Best Slack-type app for multi-institutional PhD programme

July 3, 2019 4:30 AM

I've been tasked with finding a suitable platform for a multi-institutional PhD programme, where we can archive and share training materials and students and others can have channels to communicate about anything from project management to lunch plans. I like Slack for managing my own, much smaller research projects, but this will involve 48 students and their respective supervisors, programme administrators, etc. Would some paid version of Slack be worth the cost for this? Is there an alternative that would be better?
posted by stinker to Technology (4 answers total)

Our company stood up an instance of Rocket Chat for a number of teams, it's an open source Slack alternative that seems reasonably decent.

There's also Mattermost, which is also open source but offers paid and (I think) hosted versions. Unfortunately most of the hosted versions have per-user costs that are somewhat prohibitive IMO. (Rocket is $3 per month, Mattermost $3.50, Slack wants $6.67 per user per month minimum.)

Standing up an instance of Rocket Chat or Mattermost is probably not that hard, but long-term maintaining it might be. If you are just in charge of finding but not maintaining the platform I'd start by suggesting the open source solutions. Note that you'd always have the option of paying the companies behind them.

If your institution has a Microsoft 365 subscription then you probably have the option of using Microsoft Teams - their alternative to Slack.

And if you use Google suite you should have Hangouts Chat which IMO is inferior to Slack in a lot of ways, but it's part of that subscription if you have it already. (It lacks, for example, a way to indicate you are on PTO / away. It also has a weird threading model that does not work as well as Slack's thread model for conversations.)

The problem with Microsoft and Google there, though, is if it's multi-institutional you'd have to create accounts for folks not at your institution.
posted by jzb at 7:14 AM on July 3, 2019

I'm clearly out of touch with the latest communication technology. . . but, having worked in a few multi-institution collaborations of similar size, I'd suggest a wiki for storing documents in a sensible way, an email list for official correspondence (maybe with institution specific lists also), and slack for casual real-time discussions. It's three times as much effort to set up, but it will just work once it's running. Maybe I'm using Slack wrong, but storing documents in a sensible way on that platform sounds like a lot more effort than choosing something actually made for the purpose.
posted by eotvos at 7:20 AM on July 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

If you will be archiving documents that students will need consistent and predictable access to, Slack is not a good fit for that. At least for the forms and archives, I think a website or wiki is a much better fit.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:41 AM on July 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

Agree that it sounds like you need two different things. Some sort of a wiki or CMS (perhaps a Google Site?) plus a forum or chat app. Slack has a big discount for education, assuming you have about 75 people, that's less than $100/month.
posted by radioamy at 9:33 PM on July 3, 2019