Summary of Findings

This page summarizes a high-level evaluation of the Open edX community’s communication tools against key criteria.

1. Discussion Forum

Discourse is open source, widely liked, and already meeting community needs.

• Recommendation: Continue using Discourse.

2. Messaging Platform

Although Slack is proprietary, it is popular, free for non-profit, open-source projects like ours, and already used internally by many organizations within the community. Moving to a tool like Zulip would likely increase the number of communication tools we use rather than decreasing it. Additionally, Zulip does not support Slack Connect integrations well, so the 2U-openedx slack connection (amongst others) would be lost. 

Discourse Chat does not meet usability or feature needs.

• Recommendation: Continue using Slack, but direct the community to use the forum where it makes sense.

  • Consider:

    • Add a message when people register/login to Slack, explaining when to use each tool

    • Investigate bots that might help to identify Slack messages that should be on the forum

      • Wisemonk (unmaintained): Moves conversations from Slack to Discourse

      • Discourse Chat Integration: Discourse plugin to integrate with Slack

3. Issue Tracking / Project Management

Github is widely adopted and tightly integrated with existing workflows. Replacing it would be impractical.

• Recommendation: Continue using Github for issue tracking.

4. Knowledge Bases / Wikis

Confluence is popular but proprietary. Discourse Wiki seems to meet most needs, but the need to expand permissions may be a concern.

• Recommendation: Investigate replacing Confluence with Discourse Wiki. 🔁

5. Collaborative Documents

Google Workspace is proprietary and requires Google accounts for collaboration.

• Recommendation: Consider replacing Google Workspace with Collabora Online or Nextcloud Office. 🔁

  • Consider: Is it worth the time-investment? It’ll take a substantial amount of work to migrate our Confluence docs to the Discourse wiki (preserve page tree hierarchies, point to new pages from Confluence pages etc.

6. Collaborative Design

Figma is proprietary, but open-source alternatives currently lack required features.

• Recommendation: Continue using Figma for collaborative design.

7. Video Conferencing

Google Meet and Zoom have proprietary or usage limitations.

• Recommendation: Investigate Jitsi as a potential replacement for Google Meet. 🔁

8. Surveys / Polls

Google Forms is proprietary, has limited customization options, and stores data on Google’s servers.

• Recommendation: Investigate replacing Google Forms with LimeSurvey. 🔁