Creation of a slack announcements channel

[MoralCode]

Goal Create an announcements channel that is read-only to everyone except slack admins/workspace owners and specific people

Benefits

• less repeat posting/spamming of community announcements across every channel
• restricted posting means the posts are meaningful and community members who have been out for a while can more easily catch up on major internal community changes/news

Procedure for carrying this out
Technical limitations of slack itself means that creating an announcements channel where only certain people can send posts essentially requires renaming #general to #announcements and then copying all of the message history back to a new general channel.

At a time of low activity in general, i.e. overnight, I will:

1. export the public message data from slack
2. rename #general to #announcements and restrict who can send to it
3. perform a data import from the backup to create a new channel called #general with the imported history, keeping it the same as before
4. add the new general channel to the list of channels members are invited to by default

To prevent duplicate messages showing up in search results, we can clear the history of the #announcements channel after the move by changing the message retention settings on a per-channel basis

1. adrian verifies the message count in both channels is within 5 messages of each other using a script (optional)
2. slack owner (me) temporarily enables the setting to allow workspace owners to override message retention settings on a per-channel basis
3. i then change those settings for the announcement channel to something very low (like 1 day - the minimum)
4. wait for messages to be cleared, then remove the low retention and set it back to what it was

[MoralCode]

it might also help for us to define/document what kinds of announcements are considered to be "applicable enough" to the whole community to warrant a post in this channel compared to something else.

Things I think could be a good use for this channel:

• Election announcements
• CHAOSSCon announcements (in addition to public social media/external comms)
• Major news or announcements/blog posts from the board (new partnerships with other orgs, board membership changes, incident response)
• Infrastructure announcements that impact the whole community (incident response or rare platform/tooling changes for core community functions)

maybe "stuff that would be worth putting in a timeline of CHAOSS project history" is a good litmus test - AKA stuff that can be described as "the community" as a whole did something, rather than "this part of the community did something"