Current Communication Tools
A list of communication tools used across the Community, how they are used, any drawbacks, and how popular they are with Core Contributors.
Tool | CC Popularity | Use Cases | Drawbacks |
|---|---|---|---|
Community favorite | Discussion Forum: Questions, requests for help, announcements about Open edX software, new blog posts, events, feature deprecations, core contributor nominations, posting polls, getting community, job posts | Relatively high barrier to entry creating a new thread, moderation required, notification fatigue | |
2nd favorite | Messaging Platform: 1:1 conversations, coordinating meetings, working group discussions, community announcements, quick questions, opportunistic synchronization of work, sending reminders | History disappears after 6 months (edit: this is not true of the Pro Plan which the Community uses), limited searchability, requires invitation, encourages synchronous communication, very easy to post direct (i.e. private) messages, information can be lost in threads, not open source | |
3rd favorite | Issue Tracking / Project Management: Open edX Roadmap, projects, issue tracking, product review tracking, bug reports, code reviews | Potentially intimidating for non-developers, communication is tied to issues, proprietary features, not everyone has a GitHub account | |
4th favorite | Knowledge Bases / Wikis: Current and past projects, programs like the Core Contributor and Maintainer programs, working group agendas and meeting notes, product proposals, release information, upcoming features, how-tos, code of conduct | High cost, can be buggy, unclear what is documented in the docs and what is documented in the wiki, not open source | |
Google Meet |
| Video Conferencing: Working group meetings, ad-hoc meetings | Synchronous, excludes participants in different time zones, not open source |
Zoom |
| Video Conferencing: Working group meetings, ad-hoc meetings | Synchronous, excludes participants in different time zones, free plans has time limits for group meetings, not open source |
| Email: Contacting Core Contributors (by inputting a single email address in your email client) | Inbox fatigue— people become overwhelmed by the volume of emails they receive, leading to important messages being overlooked | |
Google Docs / Sheets |
| Collaborative Documents: Collaborating on documents | Long comment threads can be difficult to follow, version history not always clear, not open source |
Google Forms |
| Surveys / Polls: Sending out polls, gathering feedback from community | Limited layout and design options, not open source |
Figma |
| Collaborative Design: In-context design discussions, prototypes | Not open source, not always easy to collaborate across organizations |
Miro |
| Collaborative Design: Collaborative brainstorms, mind-maps | High cost, not open source |