Nextflow’s community is moving to Slack!

The Nextflow community channel on Gitter has grown substantially over the last few years and today has more than 1,300 members.

I still remember when a former colleague proposed the idea of opening a Nextflow channel on Gitter. At the time, I didn't know anything about Gitter, and my initial response was : "would that not be a waste of time?".

Fortunately, I took him up on his suggestion and the Gitter channel quickly became an important resource for all Nextflow developers and a key factor to its success.

Where the future lies

As the Nextflow community continues to grow, we realize that we have reached the limit of the discussion experience on Gitter. The lack of internal channels and the poor support for threads make the discussion unpleasant and difficult to follow. Over the last few years, Slack has proven to deliver a much better user experience and it is also touted as one of the most used platforms for discussion.

For these reasons, we felt that it is time to say goodbye to the beloved Nextflow Gitter channel and would like to welcome the community into the brand-new, official Nextflow workspace on Slack!

You can join today using this link!

Once you have joined, you will be added to a selection of generic channels. However, we have also set up various additional channels for discussion around specific Nextflow topics, and for infrastructure-related topics. Please feel free to join whichever channels are appropriate to you.

Along the same lines, the Nextflow discussion forum is moving from Google Groups to the Discussion forum in the Nextflow GitHub repository. We hope this will provide a much better experience for Nextflow users by having a more direct connection with the codebase and issue repository.

The old Gitter channel and Google Groups will be kept active for reference and historical purposes, however we are actively promoting all members to move to the new channels.

If you have any questions or problems signing up then please feel free to let us know at info@nextflow.io.

As always, we thank you for being a part of the Nextflow community and for your ongoing support in driving its development and making workflows cool!

See you on Slack!

Credits

This was also made possible thanks to sponsorship from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Slack for Nonprofits program and support from Seqera Labs.