Re: Old directions in social media.

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

>     Il 04/01/2021 18:40 Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
>     I have seen groups trying to use git and I really wish they would stop. Using git to run a WG provides a small amount of tool support for issues tracking which is useful. But the tool is designed to do a very different job and has its own bizarre vocabulary. Telling people to enter comments as 'Pull Requests' causes most people's mental gears to grind. The result is WGs whose activities are unhappily split between a Web site and a mailing list with no cohesion between the two. My conclusion is that for this approach to work, there has to be a purpose written tool that absorbs the lessons from the github experience and provides a means of following the WG from the mailing list as well. (Which is how the open meeting worked.)
> 
I'll take this chance to add - speaking of inclusiveness - that the use of git creates a barrier to participation for those whose job is not about actively developing software, either because they are not software engineers, or because they stopped developing software and moved on in their careers before git became the standard way of managing codebases. Mailing lists, on the contrary, are understood and normally used by a much broader set of people.

Any new, purpose-written discussion tool should be intuitive enough not to become a way to exclude those who cannot take a long learning curve, so that they can at least provide some input into the discussion. Actually creating standards and authoring drafts takes in itself a very long learning curve, so one may conclude that an extra bit of tool learning would not be a problem, but it would be important for people that cannot undertake that effort to be still able at least to participate in the discussion.

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
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