Matrix server channel setup

So, I’m told that the new “Spaces” feature for Matrix/Element will be launching soon, and since so will Fedora’s Matrix-based chat server, we’ll be able to set that up. There’s supposed to be a blog post with details coming soon, but as I understand it this will allow us to present our communication channels to users in a hierarchy. So… how do we want to set this up? I’m thinking something like this:

  • Welcome
    • Information
    • News
    • Introductions
  • User Conversations
    • General
    • Help and Troubleshooting
    • #fedora bridge (bridged to #fedora on Freenode)
  • Contributor Discussion
    • Fedora Devel [bridged to #fedora-devel?]
    • Join Fedora [bridged to #fedora-join?]
    • Social [also bridged to #fedora-social?]
  • Project Teams (each optionally bridged to a corresponding freenode channel)
    • fedora-council
    • fedora-commops
    • fedora-design
    • fedora-docs
    • [etc – above example names just picked at random]
  • Meeting Channels (bridged to Freenode)
    • #fedora-meeting
    • #fedora-meeting-1
    • #fedora-meeting-2
    • #fedora-meeting-3

Does this make sense? Is there a better way to do it?

I’m a little bit concerned about just bridging Fedora Devel, Fedora Join, Fedora Social. There might be some… culture clash with the existing way of doing things in the channel, and maybe it’s better to have separate explicitly-bridged ones? Like, for example, the topic on #fedora-join is “Please register with Freenode to join the channel”, and the one on Fedora Social is… something about bacon? I’m wondering if it’d be better to start new channels here and then have a separate “Freenode Bridge” category?

Also, I’m wondering if we should break down the user converation thing into topics, and if so, how to best split that (edition? use case?).

And finally, there are a bunch of langage and locale freenode channels. Should we replicate those here too?

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Maybe it wouldn’t be workable, but just throwing it out there as a “what if” …

What if the front page for chat.fedoraproject.org was mainly an image of the Fedora Organizational Chart (tweaked a bit so, e.g., the center node was a general area). And clicking on the bubble took you to the main matrix channel for that part of the project? Maybe stuff that didn’t fit in the chart could just be listed below as regular links.

If a room is bridged to freenode (or wherever Fedora moves its IRC channels, if that becomes necessary soon), it probably shouldn’t be auto-joined. Also there are possibly too many Fedora rooms to include all of them in a single space without excessive clutter, even if they’re not auto-joined (which might yield suboptimal performance).

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I think that mostly makes sense. Might be worth adding a “meta” or “admin” section for people to report problems/feedback? or I suppose “Information” could do that, but we have to make sure we push any help questions off to the right channel.
I don’t think we should be afraid of the irc/matrx culture clash. We should just ask eveyone to try and live by the robustness principal ( “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others”).
I think it will be hard to split users… questions and discussions are often quite wide ranging. Just look at the users mailing list, or ask.

Also, we should try and be flexable here… try this and adjust as we go, with perhaps a month and sixth month restrospective asking for feedback and proposed changes?

As far as auto-join, I think we should have nothing set that way. Users should join what channels they like. I don’t think matrix has a way to force people to join a specific channel on newly joinin, but if they do that might be ok (to gate people to the right places, etc). If they don’t no biggie.

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Yeah, I guess adding “meta” somewhere makes sense. Maybe to Welcome at the top, even if it’s not really a “welcome” topic. I guess we could rename that to Lobby or something. (I still like Welcome though.)

I guess on the culture concern… I see that the Fedora Social FAQ says “This channel is not moderated for language. If you are easily offended by strong language, beware.” right at the top (and apparently has since at least 2010 from the wiki history). I am personally not easily offended by “strong language”, but that’s not necessarily the tone I’d like for a social channel I want to participate in, or to put forward as the now-much-more-visible public face.

And +1 to being flexible!

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Element has a new blog post about Spaces, btw:

One of the things this notes is: " To that end, the same way Spaces contain rooms, they can also contain other Spaces !"

So, we could do deeper hierarchy if we like.

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Also, on this:

Strawperson: a top-level World, and opt-in to creating channels (and optionally bridging them to IRC and/or telegram) when there at least two people interested in having a language or locale channel created. I don’t want to just replicate everything in IRC because they’re not all active.

Planned Initial Layout

(I’m going to edit this post as conversation evolves.)

  • Welcome
    • Information #info:fedoraproject.org
    • News #news:fedoraproject.org
    • Introductions #intros:fedoraproject.org
    • Meta #meta:fedoraproject.org
  • User Conversations
    • General #fedora:fedoraproject.org (bridged to #fedora on IRC)
    • Get Help #help:fedoraproject.org (hooked to Ask Fedora via discourse chat integration
  • Contributor Discussion
    • Fedora Devel #devel:fedoraproject.org [bridged to #fedora-devel]
    • Join Fedora #join:fedoraproject.org [bridged to #fedora-join]
    • Social #social:fedoraproject.org [also bridged to #fedora-social]
  • Project Teams (each optionally bridged to a corresponding freenode channel)
    • Ambassadors #ambassadors:fedoraproject.org
    • ARM #arm:fedoraproject.org
    • Build System #buildsys:fedoraproject.org
    • CI #ci:fedoraproject.org
    • Council #council:fedoraproject.org
    • CommOps #commops:fedoraproject.org
    • CoreOS #coreos:fedoraproject.org
    • Design #design:fedoraproject.org
    • Docs #docs:fedoraproject.org
    • IoT #iot:fedoraproject.org
    • KDE #kde:fedoraproject.org
    • Quality #quality:fedoraproject.org
    • Release Engineering #releng:fedoraproject.org
    • Respins #respins:fedoraproject.org
    • Test Day #test-day:fedoraproject.org
    • Websites #websites:fedoraproject.org
    • Workstation #workstation:fedoraproject.org
    • [etc – above are channels with at least 50 people currently on Freenode]
    • project subspace – a project could ask to have multiple channels grouped into their own space.
  • Meeting Channels (bridged to IRC)
    • Meeting (Main) #meeting:fedoraproject.org
    • Meeting 1 #meeting-1:fedoraproject.org
    • Meeting 2 #meeting-1:fedoraproject.org
    • Meeting 3 #meeting-1:fedoraproject.org
    • Blocker Review #blocker-review:fedoraproject.org`
  • Bot Chatter
    • Fedora Message Bus #fedmsg:fedoraproject.org (bridged to #fedora-fedmsg)
    • Fedora Message Bus (Staging) #fedmsg-stg:fedoraproject.org (bridged to #fedora-fedmsg-stg)
    • Matrix Bot Testing #bot-testing:fedoraproject.org
  • The Earth
    • APAC #apac:fedoraproject.org (bridged to #fedora-apac)
    • EMEA #emea:fedoraproject.org
    • LATAM #latam:fedoraproject.org (bridged to #fedora-latam)
    • NA #na:fedoraproject.org
    • India #india:fedoraproject.org (bridged to #fedora-india)
    • Čeština/Slovenčina #cs:fedoraproject.org (bridged to #fedora-cs)
    • Française #fr:fedoraproject.org (bridged to #fedora-fr)
    • [other languages as requested: currently only Czech/Slovak and French channels on Freenode have more than 15 people joined]
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A few more to figure out:

  • We have a #fedora-fedmsg and #fedora-fedmsg-stg channels on irc that just have a bot sending the message bus contents out to IRC. Do we want to have these in matrix? I have found them useful to search for or see events…
  • We need QE channels… a general one and blocker review channel? Or does that go under teams and has it’s own space to do blocker review or qe devel?
  • Probibly want epel to bridge to a Teams “Fedora EPEL”
  • Perhaps “The World” should be “The Earth” so we can accomodate Fedora usage on the moon, space stations and mars? :slight_smile:
    I definitely like the idea of starting with the framework and only adding things when there are enough people willing to keep them alive.

Yeah, let’s add a bot chatter section :slight_smile:

I was thinking that’d just be a team channel. #fedora-blocker-review is really a meeting channel, right?

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Yeah, #fedora-blocker-review was setup because some parts of the cycle it’s not used at all and others it’s used often, didn’t want to reserve a block of meeting channel time when it’s unused a fair bit.
So, yeah, we could just stick it under meetings I guess…

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+1. I concur that building flexibility and recurring retrospectives will help us do this in a way to reduce or eliminate the friction points.

It is a good question of whether all channels should be bridged. I think this channel is a unique exception, and the IRC operators should ask if they want a irc-social:fedora.im alias for #fedora-social on Freenode. This policy wiki page clashes with initial thinking on how the Council could more safely and responsibly include the participation of minors in the Fedora Community.

I think it is hard to know how to set this up without taking an inventory of what already exists. I would definitely make an ask to @nb to weigh in here with knowledge of any active IRC channels he participates in that might not be represented in my list (below).

To better frame this conversation, here is a first pass of IRC channels I have kept in my joinlist for a long time, or once joined:

  1. #fedora
  2. #fedora-3d-printing
  3. #fedora-admin
  4. #fedora-ambassadors
  5. #fedora-apac
  6. #fedora-apps
  7. #fedora-badges
  8. #fedora-commops
  9. #fedora-council
  10. #fedora-design
  11. #fedora-devel
  12. #fedora-devel-tg
  13. #fedora-diversity
  14. #fedora-docs
  15. #fedora-flock
  16. #fedora-i3
  17. #fedora-india
  18. #fedora-join
  19. #fedora-latam
  20. #fedora-meeting
  21. #fedora-meeting-[2..4]
  22. #fedora-mindshare
  23. #fedora-mktg
  24. #fedora-mote
  25. #fedora-outreachy
  26. #fedora-pride
  27. #fedora-silverblue
  28. #fedora-summer-coding
  29. #fedora-websites
  30. #fedora-women

I imagine there are more too. And active ones that might want to bridge if given the opportunity.

Please do not make bridging optional for #fedora- channels. They should be mapped to rooms in our Matrix server. If they want to exist on IRC, they must be plumbed through to Matrix. Obviously, Matrix only rooms are fine, too. :slight_smile:

We can set the IRC channel settings to avoid having to deal with registering with NickServ for Matrix-to-IRC users. #fedora-kde:matrix.org is already set up this way and we should use the room+channel settings for all Fedora rooms+channels.

Also, I’ll remind everyone that we should drop the redundant fedora- prefix for rooms on our server. Their aliases that currently exist on matrix.org (if we keep those) would obviously retain the prefix, but the primary name set on the fedoraproject.org server should not have a redundant prefix in the room name.

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Well, I guess my thinking is that this is a chance to clean up channels that aren’t really used very much. I guess we could remove them from Freenode too?

Yeah, if they’re not in use, let’s clean them up on both sides. If the goal is to eliminate the illusion of interest by not having the rooms on the Matrix side, it makes just as much sense to do that on the IRC side too.

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@mattdm I don’t want to bikeshed too much, but perhaps the QA channel could be called just “Quality” instead of “Quality Assurance”? It’s shorter, perhaps more obvious, it skips the topic of whether “assurance” is the right word, etc. Ubuntu also has just Ubuntu Quality (Team). On Fedora Planet we already have the “Quality” subplanet. I’d personally call the new channel just with the shorter name, I think it’s better overall.

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Sure that’s fine with me. All bikesheds welcome here, really. :slight_smile:

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Also, the IRC server transition would be a good time to rename the IRC channel to match, if you want.

I’m not sure if everyone agrees, but I do :slight_smile:

Just a word to set your expectations straight: if the channels are not publicly readable (i.e. if it’s not possible to see history without joining) they will not appear in the Space unless you join it.

Spaces are a good way to get organised, but not yet a good way for people to discover it. It would be a good idea to publish all channels in the directory in the meantime.

Here’s our experiment on GNOME’s homeserver, with details about what is left to have a super neat experience: Experimenting with Matrix spaces - Community - GNOME Discourse

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