State of the UC Tech Slack Community

By Tim Marconi. Another year is quickly coming to a close, and so it seems a good time to provide an update on the UC Tech Slack community. If you haven’t had a chance to read previous articles in the periodic blog series about UC Tech Slack, check them out now:

Our workspace now has 14,646 members, who have sent almost 20,000,000 messages since we started the workspace five years ago.

A chart displaying Slack usage over time The community has been on a steady rise since 2016, and we had historic activity in March 2020, which was the start of the pandemic. A lot of the traffic was in the #zoom channel, as our distributed community needed resources to understand how to pivot to a remote work world and also to support remote instruction on a tool that was actively changing every day. The community worked together to comb through the latest release notes, anything they had heard from their respective Zoom representatives, and tips on where to get microphones and cameras, since supplies had become constrained.

The #security channel continues to be very popular, with almost 5,000 messages posted by over 200 different members. It has seen a lot of collaboration on ransomware strategies. It’s also a place for sharing announcements about webinars for products that we use at UC so we all can learn more about the latest vulnerabilities and fixes.\

The UC Tech conference was virtual this year and a tremendous success with thousands of attendees. The community involvement was evident in UC Tech Slack. That week saw a record number of activity happening in #uctech-conference as participants met in the Slack workspace to discuss the event or catch up on any presentation or discussion that they might have missed.

Collaboration is key to the success of University of California, and it continues to amaze us that we are averaging 15,000 messages a day in our UC Tech Slack instance!

If you’re a UC professional engaged with technology (for example, you work in research, library, central IT; or you provide financial, communications, HR or other administrative support for IT; or you teach or conduct research about tech), UC Tech Slack is here for you. Are you ready to join UC Tech Slack?

Tim Marconi, director of Technology and Digital Experience, UC San Diego Library.Tim Marconi is director of Technology and Digital Experience, UC San Diego Library.

Comment (1)

  1. Tom Andriola

    What a great piece! Thank you Tim
    While maybe a small thing, just an amazing picture of creating connections that just demonstrates the size and potential power of our UC IT community, when we mobilize it

    Reply

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