In search of a bulletin board for the blog
Comparison between the main community management and chat applications aimed at the corporate market. The mission is to avoid Whatsapp at all costs.
To improve communication with my students, I always looked for a simple tool. The main goal was to avoid the ubiquitous Whatsapp , as I understand it is important to separate personal and professional communication. Incredible as it may seem, this can currently be considered an ambitious goal.
In addition, he was looking for a form of communication in the style of an open forum, not of private contact with each of the students. What I wanted to do with this was to have a very simple bulletin board, so that I could record where I stopped and what the schedule of the next class would be.
That is, I wanted to create a digital class journal.
I also wanted to make it possible for the public to be accessible, because I know that the need for authentication for reading ends up being a huge barrier. As I already had a blog, I was looking for a more agile communication than a normal post, more along the lines of a chat. Finally, I wanted it to be a free solution.
My option ended up being the Gitter , which is a fairly simple community management platform. While Gitter doesn't define its audience as programmers, it's pretty clear that it's about community management for these professionals. Either way, there's nothing stopping us from taking advantage of the wonderful tools that developers create for you.
To get an idea of the importance of this platform, Gitter was bought by GitLab in 2017, when it already had more than 800 thousand users. Since then, it has been an open source project and without any limitation of use. This is because Gitter is no longer a company with a commercial purpose and has become GitLab's arm focused on developing communities that strengthen its position in the market (repository management for developers).
But this is not so relevant to us, other than for the fact that everything leads us to believe that Gitter is indeed a solid option and that it will not be discontinued. Speaking of options, some solutions are worth mentioning, if only to clarify how they differ from Gitter .
Among the alternatives is the Slack , a gigantic company, with daily activity of more than 12 million users. It is not, therefore, a niche option, but an alternative to communication for the world of work as a whole. In addition, its mission is internal communication between teams, not community management.
This field of generic solutions for the world of work seems to be quite congested, with multiple - and great - options, which would be a good subject for another post. Here I am restricting myself to comparing solutions to my concrete problem, which is the management of my communities. That is, the management of my classrooms.
Although it has had relative success in communicating with students via Slack and, more recently, via Discord , I ended up deciding to build a lighter and more open forum , which could be presented within the page of each course I teach. I was happy with the result and I hope it works better than my previous attempts, because I ended up realizing that I wasn't using the best tools for the mission.
The icing on the cake is that, precisely because it is a community in the world of technology, the development of Gitter is very agile and focused on integrations in different ways. In this case, I chose to use an integration called Sidecar , which allows you to display Gitter directly on the blog. The result is as follows:
No more Whatsapp, no more Facebook Pages. 😅
In fact, I know that these solutions will continue to exist and that many students will be informed, second-hand, by posts propagated in those communities. The important thing for me is that I will be able to maintain organized and accessible communication, which I was having difficulty accomplishing through more complex tools.
Henrique Costa 