Revision of third-party slack channels projects

This is an spin-off from https://github.com/kubernetes/community/pull/8924

So, there is a policy about slack channels in kubernetes org defined in https://www.kubernetes.dev/docs/comms/slack/#should-you-have-a-channel-on-the-kubernetes-slack

This policy allows to host third party projects on kubernetes slack, that is maintained by the slack-admins group

https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/main/communication/slack-config/README.md

Slack is not a free service, and back in 2025 the project faced a dramatic situation when the company decided to downgrade the special status , @joshberkus blogged about it https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/06/16/changes-to-kubernetes-slack/

During that time of uncertainty some problems where very evident, it was unclear how to migrate everything and also not loosing information , who was responsible of what (CNCF or slack admins or ...) but it was clear that Kubernetes and CNCF slack were completely different things https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/06/16/cncf-slack-workspace-changes-coming-on-friday-june-20/ and with different owners.

I think that to avoid any issue in the future, we should be more clear about our slack policies.

Do we want to support third party projects? there are already a number of third party projects using our slack and more are being added, so we can create an unfair situation.

However, are these projects aware of the risks? are slack admins and the project able to sustain this? what happens if we need to pay for the services? or migrate to another provider?

This is not a new situation, we already have similar issues with prow and other resources, so I think that from the project perspective we should discuss more in detail this topic.

/cc @mrbobbytables @kubernetes/steering-committee @mfahlandt

Start by reading the Slack policy at kubernetes.dev/docs/comms/slack and the configuration guidance in communication/slack-config/README.md, then review the linked community pull request and the CNCF and Kubernetes blog posts. Done would require an agreed policy for third-party projects, including ownership, sustainability, costs, and migration responsibilities.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.