Washington DC
By day, a consultant for NOVA Web Development. By evening and weekend, he dons his costume (which looks remarkably like the jeans and T-shirts he normally wears), and goes out doing battle against the forces of proprietary software. He was the team contact for the Ubuntu DC "LoCo" and one of the hosts of the former OLPC Learning Club/Sugar Labs DC. (He has also served as a Red Hat Ambassador.)
Authored Comments
Not that I think you'll be able to change the culture of your workplace, but a number of open source alternatives are quite Slack-like and may not be as big a leap as you might think. If you haven't already looked, see https://opensource.com/alternatives/slack (I haven't tried all of them, but have spent time with IRC, Mattermost, and Riot. Mattermost seems the most Slack-like to me. Caveat: I haven't explored all the capabilities of either Slack or Mattermost. (I found myself annoyed with Riot and dropped it, though I cannot recall why specifically.)
As a coder who spent 35 years in a research institute at a university, and now consults part-time with on a different research project for the same university, this is getting bookmarked, and printed. Alas, it may be a bit too late for me: The research institute is now defunct, and my current gig which had started as an open source project seems to be undergoing some status change from the powers above. Nonetheless, it may still come in handy. Thanks.