12:41 p.m.
On Fri, Apr 28, 2017, at 05:48 PM, Justin W. Flory wrote:
On 04/27/2017 11:22 AM, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Yesterday in the #fedora-flock channel there was some conversation
> around electronic messaging and Flock. I'm writing to summarize the
> ideas and get some feedback:
>
> A recent survey done by the hubs team found that the top 2 communication
> tools used by respondents (community members) were IRC and Telegram.
> Last year at Flock we used both and we found that there was a lot of
> traffic on the Telegram channel and a moderate amount on the IRC
> channel. I personally attribute this to the fact that most folks don't
> have an IRC client on their phone.
>
> The gut feeling from the group seems to be that we should continue to
> use both methods during Flock.
>
> Therefore, I believe we should bridge Telegram and IRC
>
I already told some of the following feedback to Brian, so most of this
won't be new to him, but I wanted to share it publicly for the list as
well. :)
> Goal: Prevent the conversation from being Split
>
> There are existing ways of bridging an IRC channel and a Telegram group.
> This is currently done between #fedora-telegram on freenode and the
> Fedora Telegram Group (https://t.me/fedora)
>
> Proposal: If people like this idea, I will talk to whomever is running
> the teledora bot and work to get it set up for #fedora-flock and the new
> Flock 2017 Telegram group.
>
I'm currently running this bot along with a few more for other
communities. It would take maybe five minutes to spin up a new bridge
between a group / channel.
One afterthought I had about this is that we would want to be
transparent about this. Assuming we use a Telegram supergroup, anyone
participating via IRC or Telegram will have their messages permanently
logged and searchable within the Telegram group. I don't see this being
an issue so long as it's communicated and clear.
I think this is acceptable and we can alert based on a pinned notice in
both places.
Also, as one more afterthought, files and images won't go over
the
bridge from Telegram to IRC. I don't think this is critical, but
something I realized afterwards that might be worth noting.
> During the conversation I also mentioned an idea for having the Telegram
> group require a FAS ID in order to join. This would allow us to prevent
> harrassment like what happened last year by non-attendee
> non-contributors showing up to cause problems during some sessions.
>
> Unfortunately, the only way I can evision this happening requires a
> telegram bot be able to add a person to the channel. The Telegram Bot
> API does not include this call. Therefore a new bot would have to be
> written that used the Human API. Modifying a bot like teledora is a
> reasonable thing to do before Flock. However, writing a new bot before
> Flock seems unlikely unless someone wants to really devote some effort
> to this. Any takers? I can outline my ideas if you'd like.
>
Writing up a custom Telegram bot to authenticate with FAS to join a
group is the only way I can see this being feasible (and I think would
be technically feasible). I have no idea what the technical implications
of this might be, but to me, it seems like it could be a lot of effort
to prevent something that may or may not happen.
Instead, I see it more effective to have a wide range of individuals
added as Telegram group admins (combined with a private group among
group admins) to handle any situations that could arise. The problem
with last year's incident was that there was a handful of individuals
who were group admins, and when the problem happened, all of the admins
were either giving or participating in a talk or workshop. So long as
there is a direct communication medium between all of the people helping
in this role, I see it being a more effective use of time to having
multiple / many group admins to handle anything that does come up.
I will follow up with Jiri as he owns the group we used last year. I'll
figure out how we can get more moderators in place.
regards,
bex