Communication

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THIS PAGE IS OLD and no longer maintained. For questions, please use the Ansible forum.

Communication channels

Various channels exist to communicate within a Working Group, but not all channels are suited for every kind of communication.

In general, we do not want to impose on how a Working Group should operate, and we certainly do not want to make it overly complex. In general, do whatever works best for your Working Group, there is one exception which is related to Pinboards.

Pinboard

Most Working Groups start with a Pinboard (basically an issue named like that) where past and current contributors are invited to the Working Group. This could be up to hundreds of GitHub handles that are automatically subscribed to this Pinboard issue.

For this reason the Pinboard is not suitable for low-level discussions and should not be used often, except maybe for giving a yearly status update, or asking quarterly for help with reviewing or finishing up to an upcoming Ansible release.

If the Pinboard is used for low-level communication we risk that the wider community unsubscribed from the Pinboard and is out of reach for future communication.

Wiki

A Working Group has a Wiki space to publish various things related to the Working Group:

mission statement
related Wiki pages or references
member list
meeting schedule
action list or TODO items
roadmap for upcoming releases
links to related information on the Internet

More Wiki pages can be created to go into detail, or make a proposal or list progress on certain tasks. Whatever works best for your Working Group.

Beware that the Wiki is not intended as an alternative for the Ansible documentation. It should only be used for collaborating within the WG and is temporary in nature. Everything that is permanent for users/contributors should end up in the official Ansible documentation.

Issues

Most discussions or tasks are discussed as part of an issue ticket. An issue ticket could be a real problem with a module, or documentation updates, or an action item on the action list.

Chat / Forum

Some Working Groups have an IRC channel and a Matrix bridge to this IRC channels. This offers asynchronous forum-like access where people can talk in real-time or delayed, with full history logged. Similar to Slack or Mattermost.