Get history on Slack

[PrototypeAlex]

We're loosing good history on slack, so we either need to get onto a plan, hopefully free or freeish, cause they are hella expensive. Or migrate to something cheaper.

Though if we switch I'm not sure how many of our current users will make the migration, so there's that.

https://www.mattermost.org/ looks like a decent opensource alternative.

[jamesmacfie]

Or https://rocket.chat/ which is pretty similar.

There's a funny thing with Slack which is that people want to use the platform that they're used to and not the platform that someone else uses. So your concern about people not making the switch, I think, is probably a valid concern.

[Edit - wow, I didn't realise how expensive Slack could get]

[stevie-mayhew]

I think we are okay at the moment with the 10,000 message limit for free accounts. Anything of value and substance can be taken out to other mediums.

There is definitely a good reason to use slack as its become almost ubiquitous.

[disordinary]

I'll get in touch with slack and see if they can do us a deal, we are above the 10,000 message limit and archiving anything of substance to another medium takes a lot of manual work.

Plenty of non profit and open source communities have thousands of members and tens of thousands of messages and are free, most of them signed up before Slack started to charge for non profits however, but because of precedent there might be room to negotiate a partnership.

If we leave Slack it has to be to a platform that most developers are already using and the only alternative that I can think of is Gitter. I mean at my previous workplace we used HipChat, so I ran HipChat, Slack, Gitter, and IRC, add Rocket.chat and you're spending 2/3rds of your memory just running chat clients.

If we decided that Gitter wasn't right for us then I'd say fleep.io is a good alternative, it's free for our use case and is brought to us by those clever Estonians that built Kazaa and then Skype so they know how to engineer good products, it also integrates into email for people that don't want yet another chat application.

[disordinary]

A quick update.

Slack doesn't handle the non-profit customers themselves, signups and ultimately approval goes through an organisation called (TechSoup)[http://www.techsoup.org/], Slack suggested that we proceed with the request for non-profit status and then talk to our TechSoup agent as it proceeds.

The form for signing up is here (https://slack.com/nonprofit)[https://slack.com/nonprofit] only a team owner can fill it in and therefore that's as far as I can take it.

Otherwise, we can try contacting TechSoup NZ directly (https://www.techsoup.net.nz/staff)[https://www.techsoup.net.nz/staff] if anyone knows someone that works there or has worked with them in the past that will be helpful.

[PrototypeAlex]

@buildmaster do you own the slack account? would you mind filling in the non profit form that @disordinary mentioned if you have a spare second?

[PrototypeAlex]

We just need to use the committee lastpass account to log in as the admin and fill this form out, someone will get onto it when they have a spare second, it's deemed as low priority due to the upcoming conference.

[ootoovak]

A couple of projects I've been looking at are using https://riot.im/ which seems to have a Slack bridge https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack. Not sure if that would be a solution but thought I would pass it along as it has it also has apps for many desktop and mobile clients.

[buildmaster]

I Will pick this up

[rjmackay]

Did we ever apply for a non profit slack account?

[Kevnz]

@rjmackay I believe when we first started discussing this Slack didn't have that option. I see they do now, I will have a look into it and bring it to committee.

[rjmackay]

@Kevnz @buildmaster any updates? We really just need someone with slack admin to fill out this form https://slack.com/nonprofit?

[buildmaster]

Appreciate the nudge, have filled out the form. Will see what comes back

[buildmaster]

And have been referred to TechSoup who want us to be a registered Charity. I'm not sure we're going to be able to proceed

[rjmackay]

Ah. Thats frustrating.
Looking at https://www.techsoup.net.nz/help-and-support/eligibility/will-my-organisation-qualify-the-techsoup-new-zealand-program it might be possible if we have non-profit status. We'd have to provide:

A written confirmation of the organisation's tax exempt status issued by the IRD and
A copy of the organisation's constitution or similar

I couldn't find the specific info for Slack though, so it might really be only charities :(