[Infrastructure] Proposal: Collaboration Toolset

Thu Jul 11 11:07:50 MST 2019

We actually have canceled our meetings until August, since the attendance had gotten so low (but thanks for reminding me to go into WebEx and cancel those!). :)

I like Slack a lot and its use has been working fine for the infrastructure stuff thus far, but the limited membership/retention problem is, I think, significant when it comes to using it for IP-encumbered Working Groups. At least on initial reading, it would mean that WGs couldn’t formally use it for anything except casual conversations, as any formal discussions would involve IP entanglements that require history retention, which would mean paying for the service. I could very much be wrong on that one, though—obviously conversations between members don’t require an anti-trust statement, so perhaps the use of Slack by a WG would be fine so long as they don’t use it for any formal meetings or discussions?

I definitely hear the concern about convenience as well—I already have several different IM clients open during the day, so adding another would add to the chaos. :) I guess we could also go old-school and look at an IRC server, come to think of it…

Looking at Ryan’s comments, my only concern about using something IM-like like Mattermost to create minutes is that the channel would quickly get crowded with commentary. My mental picture of doing this was the main minute-taker writing the document and others in the background sliding up and down the document to suggest wording changes and the like, which lets people view the minutes as a whole rather than line-by-line as the Mattermost method would do. That might not be the right mental model for that work, though?

One appealing possibility for Nextcloud is that some of the apps within it might help centralize some of the stuff done in other services right now. As an example, the Deck app (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/deck) could take over stuff done currently in Trello, while one of the Markdown live-preview editors (e.g. https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/files_markdown) might help people draft Markdown-format ballots to make it easier to submit to Github. Those are both things that could potentially also be done in the wiki, though (not sure about real Trello-style stuff, but at least simple task tracking), which would reduce the number of places to look for things, definitely.

This is all good discussion, and *exactly* why I posted this here rather than starting the work on it!

            --Jos

-- 
Jos Purvis (jopurvis at cisco.com)
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From: Wayne Thayer <wthayer at mozilla.com>
Date: Thursday, July 11, 2019 at 1:43 PM
To: "Dimitris Zacharopoulos (HARICA)" <dzacharo at harica.gr>
Cc: Ryan Sleevi <sleevi at google.com>, "Jos Purvis (jopurvis)" <jopurvis at cisco.com>, "infrastructure at cabforum.org" <infrastructure at cabforum.org>
Subject: Re: [Infrastructure] Proposal: Collaboration Toolset

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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