Ask TIA: Are you part of the tech community on Slack?

Hi TIA community.

The internet has started to adopt Slack not only as a collaborative messaging platform for teams, but also as a place to hangout and discuss various kind of interests. It’s main concept is comparable to IRC, where users can subscribe to multiple channels and participate in discussions – but from my experience, Slack has better User Experience that requires little barrier to enter for non-tech users. Slack can become a good alternative for discussing something that’s beyond 160 characters (via twitter), back-and-forth comments on a blog post, or synchronous communication.

Now that we are on the same page, let me explain why I created this post – I ran into Focus Asia channel when I looked around for a community to join.

Here’s what it said on the landing page:

Focus Asia is a place where you can chat in real-time with other like-minded people who share and learn,together.

We strongly believe that in the coming years Asia will be the new hotbed of activity. Focus Asia is our response to the growing need for communication between Asia’s movers and shakers with aim to facilitate innovation and support by creating a centralized community.

Although it looks promising, not everyone can simply join since it requires a one-time fee of $49. Honestly, I was surprised with the amount of fee it requires and quite disappointed with the exclusive-nature of this community. I found another startup #channel which is free, but it does not seems like it is focused on Asia (keyword: Global). One thing that comes to mind: wouldn’t it be nice if TIA has a slack channel that is open to everyone?

If TIA members are part of other tech/startup-related channels, please share it in the Comments section. ^.^

Image Credit: Kris Krug