Subject: Non email WG participation

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 07:28:05 +0200

As I mentioned in the plenary:

* Innovation in collaboration tools is good.

* Excluding people who don't know that the tools are in use or where they
are or what steps are required to gain access and/or use them is bad.

* There is a risk that key parts of the documentary record will be lost.

I therefore suggest that

* The charter pages specify the locations for any data repositories /
collaboration tools / etc being used by a WG and if necessary the contact
information for the administrator.

* If a WG wants to use a collaboration tool other than email, that they
document how to use the tool, obtain credentials, etc. in an Internet Draft
or reference an RFC giving the same information.

No, grovelling through mailing list archives to find the necessary
information is not the same thing, nor is it a reasonable thing to ask.

* The IETF should make sure that all IETF documents are being tracked and
digitally signed on a regular basis as is currently done for RFCs.

Yes there are differences in legal jurisdictions but I am not aware of any
jurisdiction in which it is possible to submit a document that can't be
found. Locating copies of IETF mailing lists from the 1990s takes a non
trivial amount of time and effort. We have Note Well for a good reason and
maintaining records is another good reason.

Over the long term, I would like to see the use of tools hosted by the IETF
to be encouraged. This allows for credentials to be shared across WGs and
reduces the need to learn slightly different sets of commands for slightly
different tools. I was using source code managers in the 1980s, they don't
work like Git.

Similarly, while Wikis are great, not all Wikis use the same markup. And
this gets very tedious when cut and paste is attempted.