Pixels Camp provides a Slack instance to help the community take the best from the event, and stay connected before and after it. This guide provides a policy and some guidelines on how to use Slack in this context.
It's open to anyone willing to talk about hard-core tech with the Pixels Camp community. If you fit this profile, then by all means, join us.
When you're accepted as an attendee, you'll automatically get an invite via email if you haven't joined already. To join before being accepted, you can ask a friend who's already there to send you an invite.
Slack is just another way to connect with the Pixels Camp community and foster discussion and creativity, so you don't need to join but, having said this, it has proven to be useful for the past few Pixels Camp editions. People use it to ask questions, help each other (eg. on challenges happening before and during the event), and generally have a good time. It's also one of the primary means of communication for quick updates during the event.
If you choose not to join, you'll still get critical messages via email, and can follow us on Twitter. We're also on Facebook and Instagram because, err... everyone loves great photos.
We have good news for you. Slack has marvelous controls over notification settings, per channel, if you need to. Here's something you can start by doing: turning off notifications in the #general channel unless there's a mention of yourself.
You can do this to other channels as well, and you can turn off all notifications and check things out when you feel like it (some of us would say this is the sanest option).
Whenever possible, especially in #general, use english. Remember, although Pixels Camp happens in Portugal, it has participants from all over.
Hundreds of people in a channel can be quite noisy and we want it to be useful, not annoying. This means we have to be extra careful with anything that potentially triggers a notification, or ultimately, tries to capture your precious attention. As a precaution, @channel, @here and @everyone mentions are disabled in the larger channels.
We understand. You get all excited with bots, memes, giphy images, and random jokes about programming languages you don't use or understand. We want you to express yourself in creative ways, even if no one is listening, so there's the #random channel for that. Go for it. Or... you can create your own public or private channel and invite your pals to join you. That might work too.
On #general the moderators will generally try to keep things clean and will delete messages they find inappropriate or noisy.
The organization provides you an #announcements channel. We'll use this channel to broadcast information before and during Pixels Camp. It's a fairly low traffic channel, don't worry. When the channel is quiet, you can use it to announce meetups or other community events (but not for recruitment or to "sell" things).
The whole point of this is to promote interaction and networking between the participants of Pixels Camp, which means we should aim for some level of transparency about everyone on Slack. We won't ask you to expose your email or contact information — that wouldn't be nice — but we're going to ask you to use the same nickname you've used when you applied for Pixels Camp (ie. the same as your GitHub account).
It would be nice if you used your real name and real photo as well, but that's totally up to you.
There are a few channels you should be aware of and perhaps join, like #hackathon where you can ask questions about the 48h hackathon. Or the #quizshow, #codeinthedark, and #security-ctf channels, where participants seek hints and help each other get through the qualifiers for those competitions (most active in the weeks before Pixels Camp).
There is also the #jobs channel, which is the one and only place you can post occasional job offers. Remember: Pixels Camp is not a recruitment event and recruitment activities by sponsors or participants are not permitted.