Group chat allows for persons to be be able to instant message either directly to another person or to groups of persons. They are often proposed as a faster collaborative solution than e-mail alone and typically offer features such as
- ability to group instant messages into group of members or via topics (or both)
- mobile clients so you can respond on your phone
- ability to search messages
- messages are seamlessly synced to all devices, mobile and desktop
- integrates with other third party services (Dropbox, Twitter, etc)
See How At-Large should use group chat slidedeck, part of the TTF presentation at October 31 2017 at ICANN60
Group chat services
The TTF will be evaluating several of these group chat services to see if these could be used by At-Large
- Mattermost - we currently have a demo server up thanks to Niran Beharry - you can join at http://tmm.pro-tt.com:8065/signup_user_complete/?id=yx1b9zedefbotku58y8q757yoc and use the desktop or mobile apps.
- Slack (http://www.slack.com) - The At-Large Social Media Working Group used Slack https://icann-at-large.slack.com/ during the ICANN 50th London meeting to coordinate content for sharing during the At-Large Summit II.
- HipChat (https://www.hipchat.com/)
- Hall (https://hall.com/) - Note that Hall was acquired/merged with HipChat
- Rocket.chat - The TTF has had a demo of Rocket.chat by James Gannon from the NCUC at the ICANN56 Helsinki meeting and a followup demo on the 2016-09-19 At-Large Technology Taskforce Call
- Skype
What is Slack
Here's a YouTube video "What is Slack?" from the makers of Slack which gives an overview of the features of Slack which applies broadly to group chat applications
For ongoing testing, the Slack room was renamed to http://icannatlarge.slack.com
