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Even in small organisations, the list of slack channels can get overwhelming pretty quickly. Channel naming conventions help with this, and also help people to understand the purpose of each channel at a glance. The conventions below are rooted in the following four principles…
These categories of channel are specifically intended for certain types of communication. Some of them have quite rigid rules about who can create them, who should be in them and who should Use a prefix for each category so they’re easy to find and organise.
| Prefix | Purpose | Examples |
|---|---|---|
core-<channel> |
Core channels which everyone must be in. See ‣ for more on these. | core-general |
| core-shoutouts | ||
| core-random | ||
team-<temname> |
Each formally established team gets it’s own channel for team members. The convention is that the second part of the name matches the established team name, as used elsewhere. Folks can be in multiple teams and teams can be subsets of other teams. Others can “drop in” as needed. |
These should mostly be public, but some (like team-leadership or team-peopleops might need to be private). See ‣ for more. | team-design
team-leadership
team-XYZproject |
| temp-<anything> | For extremely short-lived channels, the temp- prefix can be used. Use these for short-term collaboration or discussions. | temp-acme-clientbriefing
temp-newctohire |
| project-<id> | Project-specific channel. One for each “open” project. These should be archived by the project owner when the project is over. | project-rebrand
project-q1okrs |
| bot-<toolname> | All channels that are purely 🤖 feeds from other tools. | bot-github
bot-bamboohr
bot-asana |
| help-<subject> | For asking questions about specific, generic topic areas. | help-tech
help-slack
help-notion |
| ask-<teamname> | Channels specifically for asking questions and making requests of other teams. This avoids their team channels being overwhelmed. The second part should match the team that monitors the channel. See ‣. | ask-tech
ask-design
ask-finance |
| crew-<location> | Location-specific channels for folks who live in a certain place to chat about local stuff. | crew-london
crew-uk
crew-bayarea |
| shared-<topic> | Channels made solely for conversations with external participants. This is usually done through Slack connect. | |
| guild-<group> | Team members who are passionate about a topic can form a Guild, which essentially is a community of interest about a (usually) work-related topic. Guilds should be formally established and have an owner. | guild-managers
guild-performanceengineering |
All other channels are unprefixed, and folks are free to create, join, leave or archive them as they feel necessary. Some of these will be for work topics and discussions, some of them will be for socials discussions. Here are some examples…
| Channel | Purpose |
|---|---|
pets |
Cute photos of your pets. |
travel |
Photos of vacations, travels etc and recommendations for places to go/stay etc. |
entertainment |
Recommendations & chat for shows to go see – theatre/music etc. |
parenting |
All things parenting. |
food |
Recipes, photos of your amazing lunches etc./ |
articles |
Links to interesting articles which others in the firm might find interesting. Could be work or non-work related. |
hiking |
All things hiking/outdoor related. (We seem to have a lot of hikers ⛰️) |
lunchclub |
A place to ping other people who might want to have lunch together on Zoom. |