This issue is created on behalf of Jupyter Media Strategy working group (charter). The goal of this issue is to get feedback from the community on replacing Gitter as a primary / official chat-based communication channel of Project Jupyter. Please share your thoughts and opinions.

Please note that change is intended for the whole Project Jupyter, not for a certain subproject. To kick-off the discussion, I have created issue about this at jupyterlab/team-compass. Please see it for additional discussion on the topic:

• New chat-based communication channel to replace Gitter/Matrix jupyterlab/frontends-team-compass#213

Problem

Chat-based communication channels offer possibility of real-time interaction and rapid feedback which provides additional utility and value to open source projects compared to forums like Discourse. Gitter historically served as a main/most popular chat-based communication channel for the Project Jupyter community. Based on discussions during weekly Project Jupyter calls, after Gitter migrated to Matrix it's usability and popularity is not at a satisfactory level anymore (see jupyterlab/frontends-team-compass#213 (comment) for for more details).

Proposed Solution

Create new chat-based communication channel as a replacement for Gitter.

Potential options:

• Discord
  • Pros: household name, familiar to majority of users
  • Cons: closed source
• Zulip
  • Pros: open source, can be self-hosted. Potentially better threading
  • Cons: less popular
• Zulip for technical communication, Discord for community communication (as mentioned here)

I prefer Discord due to popularity and ease of adoption.