The Open Library Foundation has a Slack workspace called “FOLIO,” reflecting the Foundation's origins. This workspace is rather special in that it was created under Slack’s original terms of support for non-profit projects; notably, it has unlimited users and unlimited historical storage at no cost to the Foundation. New non-profit projects to Slack do not have the same terms of service.

To better reflect the Slack workspace as a resource for all Foundation projects, the workspace name is changing from “FOLIO” to “Open Library Foundation”, and the URL will change from https://folio-project.slack.com/ to https://openlibraryfoundation.slack.com/. This change will take place on Monday, March 31, 2025. Slack will redirect from the old URL to the new one.

Change to Workspace Invitation site

To receive an invitation to the Foundation’s Slack workspace, go to https://slack-invitation.openlibraryfoundation.org/. This site is available now. The old invitation site — https://slack-invitation.folio.org/ — will redirect to the new site change date.

Requests to projects to rename their channels

To eliminate confusion between projects, all projects should rename their channels to include a project prefix. For instance, the existing #support channel becomes the #folio-support channel. This request won’t be forced on channels unless there is a request from a project to use the same name. That said, it would be welcoming to new Foundation projects if this potential source of confusion about channel names didn’t exist.

To rename a channel, get the channel details by clicking on the channel name at the top of the window. In the “About” tab, click “edit” next to “Channel Name”. Channel members and apps will not be affected by this renaming operation. Contact Peter Murray if you have problems renaming a channel.

Projects' -general channel

Each Foundation project on the Slack workspace has a -general channel. (This is separate from the Workspace-wide #general channel.) By default, all new members to the Foundation’s Slack workspace are added to all of the projects' -general channels. We do this to encourage communication and collaboration between projects by sharing announcements and questions. Because of the wide reach of the -general channels, the @here and @channel notification functions are disabled on all -general channels (also including the Workspace-wide #general channel). Projects that want a way to notify all members are encouraged to create a separate channel for that purpose. (Using the suffix -announcement is encouraged to promote consistency between projects.)