I’m not sure we need a distinct chat space beyond this forum for now …
First, I think it would be good to see if the forum structure works better for what we want (and this avoids duplication)
Second, we do have some decent chat functionality built-in this forum as part of discourse
In my experience, chat can have an unfortunate gravitational field for discussion in a community: because it is so easy to get into chat becomes the default place to engage. However, the (lack of) affordances of chat is problematic at several levels: lack of threading makes rich discussion difficult, it encourages a certain superficiality and velocity of engagement.
IMO it would be better to try to limit chat to some combination of: watercooler, announcements and (informal) helpdesk and void its use for substantial discussion (the issue always is that once you offer chat … because of its ease of use even if you discourage posting substantial stuff … substantial stuff will get posted)
Where is it?
If did want chat … I’d suggest restricting to two initial options (happy to hear others of course):
Using this forum chat
Using whatsapp (if we use whatsapp this should be distinct from Life Itself)
And a few folks have tried it out … my gut instinct tells me this is a mismatch in a few key ways:
The cadence of a forum/wiki is quite different to chat
Chat has different affordances e.g. mobile first perhaps, having voice and other features
Chat is ephemeral whilst forum/wiki is more permanent
etc
Overall my gut tells me that the choice is really between e.g. whatsapp and nothing for now.
Any thoughts on whether we want a general chat. My sense is that if we do have another chat channel it should be rather carefully focused on e.g. the development and evolution of the community and infrastructure (e.g. meta type matters here) rather than on conceptual discussion which should stay on the forum.
It’s a tough one and probably either way would be fine, but my gut feeling right now would be to avoid overcomplicating the whatsapp ecosystem with another chat. OK I think to have no separate chat, and funnel people towards this forum, and to the life itself whatsapp group, which seems close enough in content that it can double as a Second Renaissance chat. You could have a link to that for example on the ‘about’ page of the Second Renaissance website, which mentions Life Itself, thereby avoiding the minor confusion of a menu bar ‘chat’ link that takes you to whatsapp channel with a different name.
