Junit5: Create a "sponsored" open chat group

[mkobit]

Overview

I have felt that since joining the Kotlin Slack community I have been able to absorb the language from maintainers and the community much faster than by trying to locate these resources myself.
I believe that having an active group like this will benefit extension authors, engine developers, test writers, and other consumers of JUnit.

I would like to see the the JUnit 5 team adopt a Slack/Gitter for both the community and maintainers to gather around.

Deliverables

• [x] A Slack/Gitter/other chat platform
• [x] README documentation updated

[sormuras]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/junit5 is already ... active. ;)

[marcphilipp]

I am not against _having_ such a community. I'm afraid it would take up too much of our already very limited time as maintainers to _take care_ of the community, e.g. answer questions etc. We would need someone who'd be willing to take responsibility as a "community manager", e.g. make sure everyone follows a code of conduct, point users to an FAQ when appropriate, etc. Or am I overthinking this?

[mkobit]

It's definitely a valid concern. I don't believe a "community manager" would be needed yet, but it does sound like something that is inevitable because of the far reaching usage and impacts of JUnit that would lead users to this community. It may be worth trying out as an "unmoderated" type of system at first, and seeing how it progresses as more users join before making decisions around moderation.

To me I see the some of the benefits as:

• Ability to be reached by maintainers or those very close to the project when they are available
• Ability for groups to be locally formed and discovered (say for extensions or engines).
  Slack makes it dead simple to find other channels of user interest
• Closer interaction for beta / development features
• Responsiveness in general
• Quick questions and opinions can be more responsively answer by the community, and can be easier to approach than going to stackoverflow

Some of the possible problems I believe are:

• As JUnit 5 becomes more pervasive, the large size of the community could require a "community manager" (like you said)
• Amount of noise for maintainers with already limited time
• Another community to manage

From a personal standpoint, I am a lrage proponent for this close-touch kind of interaction. I have found it to be very effective for understanding and iterating with gradle-script-kotlin and coroutines from the Kotlin community.

[sormuras]

We could start a JUnit 5 room at https://chat.stackoverflow.com

[sbrannen]

We could start a JUnit 5 room at https://chat.stackoverflow.com

That might in fact be the easiest route for creating such a group chat (alongside the existing junit5 tag on Stack Overflow).

I'd say it's worth a shot to see how it goes.

[mkobit]

Great idea - easy way to see if there is interest. Do users need a certain
reputation to join chat?

On Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 17:33 Sam Brannen [e-mail] wrote:

We could start a JUnit 5 room at https://chat.stackoverflow.com

That might in fact be the easiest route for creating such a group chat
(alongside the existing junit5 on Stack Overflow).

I'd say it's worth a shot to see how it goes.

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[smoyer64]

I'd also be interested in a read-only (hear-only) participation in the team meetings - sometimes if feels like I'm missing a perspective that's considered "common knowledge" within the team. Alternately, transcripts after the fact might help and would be searchable.

[marcphilipp]

We could start a JUnit 5 room at https://chat.stackoverflow.com

👍

Do users need a certain reputation to join chat?

They need at least a reputation of 20. Is that too restricted?

I'd also be interested in a read-only (hear-only) participation in the team meetings - sometimes if feels like I'm missing a perspective that's considered "common knowledge" within the team. Alternately, transcripts after the fact might help and would be searchable.

I'd say let's start with a chat room where it's easier to ask questions about perspectives and see how that goes.

[jbduncan]

They need at least a reputation of 20. Is that too restricted?

That sounds too restrictive to me. I barely have 22 reputation on StackOverflow, so I wouldn't want to restrict people who don't have that much rep or even have a StackOverflow account.

[marcphilipp]

Does anyone have any experience with Gitter?

[sormuras]

Testing the Gitter badge:

[sbrannen]

@smoyer64,

We do our best to document _Team Decisions_ as a comment in the corresponding issue.

sometimes if feels like I'm missing a perspective that's considered "common knowledge" within the team.

Do you have a concrete example in mind?

[jbduncan]

@sormuras The badge works for me. Thanks!

[smoyer64]

"Sign in to start talking" for me

Works on Pidgin using the IRC bridge - instructions and tokens at irc.gitter.im

[smoyer64]

@sbrannen - I didn't mean to imply that the team wasn't always willing to answer questions - if I find a post that includes "team decision - xxx" I'll link it here. I agree that the decision is generally well documented (or perhaps obvious from the context) but there are some where I feel I'm missing something philosophical - it's entirely possible that I wouldn't achieve that zen-like state reading the transcripts either.

[marcphilipp]

Well, now you can ask us in the chat room. 🙂