Slack Channels

Policy

Slack is an application used for everyday communications in Lullabot. Slack consists of a collection of channels that include a general channel and channels specific to a topic, project, or client. When these channels are no longer required, they should be archived, but not deleted.

Scope

This policy applies to all Lullabot employees and management.

Compliance

• The person who created the Slack channel will also be responsible for archiving it when no longer needed.
• Admin staff will perform a periodic review of Slack channels to identify channels that have no activity as potential candidates for archival, and contact the channel creator to confirm the course of action.
• If a client or colleague from another organization needs access to a Slack channel:
  • and they also use Slack at their organization, they will be added through the Shared Channel feature.
  • or if they do not use Slack as a part of their organization, then they'll be added using the Guest Account feature.
  • Guest accounts will be set to expire in 12 months, and renewed for additional 6 month periods as needed.

Explanation and Implementation

Slack channels can be created for specific projects and clients. These channels keep a lot of noise out of the general channel and also provide a place to talk specifically about a topic or client. Non-employees may be invited to these channels as well, allowing clients and contractors to communicate about a specific project without allowing them access to the general Lullabot channel.

The sheer number of channels makes it hard for anyone to see all the available channels and choose to join the right ones. Therefore it's useful to remove channels once the client project is finished or the topic is no longer a priority. Unneeded Slack channels can either be deleted or archived. If deleted, all communication from that channel will be lost. If archived, the communication is preserved, but the channel drops out of the list of active channels. Another advantage of archiving is that it is easy to re-activate the channel in Slack and immediately have access to the history.

Many of these Slack channels might contain sensitive or important client or project information. It's not always obvious ahead of time which information might be useful in the future. To be safe, unneeded channels should be archived, not deleted.

You can view archived channels to see or reactivate them. There are instructions in Slack about How to archive a channel. Note that private channels cannot be archived. They must be made public first, then archived.