I'm an all the way guy for open source. Not just open in that you can see it, but open in many other ways too. Marketing muscle have seen that sense of the word open, as in open communities, open governance, a real sense of organic growth diluted over time by vested interests.
The community that drove such open work and collaboration eventually protected it with the GPL which ensures that work you contribute to such projects will remain free and open. That's our community here on this GPL project. It is the call many of us feel that bring us together.
Once we got to the point in a corner of the marketing madness where we couldn't even use FOSS without having to differentiate it by adding to it to call it FLOSS, I have up and just call it open again now refusing the mad world around me.
If anyone can make it half way, even 10% through this article:
http://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-software-develop...
And still see a case for Slack in an open source community, I have to openly express my sincere doubt about that person's credibility as an open source developer or community member ;-)
I'm very happy being part of the Drupal community. Sensible moves and a great founding feeling of keeping open source alive and well looked after. It looks like Slack won't make the cut for Drupal: https://www.drupal.org/node/2490332 and we long passed the move to GitHub debate. Only the DA still use Google Docs, which I understand, is hard to beat with an open source alternative, but once one is available, I'm sure that will change too.
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For community discussion you
For community discussion you still can't beat IRC. It's old but still very capable and with online clients these days like KiwiIRC, Freenode Webchat and even self hosted like Shout IRC there is really no excuse.
The barrier to entry is minimal, you dont even have to register an account if you don't want to. Hop into a channel and leave again alternatively register and stay on a contributor to discussions.
You can also be as basic or advanced a user as you like, from simple discussions to bot integration.
Sure IRC is ancient and sometimes it can seem to be a form a black magic getting connected but it doesn't have to. I like to look at each server, for example Freenode or Snoonet, as a social network of sorts. You connect to the servers you want and then use the channels that you need. Even start a few of your own maybe.
IRC for Drupal
Many serious open source projects still see core members on IRC. It is super vibrant!
The Drupal project too has a huge IRC buy in and it works well. We should just help people gain access.
Thanks Jonathan for also having sent me those links earlier.
So, I'm giving it some thought. If we can get gpg encryption for IRC working so that our company internal IM can be replaced with internal IMs switching to encrypted IRC, we can pretty much do away with our Prosody server. Then we will all also join the IRC Drupal groups on a permanent basis (we use IM (XMPP in our case) a lot).
I added it to my to do list so when I get a moment, I'll investigate further. Just need to get an example case working, then I can add it to our ansible and push it to all our desktops.