Have we actually talked to Slack and asked them if they might support an active open source community? It���s one thing what is written on a website, another if the consortium actually approached them and explained the problem - mass communication in a community who want to use their tool both personally and open-sourecy but also in industry.  The latter feels like the paid market they are after - the former might take their interest. 

Like others, I agree that the mobile clients are easy to use and take away the friction (and we don���t need more friction in something we are often doing for the joy of making things better)

I would get Stef or Marcus to reach out to them.

Tim

On 10 Feb 2017, at 12:26, Fran��ois Stephany <tulipe.moutarde@gmail.com> wrote:

There is a special price for non-profits organization:

> The Slack for Nonprofits program offers eligible organizations a free upgrade to our Standard plan for teams of up to 250 members. For eligible teams above that size, we offer an 85% discount on the Standard plan.

With 322 users it means that we still have to pay...

See https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204368833-Slack-for-Nonprofits for more information.


On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 1:18 PM, denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr> wrote:

>
>> I share many of what you say��� but in the other point of view, Slack as really worked and there is a lot more happening now in Slack + mailing list than what was before just in mailing list.
>> But most of that is lost because of Slack policies (also Slack pricing model is impossible for a community as ours), and we need to find a solution for that.
>
> Yes this is too expensive for the Pharo consortium ?
>
It is per active member��� which is defined as ���has logged in the last 14 days���. We have 322 members. No idea how many
are active according to that definition.

Fot 322 it would be: $8 per user per month. Which means $2576 per month or $25772 per year (taking the special yearly price into account).

        Marcus