+1 for merging slacks and making it public.

I believe Slack should not be used here as it is a proprietary SaaS service and this in incoherent with Piwik's mission and values.
Other alternatives that may be more coherent to use may need some testing and evaluation, I know for example about https://rocket.chat ( see https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#features ) but there may be other better alternatives.

I don't think using Slack is incoherent. It's as incoherent as using the proprietary IDE PhpStorm for coding...

TYPO3 community has 109 channels on Slack and it just works fine.

That's my 0.02 canadian dollars opinion

+1 for public slack

@gaumondp yes, I agree using a Free as in freedom IDE would be better, I suggest you open a bug report about it.

If the Typo3 community has a different set of values I don't see how that is relevant here or how it should make Slack use coherent with Piwik's own values.

I'll re-state the obvious, whenever the Piwik community is required to use tools and SaaS that go against such values in order to contribute, instead of valid existing alternatives, it is in fact incoherent with such mission and values.

We should at least consider an alternative and evaluate the feasibility of moving to it.

What are your thoughts on improving forum discussions?

It was suggested by a few community members that we could use a more modern forum software for the Piwik community, in particular http://www.discourse.org/ was suggested as an alternative to our current phorum-based forum.

Examples of other discourse forums:

• New Relic: https://discuss.newrelic.com/
• Atom: http://discuss.atom.io/
• Discourse itself: https://meta.discourse.org/

What do you think about this?

@MagicFab Piwik uses many proprietary tools for its own development. A good example is GitHub.

Modernizing the forum would be great, Discourse is awesome.

+1 for public Slack and Discourse.

@mnapoli I know, it's not the topic here, though.

@mattab +1 on Discourse, it may be important to look at possible SSO setup to simplify contibutor's login to this and other tools.

@MagicFab I'm sorry, I'm probably missing it then :/

I'll re-state the obvious, whenever the Piwik community is required to use tools and SaaS that go against such values in order to contribute, instead of valid existing alternatives, it is in fact incoherent with such mission and values.

What is the problem with using Slack which isn't a problem when using e.g. GitHub?

@mnapoli AFAIK GitHub is not contributing to miscommunication issues, however I agree it's also problematic (for example it's restricted to 13 y.o. and +, you can't have more than 1 account, etc.). I am not involved in development, perhaps those who are will want to elaborate on that. It would certainly be useful to know more details on what you think.
Reading from the top I a realize I assumed this was about forums + chat only.

Good news: some progress has been made on testing Discourse for Piwik forums! See Migrating Piwik forums to use Discourse #8747

(opening Slack to the public is still planned, but I prefer to focus first on Discourse migration as it is more important. will get in touch with Slack for more details, after Discourse migration is successful)

Not working with Piwik PRO anymore so closing for now.