This document covers best practices surround the naming, information fields, and roles for the chat channels. Today, we have the following type of chat channels (see chat channel mapping):

• Project channels (e.g., fabric-*, sawtooth-*)
• Working Group channels (e.g., architecture-wg, identity-wg)
• Special Interest Group channels (e.g., social-impact-sig, healthcare-sig)
• Community channels (e.g., community-*)
• Language-specific channels (e.g., russia, portuguese)
• Lab channels (e.g., labs, private-data-objects)
• Program channels (e.g., meetup, ambassador)
• Event channels (e.g., blockchain4good, hackfests)
• Devops channels (e.g., ci-pipeline, jenkins-robot)

Channel Naming

This section covers the best practices for naming for each of the different channel types.

Project Channels

• All project related channels must be named using the project name as the prefix.
• All projects should have a contributors channel (e.g., fabric-contributors, sawtooth-contributors). Naming must be consistent across all projects. Today, we have both -contributor and -dev channels.
• Project channels should be limited to ensure that people know where to look and eliminate fragmentation. The following channels should be created for all new projects:
  
  • project-maintainers - Used by the maintainers to the project to discuss topics related to the direction and vision of the project.
  • project-contributors - Used by the contributors to the project to discuss topics related to the development of the project.
  • project-end-users - Used by the end users of the projects to discuss topics and questions related to how to use the project.

Working Group Channels

• All working group related channels will be named using -wg as a suffix.

Special Interest Group Channels

• All special interest group related channels will be named using -sig as a suffix.

Community Channels

Language-specific Channels

Lab Channels

Program Channels

Event Channels

DevOps Channels

Channel Information

Chat allows the administrator to specify a "Topic", "Description", and "Announcement" via the room information. The following best practices should be used for all channels to allow for people to discover and properly use the channels.

• All channels must have a topic specified. This will be a short description of the channel.
• All channels must have a description specified. This will be a longer description that specifies information about how and for what this channel is used, as well as, when this channel should not be used.
• The "Announcement" field shall only be used when you want to call attention to something specific related to this channel. An example could be a new release of the project. 

Roles

This section covers the best practices surrounding roles for the chat channels. Today, our chat program supports the following roles:

• Admin
• Moderator
• Owner
• User

By default, all users will have the User role. The other three roles should be granted only in these instances:

From the above, you will see the following:

• Some of our channel types will not have moderators. This is because there is no one person or set of people who act in this role.
• Ownership is only provided to LF Staff. Owners can perform the following tasks over and above moderators that should not be provided to the community: Archive Room, Delete Public Channels, Force Delete Message, Set Leader, Set Moderator, Set Owner,  Set React when ReadOnly, Set ReadOnly.
• Non-program channels will have the owner set to a Hyperledger-owned account to allow for administrators to leave channels that they created.