[Infrastructure] Collaboration/Minutes Tools

[Jos Purvis (jopurvis)]

After our discussion on the call today, there seem to be several potential tools for real-time minutes editing:

ETHERPAD
Pros:
            - No authentication by default: quick for people to get going, and no ongoing onboarding/offboarding to keep track of
            - Familiar interface, so people can hop in and get going quickly
            - Basic/no-frills formatting should keep people focused on content over presentation
            - Gerv. :)
            - Very low overhead—can be run from a tiny instance online or just from someone's laptop (the latter solution does not require functional Internet access for collab, just a local network)

Cons:
            - Unauthenticated, Internet-accessible minutes create a big liability risk for the Forum due to content leakage
            - Unauthenticated services on the Internet have a tendency to be abused in other ways
            - Authenticating access means building and tracking authentication (even if it's just HTTP basic auth)
            - Solves the real-time collab piece, but nothing longer-term for documents (the solution for which might be 'place in wiki', although that has its own issues)
            - We have to run something to make it work
            - Contents not in Markdown, so pasting into wiki may require some reformat work

GOOGLE DOCS
Pros:
            - Familiar interface so people can get going quickly
            - Has a unique-ID "edit if you have the link" function by default, so we get collaborative editing with lower risk from Internet exposure
            - We don't have to run anything to make it work

Cons:
            - Solves the real-time piece, but may encourage this for more permanent work product, which we don't want
            - Extra formatting may prove distracting (people worrying about bullets vs. numbers, e.g.)
            - Requires functional Internet for any member collaborating
            - Contents not in Markdown, so pasting into wiki may require some reformat work

NEXTCLOUD
Pros:
            - Simple editing interface similar to Gdocs/Etherpad - people should get going fast
            - Has a unique-ID "view if you have the link" function for reviewing edits
            - Contents in Markdown, so they're directly transferable to the wiki
            - Provides a long-term document repo as well as the short-term minutes-collab solution
            - Basic/no-frills formatting should keep people focused on content over presentation (this goes away if you use Collabora, which is more like Gdocs)

Cons:
            - Sharing is view-only unless you use Collabora plugin
            - Requires functional Internet for any member collaborating
            - Requires that we run tools ourselves
            - Requires authentication for editing, which means tracking onboarding/offboarding (although we could centralize this with the wiki)

Of these, the simplest solution seems to be “the chair or vice-chair runs Etherpad on their laptop during the meeting and everyone uses that”. No Internet access required, no overhead. We can even supply a VM or container with it pre-configured to make hosting it as easy as possible for the person responsible. That solves the immediate need for real-time minutes-taking, but doesn’t provide anything beyond it. Running Etherpad on AWS would be difficult to do without some sort of VPN or IP access whitelist, which would need adjusting for each F2F to make sure we could get to it but no one else could, and would get messy to manage with remote collaborators.

The most complex but featureful solution seems to be providing Nextcloud with the Collabora plugin, and use a centralized authentication between that and the wiki so that everything uses one set of credentials for everyone. It does require that everyone has Internet access to get to it during meetings (historically this has been hit-or-miss, although it’s become more of a requirement for future F2Fs), but it offers both a short-term collaboration solution and the larger “put all your committee/F2F work products and shared documents in here” solution to take that weight off the wiki but prevent losing any documents to individual accounts. That said, it also requires running stuff ourselves and has the most moving parts, so that’s definitely a concern.

Not married to anything right now; what do people think?


--
Jos Purvis (jopurvis at cisco.com<mailto:jopurvis at cisco.com>)
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