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I'm a 2nd year masters student studying theoretical CS (algorithms to be precise). I would like to know if there are any public synchronous discussion groups (slack, discord, etc.) for TCS. CSTheory StackExchange works well when someone has a specific question/query, but I felt it would be awesome to have an online forum for people interested in TCS to discuss about various developments of the field and also talk about interesting papers and concepts.

If enough people are interested we could create one in discord.

EDIT 1

As we have gained enough traction, I would like to know your opinions on how to proceed further. Some questions on top of my mind -

  1. How should it be structured and what is the scope of the discussion
  2. As I'm still an amateur, I would need some guidance from mods on how to go about this in general. And preferably some more volunteers.
  3. Also I would like to know what platforms do the people up-voted prefer.

EDIT 2

Interested people, please fill this poll

EDIT 3

I have created a group in Zulip

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    $\begingroup$ +1 - great idea! I've recently seen a Discord for algebraic geometry. The disadvantage of Discord (compared to, say, Slack) is that it doesn't allow threaded conversations, so it's hard to keep several conversations going at once and seems to get very disorganized. The advantage, of course, is if people are participating live they can do so with voice etc. Disadvantage of Slack: the free version only stores 10K messages. I wonder if ACM, IEEE, or the CCC steering committee (or whatever) could chip in the small amount of money to make a slack w/ unlimited history... $\endgroup$
    – Joshua Grochow
    May 6, 2020 at 15:37
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    $\begingroup$ @JoshuaGrochow you can check out Zulip it tries to find a good balance by making threads mandatory for every channel. Zulip vs Slack . Plus it's also open source. $\endgroup$
    – Bhishmaraj
    May 6, 2020 at 15:45
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    $\begingroup$ The AG Discord has a number of channels that I like, but we could let things occur organically. For example: They have a "math-chat" for more extended technical chats. A "today-im-learning" for 1-liners about what people are learning/working on today (sort of emulating the "quick catch-up at the water fountain"). A LBGTQ+ and LBGTQ+allies channel. A "town-hall" for the meta-discussion of the structure of the forum itself. "career-advice" etc. But some of these depend on the demographics of who joins. "announcements" channel. I'd suggest making a quick poll (not here) re: potential platforms. $\endgroup$
    – Joshua Grochow
    May 8, 2020 at 19:12
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    $\begingroup$ I think I'd be in favor of zulip for general usage, and discord for live "meet ups". I'm really disliking the deluge of unthreaded messages on the AG discord. $\endgroup$
    – Joshua Grochow
    May 9, 2020 at 20:20
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    $\begingroup$ Some of the cstheory folks at the IQC have started using Zulip and it seems pretty good so far. After looking at a lot of alternatives, we picked Zulip because of its superior LaTeX support. +1 for threads. $\endgroup$
    – user45987
    May 10, 2020 at 15:58

1 Answer 1

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CSTheory is now live at Zulip.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the above discussion and for sharing your opinion.

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