Migrate freezingsaddles.slack.com to a pro plan

[obscurerichard]

Uh-oh, Slack is going to be deleting all the older message history for the free plan on freezingsaddles.slack.com starting on January 28th, 2025:

See also Updates to message and file history on free workspaces - this has an earlier date for the rolling deletions to begin, but we have specific warnings about the Freezing Saddles slack.

What can we do?

1. Do nothing - let this be deleted
2. Pay for the Pro plan - this is really not going to be feasible and sustainable in the long run.
3. Get Slack to grant Freezing Saddles a free plan
4. Migrate the Freezing Saddles Slack messages to another Pro plan that either some other organization pays for, or is covered under Slack's non-profit free Pro plan.

Tradeoffs

We could survive option 1, none of the data is super critical, fortunately. We mostly use this to coordinate in the moment. But I hate losing data.

As for option 2, it might not be too bad to pay for the pro plan, because we are only active for part of the year, but it could be a few hundred dollars per year. I don't really want to pay for that myself, and I'd rather not have to get anybody else to pay for this collectively if we can get the plan under the wing of a non-profit that gets Slack for free. That really leaves options 3 and 4.

Alas, option 3 is likely not going to happen. I already tried to get Slack to grant freezingsaddles.slack.com a non-profit Pro plan as a sponsored program of The Obscure Organization, which already sponsors the AWS accounts for Freezing Saddles. However, they replied:

Thank you for the follow up to your organization’s application. In order to be eligible for this program, US organizations must have 501c3 Public Charity status in their own name. Unfortunately, separate projects are not eligible for their own workspaces under a parent organization’s information.

If “Obscure Organization” wishes to support a sperate project, we recommend you offer them a channel on the Obscure Organization’s workspace as they unfortunately are not eligible for their own workspace.

I’m sorry we don’t have better news for you.

That leaves option 4. The Obscure Organization would be willing to absorb the Freezing Saddles slack. We do have the option of exporting all the public messages with the free plan we have, and importing them into the obscureorg.slack.com slack, and importing the users too. If we temporarily upgrade to the Business+ plan, we can also get all the private messages between users. I'd like to do that if we do it, and we have a $100 credit after our recent support encounter, so it would only be $95 for that first month. And we'd only need that first month.

It would be a bit of a pain adding folks to the new Slack and managing the transition, but it would yield the benefits of having a full archive of all the messages available to us going back to 2018. I'd be willing to do the work needed and get The Obscure Organization to foot the bill for the small transition costs.

Decisions, decisions

I'm going to inform the Obscure Organization board and also the Freezing Saddles organizing cabal about this and see if there are objections before committing us to this course of action.