Announcing Our Migration To An Open Source Messaging Platform

Aragon

• Aug 5, 2020 • 3 min read

Aragon will migrate to Rocket Chat along with 10 other Ethereum projects

Today we are announcing the plan of several Ethereum based projects to migrate to the open source messaging platform Rocket Chat.

Aragon will be migrating our community out of Slack and onto Rocket Chat in the next couple of weeks.

Projects that will be migrating together as a part of this effort are:

This has been a joint effort from the projects participating in the migration plan. Aragon initially started the proposal for the community after there had already been discussion on the subject from multiple projects. We came together as members of the same ecosystem and community to work on this plan to find an alternative that fit the needs of these cryptocurrency projects.

After much discussion and debate upon which open source platform would best fit our needs right now, we came to the conclusion of Rocket Chat being the one for us.

For more information about specific project's migration plan go to their respective announcement for details. As every project is different, the projects listed here will share their detailed plans with their communities on their own channels when ready.

Aragon's participation and plan for migration

At Aragon our plan has been from day one to switch into using an open source messaging platform at some point. We were content with using Slack until we could figure out an open source alternative and were ready to migrate our community to a new platform.

After the phishing attacks begun many of the projects in the Ethereum community started discussing various options on how to combat this common issue. Some were looking into alternative platforms while others have been working on solutions that could help mitigate these attacks while remaining on Slack.

Ever since the phishing attacks started, the scammers have been increasing their efforts and strategies as to how they are conducting these elaborate scams. Unfortunately many have fallen victims of these attacks as well.

Many projects seemed satisfied with staying in Slack but we had had enough, this was heavily impacting our community and the community member's security was at stake. Which is why we started the community wide proposal, AGP 5: Migration to Open Source Messaging Platform to gauge the interest of projects looking for a similar solution to this shared problem.

The proposal quickly gained support from multiple projects and many of our own community members indicated that they were looking forward to this change. The proposal and discussion around it remained open and transparent at Github as we looked to see how many projects might be interested in this joint effort.

The comments on the proposal were coming in and there was definite interest for the migration, even though the discussion often drifted off-topic in the thread. Github is not great for coordinating over ten different projects to come together and prepare a plan for a collaborative effort, so about a week ago we created a private channel at our Slack to discuss these things with the projects that had signaled support for the proposal.

Discussion, debate, calls with both Riot and Rocket Chat teams took place as well as a poll to see which platform gained the most support from the community. Rocket Chat was the choice that we found to be the one for us as Ethereum based blockchain projects.

And now after announcing our plan to move forward together, it's time to execute on this.

Aragon will be migrating our community from Slack to Rocket Chat within the next couple of weeks.

We will begin by moving all the existing users and public channels to Rocket Chat (there's a tool for that in RC!). Then we will continue to close down the channels at Slack, keeping only the announcement channel for a period before finally completely leaving Slack behind.

Crypto projects are really a new kind of projects, built and supported by the community around them. Leaving the faith of our communities to a centralized company that clearly doesn't care about us doesn't make any sense. Switching to an open source alternative will allow us to enhance the software in order to minimize attack surface and increase engagement and quality of discussion. Our communities deserve it.

Luis Cuende, Project Lead at Aragon

Guide on how to join the new Aragon Chat:

Aragon Chat is now open
Aragon starts using the open source messaging platform Rocket Chat