[Infrastructure] Proposal: Collaboration Toolset

[Ryan Sleevi]

On Tue, Jul 9, 2019 at 4:36 PM Jos Purvis (jopurvis) <jopurvis at cisco.com>
wrote:

> So, now that I’ve thoroughly embarrassed myself for one day, let me throw
> out a proposal that occurred to me during the last CABF. :)
>
>
>
> There was discussion during the meeting of the use of tools like Etherpad
> to take minutes, providing a collaborative, real-time opportunity for those
> present to review and correct minutes information—this would potentially
> lead to faster review-and-approval cycles for minutes. In addition, there
> have been a couple discussions in different contexts about the use of tools
> like Slack for Working Groups, since this might lead to a loss of
> IP-related information from discussions.
>
>
>
> Since we have the ability to host additional services through AWS, I had
> considered starting up instances of a couple tools:
>
>    - Nextcloud (nextcloud.org) is a free and open-source tool that
>    provides document storage, as well as collaborative tools such as
>    Etherpad-like collaborative note editing. This might encourage groups to
>    store working copies of documents in a server the CABF maintains, as well
>    as offering the above-noted collaborative minute-taking.
>
> Known Luddite here. I'm not a big fan of this, largely because the more
systems we have that provide document storage, the more documents that end
up littered all over :) This was my same apprehension around Microsoft's
generous offer to host Sharepoint at one point. That said, I thought our
Wiki was meant to be the Happy Path here?

I understand the tension of not wanting to require any One True Way, but I
always worry about encouraging Many Disparate Systems. If we switch from
the 'what' to the 'why', we can see a few things:

- Collaboration on Minutes
- In-progress drafts/ballots
- Task tracking

While Nextcloud appeals for the real-time collaboration on minutes, a
different working model might be to use Mattermost itself to track minutes
real-time, and thus might also reduce the time-to-draft-minutes rather
significantly.

For in-progress drafts/ballots, I'd love to reduce obstacles and friction
for folks on GitHub, so that while it may not be required, it ends up the
most useful approach for folks.

Task Tracking is a bit more interesting. The Validation WG has, AIUI, used
a combination of Trello and Google Docs. My understanding (perhaps
incorrectly) is that the latter predates the former. I would think our Wiki
may have been equally sufficient? Not sure there.


>
>    -
>    - Mattermost (mattermost.org) is a free, open-source Slack alternative
>    that provides strong encryption with unlimited channel-logging, allowing
>    for Working Groups to collaborate without loss of IP-related details.
>
>
While no experience with this particular software, I am supportive of
finding /some/ real-time collaboration solution that works, as I think that
could unlock a lot of potential here for more effective collaboration
during our real-time events, like the telecons and F2F. There's a tension
with the cost to infrastructure to support and secure such instances,
compared to having something managed/3P (like Slack), but that's second
order to what I consider the first order discussion: Whether there is
shared sentiment in the value of real-time collaboration / chat.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://cabforum.org/pipermail/infrastructure/attachments/20190709/8c17237e/attachment-0001.html>