Slack channel for communicating across language variant teams

In Americas Polyglots Meeting, participants agreed that creating a SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel for coordination among themselves can benefit the Latin American polyglots community (during the meeting they agreed upon #polyglots-latam but #polyglots-es may be more appropriate after all).

When I brought up this request to #metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. Slack channel, there were pro/con opinions about creating an additional channel for a smaller group of polyglots.

Related previous conversation: https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/2019/01/28/locale-specific-slack-rooms/

Pros

  • It may stimulate conversations & mentoring activities among contributors that speak the same language in different regions
  • It may allow interested parties to focus on the topics that they are relevant to them while reserving the main #polyglots for more general topics that affect all polyglots
  • All conversations will be always accessible unlike free versions of Slack most of localeLocale Locale = language version, often a combination of a language code and a region code, for instance es_MX denotes Spanish as it’s used in Mexico. A list of all locales supported by WordPress in https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/ teams are using
  • In reality, language channels may not over-created since there are only a handful of active localesLocale Locale = language version, often a combination of a language code and a region code, for instance es_MX denotes Spanish as it’s used in Mexico. A list of all locales supported by WordPress in https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/ with multiple variants (e.g. es_, en_, fr_, de_, and pt_)

Cons

  • It may create a fragmentation between the main channel and language-specific one
  • (Too much of?) non-English communication in the new channel
  • This may trigger over-creation of language channels furthering the problem of fragmentation

Do you think this additional Slack channel will facilitate collaboration? Or do you think we are entering a dangerous territory where conversations are be siloed and not synced up?

Also, please add any points I missed to pick up.

#slack