All written communication across the team should happen through Slack, with documentation taking place in Notion. This means that the team should default to communication in public channels over DMs or private channels to ensure team SA (situational awareness) and context sharing. There are clearly exceptions to this and we trust everyone to use good judgement here.

Below are some specific callouts:

• Teammates are expected to monitor and be responsive in relevant channels.
• Please sparingly use @channel and @here (or other large group @'s — definitely use them when needed, but know that this will alert many people in a channel, if not all.
• Please thread. With an ever growing team, many parallel conversations will happen in channels. The best way to ensure conversation paths don’t cross and make it hard to follow and continue to discuss, use Slack threads. This not only makes conversations easier to have in real time (simultaneously with other conversations), but also easier to look back on in the future.
• Proofreading your Slack messages can save time and confusion. Given the significance of written communication, typos that can convey different thoughts from the writers intent are expensive. There will be more back and forth to clear things up or there will be incorrect information spread / confusion. A few ways this manifests:
  • The biggest culprit is accidentally using negatives (or too many of them) when that was not the intent. Literally changes the meaning of the message.
  • Verb usage that changes the person performing the action. Look at this example:
    • from Gary: President Obama - add your information to DataDawg
    • from Gary: President Obama - added your information to DataDawg