Hi all,

The conference planning committee, working with the folks at CLIR, have
arranged for the Code4lib Slack instance to be upgraded to a "Standard"
paid account. The main motivation of upgrading was to maintain access to
chat history, as we had been exceeding the free-tier message limit at a
rolling window of  about 6 weeks. As Slack has become the de facto location
for many operational conversations about organizing the conference,
retaining access to that organizational knowledge has become absolutely
essential.

However, Slack is also an informal community space, and I think we need to
consider the implications of this "permanent" access to chat history and
how it may impact some community members willingness to participate in the
conversations there. Slack does provide an option of limiting message
retention on a channel by channel basis, which is something we may want to
consider.

Moreover, I think this question about Slack points to a larger issue, that
while *the usage* of community communication platforms (Slack, irc,
discord, this listserv), is already covered in our Code of Conduct
<https://github.com/code4lib/code-of-conduct> we don't explicitly state how
community members should expect* data collected by/ on these platforms
could be used. *While being fully aware that Slack has access to this data
and we can't control what they do (and that's a whole nother conversation),
we can make decisions about what our expectations are *as a community,  *and
what norms we want to set.

Conversations in Slack have already yielded requests for access to the public
message export
<https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-workspace-data> that
Slack provides, and pushback that no Code4lib Slack users have actually
consented to having their message data used for research / data analysis
purposes.

I think we need to make some intentional choices about our data, instead of
just accepting the defaults, and that we need to be transparent about
whatever we decide so that community members, present and future, know what
to expect.

While I'm sure some conversation will happen here, perhaps a good topic for
a breakout session at the conference?

Thanks
Chad