DAIR moves from Slack to Mattermost for data sovereignty & granular data retention controls

The Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) is an independent nonprofit dedicated to reducing the harmful impacts of AI and imagining a technological future that benefits our communities instead of surveilling and exploiting them.  

To date, some of the organization’s projects include developing sovereign language technologies for East African languages, analyzing social media harm in neglected countries, and creating guidelines for designing needs-based AI systems. 

Founded by ex-Googler Timnit Gebru in December 2021, DAIR consists of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and activists located across three continents, with teammates spread out over nine countries. 

Needing a privacy-focused Slack alternative 

With researchers working across the Americas, Europe, and Africa, DAIR needs a central collaboration solution that its distributed team can use to securely coordinate research and projects.  

When DAIR started, the organization used Slack for this purpose. But because they wanted to steward their own data, the DAIR team began looking for a new collaboration solution that gave them more security controls. 

“The primary factor that triggered our move to Mattermost was data sovereignty, privacy, and ownership,” says Mike Medow, director of operations at DAIR. “We needed a solution where we had 100% control over our data — where we keep it, when we delete it, how and where we back it up. Slack is a great platform but introduces a lot of uncertainty about how our data is treated and what safeguards are in place.”  

Choosing self-hosted Mattermost for data sovereignty and granular data retention controls 

As DAIR began looking for a Slack replacement, they prioritized a self-hosted solution that offered granular data retention controls.  

“We wanted to be able to set disappearing messages with various retention rates for different channels,” Medow says. 

After researching their options, the team ultimately decided that Mattermost, the secure collaboration platform built for mission-critical work, met their needs best. 

“Mattermost gives us the ability to self-host our instance and apply all the safeguards we deem important.” 

According to Medow, migrating from Slack to Mattermost was easy. 

“Mattermost provided an excellent guide to help us navigate the process, but we ultimately decided that the change was an ideal opportunity to clean up our channels and start from a clean baseline,” Medow says.  

DAIR outsources technical support to a small firm on a fractional basis. “We strive for efficiency — getting the most value for the tech support time that we have.” The company also contracts a process automation expert, who handles integrations in Mattermost. 

“Mattermost’s server and application management is minimal and well within the capability of our technical support people,” Medow continues. “So far, both hosting and automation have been straightforward with no issues.”  

Streamlining collaboration, improving governance & accelerating workflows 

Serving as a central collaboration space for a global team, Mattermost has helped DAIR researchers advance their mission more effectively. 

“We have channels where co-researchers plan and manage projects, technical channels for managing compute resources and IT matters, and channels where team announcements are broadcast,” Medow explains.  

By self-hosting Mattermost, DAIR has full data sovereignty, ensuring collaboration data stays on servers they control. Using Mattermost’s customizable data retention policies, DAIR’s data is preserved only for as long as necessary, strengthening the organization’s overall security posture. 

“We set custom data retention policies for different channels,” he continues. “Mattermost has allowed us to operate with greater adherence to our records retention policy, encouraging more intentional record keeping and ensuring the responsible governance of our organization.” 

Extending Mattermost with integrations and automation 

DAIR automated several key workflows using the Mattermost API. For example, when procurement- and fundraising-related notifications show up in Airtable, they’re automatically piped into Mattermost channels. 

“We built an Airtable with all of our grant awards and deadlines, and the notifications of deadlines post in a Notify-Grant Events channel,” Medow says. “We use DocuSeal for contract signing, and the execution of contracts posts in a Notify-Document Signings channel.” 

DAIR is also using low-code integrations via n8n to automate monitoring and reporting on key financial business processes. 

“The custom integrations enable real-time tracking of procurement processes, grant writing and fundraising tasks, and document signing workflows,” Medow says. “We are leveraging the Mattermost API and webhooks to receive informational notifications as items pass through the workflows, as well as error notifications when something goes wrong.”  

While DAIR expects to continue automating more workflows as they deepen their Mattermost use, the team is already saving hours each week.  

“As one example, our use of Mattermost as a centralized triage center has allowed us to identify an automation error in our contractor payment system that easily saved us an estimated 40-plus hours of triage and recovery time,” he explains.  

Looking ahead, DAIR sees “significant opportunity to optimize valuable resources using Playbooks.”  

Medow recommends Mattermost to organizations looking for a secure collaboration platform that delivers full data sovereignty.  

“For organizations looking to move away from privacy-hostile platforms like Slack, Mattermost is a good alternative that allows for secure communication, self-hosting, data retention, and useful integrations with other business systems,” Medow concludes.