Over the last year we have basically migrated all osu! administration and development communications to Slack. As it has proven astoundingly successful and is a tool we couldn’t live without, I’ve been considering how to expand our Slack usage to include a more wide audience. The next step starts today.

Calling everyone interested in:

• Testing cutting-edge features with us in real-time.
• Contributing art, graphic or sound resources to the project (or getting the core team’s feedback on your creations).
• Getting help working with the API, or just developing your own apps/services which further build the osu! ecosystem.
• Communicating directly with me and the rest of the team in a focused and spam-free environment.

From today you can join us on a new public slack team I created specifically for the more open future of osu!. Internally we will still be using our private Slack team for more of the administration (and private development) side of things, but gradually I hope to make more of this transparent. Think of this as the first step of something larger.

A few things to note:

• Don’t join unless you fit in to one of the above categories. In the future we may extend the scope, but for now people found abusing the new communication media will be gracefully removed from the team.
• This is not a new way to bug the team for account queries. Don’t use it as such; not only will we ignore you, but we will increase your appeal duration an extra 6 months.
• Please register from your osu! registered email address.
• Please set your username and your First Name to your osu! username. The username field is all lowercase, so use your First Name to adjust case to exactly match your osu! username. Leave Last Name blank.
• This is a free Slack team, which means we will have limited history. Make sure to export any important conversations you may want to keep in the future. Going forward I will consider whether it’s feasible to make this a paid Slack team based on the number of users we see active on it.
• Slack has very good mobile support, as well as native apps available for windows and OS X. Figure out what suits you best.

I will touch back on this subject as we figure out how it is going to work, but for now it’s a matter of getting relevant people in one place so we can better discuss the future :).

Don’t know how to join? Read this post again more carefully.