Digital communication bridge-building team

[patcon]

Re-posting this from #pitch-zone channel in ProgressiveHackNight Slack:

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In Toronto, I've been socializing the idea of a project/team that organizes as a single-purpose support team for helping local communities who rely on digital comms tools. The groups mission might be to accept requests to stitch together various digital communities through bridges

Possible activities might include:

• manage bridging infrastructure
• suggest patterns for not being bound by comm tool limitations (ie. lack of public logs in slack, etc.)
• make introductions between groups that might want to share digital space more freely through bridging

Slack is one such comm tool that fragments conversation between its Slack teams, but even just one community is sometimes fragmented across several tools. For example, my hacklab was trying to force people to use telegram, but some preferred slack, and the crustiest were still hanging only in IRC. A bridge removed the tension, and allowed everyone to stay where they were, but still talk. Bridges neutralize network effects and needless disagreement on best tools 🙂 -- The best tool will eventually win out without a top-down decision and potentially-coercive community migration.

So would this be something that folks in NYC might be interested in? I can imagine much of the work would be hitting the street and visiting other communities, and figuring out whether 1) they communicate digitally, and 2) whether their are conversations of interest to them that they aren't seeing and might like to see.

Anyone interested in running with this idea in NYC? Would be happy to collaborate cross-city and share learnings!

Best bridge I've found is Matterbridge:
https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

Here's my repo for posting it free on heroku:
https://github.com/edgi-govdata-archiving/matterbridge-heroku#readme

Screenshot: across many slacks: https://imgur.com/CqiPyeF
Screenshot: across chat platforms: https://imgur.com/oeH8SlD

[patcon]

Here's a possible MVP for how this could work: edgi-govdata-archiving/matterbridge-heroku#4

For a one-pager website as suggested through the above link, this might help people submit requests for new bridges without forcing them to join github: https://gitreports.com/ (can fork, rehost, and adapt to our needs with custom fields)