Re: Old directions in social media.

[Kyle Rose <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 12:20 PM Keith Moore <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> If the new tooling were anywhere nearly objectively better overall, you
> might have a point.
>
Generally speaking, there's no such thing as "objectively better", so
that's a rather high bar to reach. But clearly there are participants who
have found GitHub to be an amazing productivity enhancement.

> Why in the world should IETF penalize the vast majority of its
> participants in order to favor open source software developers?   Because
> that's exactly what this is doing.   I like open source software too and
> definitely want us to be inclusive, but not at the expense of significantly
> penalizing other participants.
>
How is this penalizing participants? You can still engage on the mailing
list in the traditional way. No one is required to use GitHub to
participate in any WG, and chairs should push back in the event an author
implies that a PR is required for a contribution.

Does GitHub make it *easier* for those who know the tools to contribute? Of
course: that's exactly the point. Learn the tools and you too can benefit.

> And I can see why the model of making it easy to submit and manage text
> changes, late in a document's development, can make sense for IETF in
> general.   But git/github is still a really poor interface for this, and
> PHB is exactly right that this actually impairs and splits the discussion.
>
It does sometimes split discussion, which is where the WG chairs need to
step in and move discussion from an issue to the mailing list when that
happens. If that isn't happening, talk to the chairs or the AD.

> We did the experiment.  Now it's time to stop the experiment, collect some
> results and learn from it.
>
>From where I sit, it's been a tremendous success. Why would we voluntarily
hamstring ourselves by moving back to a less efficient universal model for
contribution?

Kyle