Currently we have several means of communicating inside KDE:

• IRC channels - there are a lot of them
• Forums - there are a lot of them
• Mail lists - there are a lot of them
• Wiki messages - there are a few of them
• Telegram - not officially, but quite a few of us use it since Akademy.
• Google Hangouts / Jitsy / Mumble - many of use use it for conferences, meetings and others

Have I missed any?

To an experienced user, this is much to handle, probably too much. For a new user... this is chaos.

We need a unified way of communicating, that connects to all these, and is mobile friendly.

"Slack" tries to achieve this, but it's proprietary software, so we're not considering it, but it's concept is a good place to get started.

What I think that we currently need (not sure if we have this yet or not) are APIs for the Forums and Wikis. Bots can be used for the IRC and Mail.

Now, I'm not saying that we should give up our current communication system. All I'm saying is that we should have an application/website/app/what ever that connects to all these, and the user/developer can subscribe to different projects/groups. When a message is posted they get a notification. From that app they should be able to reply.

There still are many things in my proposal that need to be solved, but I believe this is something that we should have.

Any opinions? Suggestions? Completions?

Telegram for chat
Hangouts for videochat

IMHO the most important parts are a) that the official channels are actually active and maintained and b) that they are Free Software and Open Format/Standard.

That being said, if – hypothetically – as a community we are able to only maintain one channel, it is better to have that one properly maintained and followed channel, even if it’s not as glittery and shiny, than to have dozens of unmaintained channels.

More does not equal better. Better equals better.

For designer -> dev communication, this has a lot of interesting stuff (many still in a pre-alpha state): https://github.com/opensourcedesign/resources/issues/16

You may want to take a look at Matterbridge. It supports a number of chat platforms and can be easily extended.