Slack?

[James_Slattery]

Not sure if any of you have used it, but what do you all think about the communication software slack? Does it work well with a robotics team? Let me know what you think!

https://slack.com/

[Abhishek R]

Didn't use it when I was on the FRC team, but we use it as our primary mode of communication for one of the engineering organizations I'm a part of in college. I think it has a lot of functionality and the fact that you can make a channel for every subsystem is great. In a way, it's like a chat/instant messaging based forum. I would definitely recommend it.

[Alex Webber]

James,

While I cannot speak from the standpoint of having an entire team using Slack, I created a group for our programming team, composed of 18 students and mentors. We have been using it for over a year, and have been very impresed.

Slack's free plan is amazing for the price. We can have unlimited members, channels, and the file and photo sharing works nice. I recommend if this is the course that you choose to consider, to make a google drive account, most teams have one already. You can copy the share link of the file, and it will share it with everyone in the channel to make sharing files easier.

Slack has some of the best customer service that I have encountered with, our team is using it to replace Skype and Google Hangouts. Slack has plans to add voice integration sometime in 2016. Administrators can set-up bots, allowing a bot to remind the channel or everyone when there is a meeting, or important event! There are so many integrations to make slack even better.

If you choose slack, you will need to consider the difference between Private Groups and Channels. Channels can have lots of spam, and everyone can see those messages. Private Groups are only visible by those in it.

One of my goals for 2017 is to hopefully push towards Slack when I have more leverage. It is an amazing tool, and replaces Skype, GroupME, Kik, and Texting. We still have a teamspeak server for voice.

EDIT: After reading, one of our programmers made a bot to log how much time people get on Slack. But yes, getting people to get on slack is a challenge, just like checking your email.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

[EmileH]

I would add - our team uses slack in conjunction with Google Hangouts at the moment. Simply paste the link to the hangout into the slack channel, and have your members join up.

[James_Slattery]

Yes that was what I feared, although I feel like it is easier to get them to download the app and then they get direct notifications instead of emails that may or may not be spam or important.

[Mykey]

We have been using Slack. I get better responses from the team this way than I do through email.

We also have sub sections for the team leaders and a joke area named the Pun-ishment Room.

It is a very useful tool. I recommend it.

[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.

[Chak]

Looks like a nicer alternative to email, but is there video calling or plans for adding it?

[James_Slattery]

Originally Posted by Chak

Looks like a nicer alternative to email, but is there video calling or plans for adding it?

May be able to integrate google hangouts video call or something like that.

[Chak]

Originally Posted by James_Slattery

May be able to integrate google hangouts video call or something like that.

You're completely correct. Googled "slack video chat" and this explains how to do it through google hangouts.

[dmelcer9]

810 to use Slack within the controls group, but barely anyone posts anything. We've tried to get programmers to join #programming, but it has 5 members in all (including me and the head of controls. There's only 3 new programmers in there, out of about 10).

[guniv]

We just set up Slack on our team with just team leads and it's going great so far. We're going to add all team members soon.

My favorite part is the integrations - we use Trello for a Scrum-like experience, and it posts to Slack every time a board is updated. Same for when a new revision is pushed to GitHub. It's great.

I should mention that I pushed for us to use Slack because we were having communication issues with our team leads. I would email and text them and still barely get replies. With Slack you can mention someone and have it notify their phone and get their attention pretty quickly. You can also search Slack!

[TJolley]

Team 4020 has been using slack for the entire 2015-2016 season and so far we love it. Slack helped to replace google hangouts, group texts and massive email chains. I agree that the largest challenge was to get students to regularly check slack but after everyone downloaded the slack app to their phone checking slack was no longer an issue. The other problem that we had with slack is that the company that almost all of our mentors work for blocked the use of slack on there work network, but with the app installed on their phones this issue was resolved. Over all I would rank slack 8.5/10 stars


Thomas J
Operations Director
DB Cyber Tribe
Team 4020
www.DBCyberTribe.com

[legts]

My team uses Slack at competition. It's very useful for making sure everyone can contact everyone else, so if someone doesn't have someone elses' phone number it's not a problem. We also use Slack for communicating between drive coach and scouting empress.

[Ty Tremblay]

GameSense has been using Slack for 2 years now and we love it.