Getting a rough plan on when to officialize alternative venues

[Manishearth]

There are a bunch of unofficial Rust spaces. There's the subreddit, the gitter, the Discord, the Slack, and I'm setting up http://oxidized.systems/.

While some of these (e.g. the subreddit) are supposed to be unofficial spaces, others are unofficial because we haven't officialized them

We should get a rough idea of if and when these can be made official, including answers to the questions of:

• What does it mean to be official, aside from being termed as such?
• How do we grow moderation for this?
• What are the criteria for a venue becoming official? Does this need an RFC? (probably yes)

cc @ashleygwilliams @jonathandturner

[Manishearth]

Strawman proposal:

Official does mean moderated by the Rust mods, and listed on RLO, at least. In general most of these venues will be places where you can ask and answer questions, or have Rusty discussions. This also further empowers teams to choose to have their open-to-public meetings in these channels instead (though they're currently allowed to do that as well). For discussion forum like venues, we should try and post announcements/ask for feedback in these venues consistently.

If we want to officialize a venue, the criteria are:

• X level of activity. I'm not sure what X should be, but I think having it be the same order of
  magnitude of activity as #rust-beginners (for chat venues) and URLO (for discussion forums) should be ok. Mastodon is ... weird .... and we can ignore that one for now as far as activity criteria are concerned.
• It must follow the code of conduct.
• It must already have local moderation going on. The Rust mod team is supplemented by venue specific mods on many venues. They can't hang out everywhere. They will have access, but will likely not be hanging around.
• The rust mod and community team have final say on whether or not the current moderation is at an acceptable level. We can come up with more specific constraints here, but part of this is "does the mod team trust the current set of venue mods to handle it correctly", which is hard to codify.

If it reaches these rough criteria, the community team can push an RFC for officializing the venue.

I have personally been hanging out and passively watching many of the venues (gitter, discord, slack) and am hoping that some of these will be at critical mass soon. I can try growing moderation there if we agree on something here.

[skade]

I'd like to add that the benefit to official venues is obviously that we can promote them. We regularly hand out flyers at conferences listing the irc channels and such, I'd be happy to add communities there. I want to be reasonably sure that they are following standards when doing that. Integration into the mod team is what I'd expect, also at least some ability for people to interact with the project from there. I'd hate if "you can talk about anything here, but to ask a question to the project, you have to go somewhere else" would become something.

I'm still critical of community RFCs and never found to get much value out of them.

[bstrie]

It's worth making the distinction between an official Rust venue and an official account on unofficial venues. For example, Reddit is not an official Rust venue (as the original /r/rust give-a-shit mod, I was the one who insisted upon this!), but that doesn't mean that /u/aturon or /u/steveklabnik1 couldn't represent an official account for communication on behalf of the core team (which would mean holding such accounts to certain standards of discourse, though that hasn't been a problem so far); likewise Twitter isn't an official Rust venue (and IMO shouldn't ever be), but @rustlang is still an official Rust account on behalf of the core team (which likewise implies certain self-imposed standards of conduct).