Re: Old directions in social media.

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 5, 2021, at 12:32 PM, Kyle Rose <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
>> 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.

Yes, because they already knew how to use that tool, and because the use of that tool was penalizing everyone who didn’t know how to use that tool.   It’s not as if git/GitHub are “good” for editing of text documents in any other sense.  
>> 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.

Right but instead of having one discussion, now there are effectively two discussions, with the GitHub one having more “pull” with the document editors.  


> 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?

Because email is actually both more efficient and fairer.  

Keith