invite to join a Slack server; you need to be individually invited. It is always the desire of the Open Robotics to be as open in our projects as possible, and not being able to let everyone into Slack went against this. We decided over a year ago that we wanted to move the project work away from Slack to something more open, allowing the wider community to see even more about what is happening in the projects.
We spent plenty of time considering the options, including consulting with the OSRA TGC and with each project’s PMC, before finally settling on Zulip as the best option for chat for Open Robotics and its projects.
Why not just move everything to Discord?
There are several reasons for not shifting everything that was happening in Slack to Discord. In no particular order, they are:
- It is not possible to even read a Discord chat without signing up and logging in - and you must use the official Discord client. This is a barrier to anyone who wants to read chats without necessarily participating in them, and is counter to the open source ethos of permissionless anonymous access
- Discord, with its focus on gamers, lacks features useful to developers, such as usable threaded conversations and automatic source code highlighting.
- Discord is a closed ecosystem. We would not have any control over the data generated by the server and its users.
- Discord does not allow the chat data to be exported. We would not be able to keep records of discussions for future reference, or create an online searchable log of them. We would also be at risk should Discord shut down or otherwise alter their service in a way that we were against.
- Discord provides no way for us to pay for the service. Each user individually has to choose to pay Discord for using all of Discord. Not having the option to pay makes us and all our users the product, not the customer.
What’s so great about Zulip, then?
By contrast to Discord and Slack, Zulip has numerous advantages for us.
- Zulip provides open access - you can view every public channel, including its history, without logging in and with just a modern web browser.
- It gives us control over our data, allowing full export at any time and for any reason.
- It has advanced features useful for our projects, such as powerful threading support.
- It supports multiple clients - there’s even an official terminal client.
- It supports direct links to topics and messages without logging in - allowing us to now link to Zulip messages from GitHub, for example.
- It is fully open-source; you can even run your own Zulip server entirely independent of the existing Zulip infrastructure provided by Kandra Labs (the company behind Zulip).
- Finally, the hosted Zulip is a service provided to paying customers of Kandra Labs, not to products. In our case, thanks to the strong and generous support for open-source organisations and projects of Kandra Labs (the team behind Zulip), we are able to use their hosted plan for free. This gives us access to advanced features of Zulip and allows us to provide the best value to our community.
What’s going to happen to Discord and Slack?
The Open Robotics Slack server is no longer in use by the projects. All PMCs have been using Zulip for about a month now, as has the OSRA TGC and the SIG on Physical AI. So far, everyone is very happy with the new capabilities for organised discussion that Zulip offers.
The Open Robotics Discord server will not be removed. We plan to keep a presence in Discord, as it is a fantastic way to support new users who are not aware of our existing discussion tools. We also don’t want to disrupt the active and valuable community that has formed on our Discord server. However, the server will be reduced to just a few of the more active channels, and we will have a prominent notice for any new users joining the server that they should try out Zulip to see more of the community.
Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to export the chats from Discord or Slack for public posting.
How do I join and use the Zulip server?
It’s very easy: Simply click this link! Alternatively, you can click the “Chat Server” link at the top of the Open Robotics Discourse, then on the server’s website, click the “Log in” button in the top right, and then click the “Sign up” link in the bottom right of the login dialog.
You can sign up using your email address or using an existing GitHub account.
Once you’ve joined the server, you should take a look at the following topics for more information.
- Most importantly, read the server rules. You will be expected to follow them if you wish to participate in discussions.
- Read the Channels guide to learn what channels are available and what they are for. Although joining the server will add you automatically to a default set of channels, there are many more channels that you can join. The public web view will show you all public channels, but once you are logged in you will only see channels you have subscribed to (which includes the default set).
- Check out our Zulip tips topic to see how you can improve your use of Zulip.
The Zulip server is not the best place for complex discussions with long messages - for that, you should use GitHub issues/PRs, or this Discourse. It is, however, a great place to have a quick chat about anything related to Open Robotics and our projects! We hope it will be used for such things as:
- talking about Open Robotics projects;
- having a conversation about an idea for an improvement or fix before taking the result of that discussion to a more long-form medium such as GitHub issues, PRs, and Discourse;
- informally proposing how to implement or fix an issue from GitHub, such as asking if the method you are proposing to fix a bug would be a good way to do it, before making a PR;
- chatting to others about your cool robot project;
- organising community events, both in your area and online; and
- wholesome memes for robot teens.
Finally, and of the highest importance when using any of our discussion forums, treat others well and be a positive and constructive participant in all discussions.
Happy chatting!