Just a random thought, is there any reason why the Hackspace Foundation couldn’t set up a slack team for all the hackspaces to use, with channels for each hackspace + a few for organising stuff. I appreciate that Slack’s free tier has some limitation, but it would be good to have somewhere to coordinate things like EMF prep, inter hackspace competitions, etc, and would allow members of various hackspaces to interact outside the occasional yearly event.
We (Cheltenham Hackspace) are just about to trial using slack instead of a dedicated Discourse forum, i know of several other hackspaces that are already using Slack and at least 1 that uses discord. Yes i know there are irc channels but i’m guessing most of people on there are just using irc relays to keep logged in.
I guess in an ideal (and more OSS aligning) world the foundation would host a mattermost instance and take advantage of their non profit licensing but i do appreciate that would require upkeep & maintenance (in time and money). Slack seems to be closest to a lowest common denominator for a modern chat platform, with the least management overhead.
Thoughts?