Hunting the Shmoo

Mozilla recently announced that we are planning to de-commission irc.mozilla.org in favour of a yet to be determined solution. As a long time user and supporter of IRC, this decision causes me some melancholy, but I 100% believe that it is the right call. Moreover, having had an inside glimpse at the process to replace it, I’m supremely confident whatever is chosen will be the best option for Mozilla’s needs.

I’m not here to explain why deprecating IRC is a good idea. Other people have already done so much more eloquently than I ever could have. I’m also not here to push for a specific replacement. Arguing over chat applications is like arguing over editors or version control. Yes, there are real and important differences from one application to the next, but if there’s one thing we’re spoiled for in 2019 it’s chat applications. Besides, so much time has been spent thinking about the requirements, there’s little anyone could say on the matter that hasn’t already been considered for hours.

This post is about an unrelated, but adjacent issue. An issue that began when mozilla.slack.com first came online, an issue that will likely persist long after irc.mozilla.org rides off into the sunset. An issue I don’t think is brought up enough, and which I’m hoping to start some discussion on now that communication is on everyone’s mind. I’m talking about using two communication platforms at once. For now Slack and IRC, soon to be Slack and something else.

Different platform, same problem.

Two Modes of Communication

Mozilla walks the walk when it comes to involving the community. Much of our communication, decision making and implementation all happens right out in the open. Anyone can go back and read almost everything I’ve ever posted to Bugzilla, every message I left on IRC, every post I’ve made to the newsgroups, every patch I’ve submitted or review I’ve conducted. It’s all out there in the public. For most, this level of openness is a very strange concept. For many it’s unsettling. But it allows Mozilla to bring community into the conversation unlike anywhere else I’ve ever seen at this scale. This is a feature, a huge competitive advantage.

But like any organization, some things need to be kept out of the public eye. Whether that’s information on critical security bugs, confidential partner agreements or product announcements carefuly timed for marketing impact. Other conversations have no reason to be public, office channels, lunch plans and catching up with colleagues, anything that might touch on something personal.

In the old days, the only way to talk in private was either e-mail or password protected IRC channels (which were nowhere near suitable for the purposes they were being used). After much frustration, someone set up a Slack instance and solved the issue in one fell swoop. Constantly being in the public eye can be unnerving, and now there was a safe space one could chat with their colleagues. A place Mozillians could be themselves without needing to worry (as much) about what they say. This was a very good thing.

Now Mozilla had (and still has) two communication platforms. IRC for public community facing discussions, Slack for private, NDA’ed only discussions. As I mentioned, both modes of communication are essential, and IRC is not capable of fulfilling the latter adequately. So what’s the problem?

Cultures of Preference

The problem is that the usage divide between these platforms does not follow the public/private guideline I outlined above. Most of the conversation I see on Slack has no reason to be private (and some of the conversation I see on IRC should be private, albeit much less than the other way around). Everyone has inherent biases. Given two communication platforms A and B, some percentage of people will prefer A and the rest will prefer B. Even assuming that everyone still uses both A and B to some degree (which I know from experience is not a valid assumption in our case), this is a big problem.

The first thing that might pop into your head is the cost of context switching between chat apps. While there is a certain cognitive burden associated with adding yet another app to your workflow, I’m not convinced that it’s significant. So for the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that there aren’t any drawbacks from the actual use of two apps.

The real cost comes from missed connections. It’s best to illustrate some of these costs in a case study. I’ll use the case study of someone I can speak for authoritatively, myself.

Missed Connections

I have fond memories stumbling into my first IRC channel to play a text-based online space battle game called Star Fury. The openness of the communication was also something that really impressed me when I first joined Mozilla as an intern. It’s something I took to heart and try to use myself whenever possible. Suffice to say, I am personally biased towards IRC.

That’s not to say that I refuse to use Slack. I use both, and when someone pings me I’m equally responsive on either platform. But I spend more time in IRC, I read more scrollback, I actively search out channels that might be relevant to my interests, I set up notifications for terms that I might be able to help out with. Very often I am able to help someone in need without being explicitly pinged.

I don’t do any of these things on Slack. How many relevant conversations in channels I don’t even know exist am I missing? How many people spend hours figuring out an unanswered question that I knew off the top of my head? Conversely, when I ask a question in IRC, how many people who have a bias towards Slack could have helped me out but didn’t? Mozilla has a cultural problem that needs solving. Developers with a bias towards IRC are talking past developers with a bias towards Slack. The same conversations are often being duplicated in both places.

Of course measuring the productivity impact of missed communication is more or less impossible. There’s no way of knowing just how big of a problem this is, though I suspect it is larger than one might expect.

Inclusion by Default

The previous section purposefully doesn’t mention the words ‘private’ or ‘public’. My hope is to convince you that simply giving people a choice (regardless of the mode of communication) causes problems worth solving in and of themselves. But remember that people usually tend to use Slack, not because they are having private conversations, but because they prefer it to IRC. This is a problem because Slack is exclusionary. Contributors can’t access it without signing an NDA (which requires employee intervention). These conversations exclude the wider Mozilla community, treating contributors as second class citizens. Here is a quick anecdote.

There is both a #python channel on IRC and on Slack. The one on IRC is more or less dead, there is hardly ever any conversation there. The one on Slack on the other hand has 3-4 times the number of members and there is vibrant conversation happening daily. The vast majority of conversation there is simply Python enthusiasts sharing tips and tricks, talking about new language features and discussing new and cool packages discovered in the wild. In otherwords, exactly the kind of conversations that might be beneficial to a contributor trying to learn the ropes. It saddens me that these conversations, and conversations on many other channels like it, are not accessible to the entire community.

A Cause for Optimism, A Cause for Concern

To summarize, there are two distinct problems outlined here:

1. Missed and duplicated communication that arises from two factions of people having inherent preferences for a given platform.
2. Exclusive conversations that have no reason to be private, arising (presumably) when a critical mass of people prefer the closed platform to the open one.

Despite my misgivings, I’m optimistic for the future. The process to replace IRC should result in a public communication platform that is more or less on par with Slack in terms of bells and whistles. This should incentivize more people over to the side of public by default and reduce the impact of both of the aforementioned problems.

But it needs to be noted that deprecating Slack is not in the cards (at least for now). Whatever platform we end up choosing, Slack will continue to be the platform we use for our private NDA’ed conversations. This means that the problem will still exist to some degree (some percentage of people will always prefer it to the alternative). Ideally the IRC replacement will be able to handle both public and private modes of communication. And ideally once the switch happens, we can start a conversation about turning off Slack. I’ve heard one of the barriers to turning off Slack is that it is the preferred method of communication amongst some higher ups. I sincerely hope that after we switch away from IRC that this is not the only barrier stopping this from happening.

Mozilla’s productivity and inclusion are both on the line.