[Cel Skeggs]

Team 1540 has started using Slack, at the recommendation of a couple of the software members, myself included. I've also used it at a summer internship.

I find it to be a very useful tool - we tried an email list for our department, but email is clunky and too heavyweight for small questions, which leads to small questions not being asked electronically. (At least for our team.) This way, it's possible for everyone to ask whatever they want, and if it's in a public channel, everyone else can learn from it too.

One thing to make sure to recommend to team members is to modify the notification settings - if you don't, you can get pinged for messages that you don't want to be pinged about. With the notification settings set to only notify you when you're directly contacted, it's possible for team members to ignore most conversations in the moment and then catch up on their own time later.

Also, for your programming subteam, the GitHub integration features are very useful! You can have Slack notify you about everything that happens in your repositories, in a public channel that the rest of the subteam can see.