In one sense I highly value email as one of the few communication tools that is truly decentralized and potentially free from lock-in by large companies – centralized platforms like slack are not the answer to email’s problems. In recent years I’ve been trying to encourage teams to move discussions out of email and into git pull requests. Conversations should happen around documentation where the results of a discussion will be captured. Will be interesting to compare these ideas with what Cal has to say.
I have a presentation I give called “Email is a team sport”. My team only uses email as an interface with people external to our organization, and even then if there is longer term communication, we fold those externals into internal non-email channels.
The downside of this is that I am the main external email team member
Agreed, email is still very useful for communicating across organizational boundaries. I still use email a lot for notifications – for instance when someone makes a comment in a Git pull request, but could also use Slack or something like that. I like the periodic summary emails Discourse sites send out – I’m a member of a dozen of so Discourse sites by now. I think email works best if you can delete most of it and don’t have to refer back to old emails often.
Are there any communication tools you recommend for internal discussions?
Also interested in your presentation if it posted anywhere, or if you present it again.
I’ve got reply-by-email running on a couple of our Discourse servers which works well for email centric folks.
That’s an interesting insight. I think you’re right.
I currently like Discourse for this! The permissions mean you can do private groups and spaces in it well. But really depends on size of organization and what is needed.
HedgeDoc is Markdown pages with collab editing that is useful.
