[Infrastructure] Proposal: Collaboration Toolset

[Wayne Thayer]

On Tue, Jul 9, 2019 at 11:41 PM Dimitris Zacharopoulos (HARICA) <
dzacharo at harica.gr> wrote:

>
> On 9/7/2019 11:49 μ.μ., Ryan Sleevi wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> I personally don't mind introducing various tools that can assist in
> organizing the information/tasks handled by the Forum as long as this
> information "lands" in the same location and platforms that we have
> traditionally been using, otherwise Members will be forced to learn new
> tools all the time. For example, we can use all sorts of tools like
> Etherpad for drafting the minutes of the F2F or even regular
> teleconferences, but the final minutes of the teleconferences must be
> posted on a public mailing list (and appear in the archives) and the
> minutes of the F2F will be posted on the public web site.
>
> I'd be concerned about introducing tools without a clear use case and
defined usage patterns.

>
>
>>
>>    -
>>    - 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.
>
>
> This is definitely worth exploring some more, especially for
> live/real-time events. We could discuss on our next call perhaps with some
> examples of how people see this being used.
>

I agree that it's worth exploring the use of a real-time communications
platform, and that we need to define appropriate use cases. For instance, I
could see this being very useful for some of the administrative work that
I'm involved with. I also think that it would be interesting to gauge how
many members already use Slack - I'd rather not introduce yet another tool
if most folks are already using Slack. Slack does offer free workspaces
with some limitations such as message retention that may or may not be
appropriate, depending on the use case.
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