22.00.0073: Slack × Life admin: an experiment

20-29 Community 22 Blog
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There’s been some great discussion in the life admin support thread on the forum.

In thinking about the next Quick Start pack, which will be ‘Small business’[1], I’m interested in the idea of providing really specific support at the ID level.

I want to start this experiment with the life admin pack.

The goal

An example will help. Let’s say we end up with
13 Finance > 13.11 Quarterly accounting.

The pack will give you a place to put that: but what if it was also your operations manual, so that you not only knew where to store your accounts, but how to do them.

Why does every small business have to figure this out for themselves? Surely we can be more efficient than that.

I can’t create a small business operations manual by myself. But together, we can.

One channel per ID

The idea is that we’ll use Slack, and each ID in the pack will have its own channel.

Then you can ask for help in that channel and get really specific advice. Perhaps someone is an accountant; or maybe they live in your state and understand your question about tax law. Or maybe they just did it themselves last month and have experience to share.

I’ll extract this knowledge and make it a permanent part of the system.

Why Slack?

I’m wary of adding another comms channel to this system. It’s something else to manage.

But my existing options aren’t suitable. I want this to be the sort of place you can jump in and ‘chat’, so that rules out the forum. Discord could possibly work – but I get the feeling that small business owners would rather not spend their day on a platform built for gamers.

So I’m going to try Slack. Like the title says: this is an experiment. Feedback is welcome.

Free now; not always

To seed this, invitations are currently open. When we create the small business pack later this year this will become a perk that is only available to those who buy it.

Because, to reinforce the point: this is place to get targeted advice on a specific Quick Start issue. So if you’re not using the pack, it’s not going to be useful.

Life admin

This all applies to the life admin pack, so let’s try it out. Here’s how it works.

  1. You need advice about a specific ID in the pack. Say 13.21 Budgets & planning.
  2. If that channel doesn’t already exist, create it. All members have permission to do this.
  3. Post your question.
  4. Happiness.

Get access

Here’s the link. See you there.

  1. It’ll also cover your community club, or that kindergarten you’re the treasurer for, or anything similar. ↩︎

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Sorry, I won’t meet you there.

Unless you pay for slack (which I assume you don’t?), data will be removed once the history becomes too large. Knowledge will disappear from the net.

Slack is using our content to train their AI and I don’t want my data there.

However, I will of course continue using your public forum to learn and share.

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And this is why it’s an experiment! All thoughts and opinions are welcome.

My plan for the first issue is to curate knowledge out of Slack and back in to my system. I’ve always found search to be near-useless in a chat context anyway.

The second, re: AI, I didn’t know that. But I can’t say I’m surprised.

But I think — I’m not decided — that pragmatism will probably win for me here. I need something like Slack. There aren’t many things like Slack. So I’ll probably use Slack. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I really like the idea in principle it’s excellent. I don’t use slack and I don’t like this tool too much.

From my professional experience I meet many more people in companies with Google Workspace and individuals in the world with a Google account.

This makes Google Chat a tool undoubtedly much more established than Slack, less geeky and which also meets the specifications (one channel per ID, on invitation…). Bonus the chat is accessible in Gmail app.

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Interesting. So is a ’space’ a channel?

And can you join it via this link? https://chat.google.com/room/AAAAt_ti-vg?cls=7

Jeez I think Google’s interface is ugly though… :stuck_out_tongue:

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Sorry it’s say I am not authorized to connect the space. Can you check the permissions access ?

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…and this is why I don’t like Google’s interfaces.

I can’t see anywhere to do that. Give me a clue?

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I’m sure you already did that

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Put my email in (3)

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A major limitation of your project is that it’s unfortunately not possible to create sub-spaces.

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Here in (1) all messages are displayed, a bit chaotic.
You need to reply to a message to create a thread.
The thread can then be displayed in a dedicated window (2).
It works more like a conversation thread, which is perhaps the weakest point compared to Slack.

Another Google approach would be to have your central document in GDocs format and then organize the discussion with comments that would enrich the document or answer questions.

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For the record, I will mention the FOSS option which comes closest to being an alternative: Matrix, with element.io as a useable interface that is easy to install on all platforms.

I have experience with it in the Dutch QGIS user group where it fulfills a role similar to what you are envisioning here. I believe it has support for spaces/channels/threads.

Whether you’d have to host it yourself to get all the functionality, or pay some non-trivial fee for hosting by Element the company, I don’t know.

It does have a Slack bridge, which could be useful for mirroring data in a test phase.

I fully understand the need to use one of the ‘big’ established ones, despite the drawbacks regarding privacy and data security. Stability and universal accessibility are important if you have paying customers to support. For me personally, the drawbacks are dealbreakers as for @trintera. If we never make the move, we’ll all be Google’s data forever and the Web will just get less and less human.

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This approach is out, sorry. I need a public link that anyone can sign up through, like Discord or Slack.

On the nascent Slack I ran a poll: Discord, Slack, or a poke in the eye? Discord won it 10-2-1.

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Circle or another similar platform would probably be most ideal and makes sense to me? Especially if the chat is based around a product you are selling. I know you don’t like Circle LOL!

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I’ve not used Circle but any of those platforms come with a fee[1], setup, and another sign-in for the user. All of the things I’m trying to avoid! I’m looking for the least-friction but most-suitable method.

I will check Circle out. But I think Discord is going to win out here.

  1. I really don’t need to be paying another platform US$99/month. ↩︎

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Yes that’s the problem with those platforms you need to pay for it’s another upfront cost, which I guess then puts up the price of the course. And I guess the platform depends on your majority audience. But what do I know about business and online courses etc, thinking as I go along :rofl::rofl:. It all interests me! I wish I had a niche for myself lol. Anyway, When I first found JD I joined discord and didn’t like it, but I’m willing to give it (or whatever platform you decide to go with) a try. discord might be easier now that I have done the course and have a better understanding of JD. But all of the coding techy stuff goes above my head :rofl: and I don’t need another hobby right now :rofl::rofl: but will try it out again and see how I get on.

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Sure I understand I guess it was on invitation only.
Otherwise the presentation of information don’t do the job.

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On Slack it was also mentioned that you could spin up a self-hosted system. There are things like Zulip or Mattermost - the latter of which I run at home with great joy.

If you’re half-decent with IT then you can get these things running in an evening or two. We could have a separate thread about that if needed.

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This is a GREAT idea. And Slack is PERFECT for this. I’ve never thought of Discord as a business tool other than for developers. I’m on several Slack communities and your use case is a perfect one. It is somewhat irrelevant that the free version deletes access to history because the whole point is not to create a searchable database of oldish information, but rather to give folks a connection for help by channel. It’s quite useful. And as grownups, we all know not to post sensitive data to the interwebs, so the AI thing is less cringy to me. 28+ years of it and nothing is private anymore.

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There’s such a wide range of views! Some love Slack. Some really really don’t love it at all.

I think I want this place – the Slack-like place – to be separate from Discord.

Because, in its final incarnation, the idea is that it’s really tightly focused on the to-be-produced Quick Start: Small business pack.

So rolling it in with Discord feels like things will get confused. And you’ll be distracted with the rest of the chit-chat when you’re meant to be working. I want to help, not hinder.

I’m really interested in these self-hosted options…

…“great joy” not being a phrase you often hear in conjunction with self-hosting software! I’ll definitely be looking at Mattermost, thanks @torbengb.

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I have lots of services on my home server, and several of them actually do spark “great joy” for their usefulness! Besides Mattermost there’s also Paperless-ngx for archiving scanned documents, and the hilariously-named Immich as a replacement for Google Photos — but let’s keep this thread focused on chat.

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I tried to join Slack via invitation link from the newsletter. But seems it allow only emails from @johnnydecimal.com domain.
Or I am doing something wrong?

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