[Infrastructure] Collaboration/Minutes Tools

[Wayne Thayer]

Thanks for laying out the options Jos!

First off, I'm not a fan of Nextcloud because it's the most complex choice
and it creates some redundancy with the wiki that will be confusing.

Of the two simpler options, I'm happy with either a local Etherpad instance
or GDocs. I use GDocs all the time for this type of collaborative note
taking so my bias is for that approach.

- Wayne

On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 12:54 PM Jos Purvis (jopurvis) <jopurvis at cisco.com>
wrote:

> 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)
> .:|:.:|:. cisco systems  | Cryptographic Services
> PGP: 0xFD802FEE07D19105  | +1 919.991.9114 (desk)
>
>
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