Welcome to Slack!
Slack can be confusing at first and certainly takes some time to get used to - but hopefully this living document will help you better communicate between our meetup.
Here's how Slack describes it: https://slack.com/is/team-communication
For us, it's more or less how we're hoping to communication in between study groups. So whether you are working on an open source project with a few other women at the meetup or just want to ask questions about a language - we think this will really help!
We're still growing, so you'll notice that at the moment we only have groups set up for #front-end-hack-night, #general, #jobs, and #one-month-rails. As we get started, we're trying to keep it small and only sending out invites to people that show up to our study groups. We're still deciding how we'll scale - but one hope is that everyone who would want to communicate throughout the week will be attending a study group, so they'll get a chance there. But we'll see how it goes!
This is certainly the trickest part about Slack and what takes the most time to get used to! (hence calling it out first) Slack is way more like a chat room than email - so you don't want to feel like you need to read every message that is sent to the group. And if you get a notification for every message sent to your phone - you'll quickly go crazy!
Here is the page for notifications - https://womenwhocodedc.slack.com/account/notifications
Check out where you want notifications. As an example - I get all notifications when I'm on my personal computer, but then only direct messages, mentions, or #front-end-hack-night notifications on my phone. Definitely switch around your phone settings so that you don't get too much too quickly!
(have to figure out how we want to organize all of these)
Will we have channels for specific projects that are going on inside a study group?
Front End Hack Night will probably help determine how we handle that sort of communication
Can I start my own channel?
For now, speak to Nupur Kapoor or Kaylyn Gibilterra if you want to start a group. We just want to monitor a bit of how it'll be used as we get started to (hopefully) minimize entry level confusion...but we'll have to see how the group grows organically!
What happened to private channels?
Right now we have them only set for admins to create because we're using the private channels for study group organization (aka a lot of "who is hosting X meetup" discussions haha). Depending on how the group grows we may or may not open up private groups for everyone!
How do I mention someone or a channel?
To mention someone type @ and their name will come up as you spell it out.
For groups, use the # to send the notification to everyone - so #general, will send a message to everyone in theg roup. Try to use this sparingly though because that could get annoying very quickly!
What if I have an idea for a new study group/event?
Talk to Kaylyn Gibilterra or Nupur Kapoor! Bringing it up in #general to see if others have interest is also useful. There is quite a possibility that we've been thinking about starting the event soon (most languages are on our backlog haha) but the more interest we hear for specific languages/topics the faster we'll work on the hosting situation so that we can have an event as a group!
What about an idea for an existing group?
Well for starters, bringing it up in your groups channel is probably the best bet! But then we should have the lead for each event listed in the associated channel, so feel free to reach out to them if you have any questions there too!
If you have a question that isn't discussed here (likely) - feel free to make a pull request to add the answer if you have it, or just ask it on Slack and we'll continue adding to the document here. Hopefully over the next few months we'll have something helpful for everyone when they join!