Re: [Tools-discuss] Content at notes.ietf.org is not archival

[Tero Kivinen <[e-mail]>]

Carsten Bormann writes:
> 
> > On 16. Sep 2021, at 09:46, Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > 
> > Or, just automatically delete notes 30 days after creation.
> 
> (Again, I don’t know whether this was a serious proposal.
> I’ll treat is as such for the purpose of this message.)

I also think this automatic delete after 30 days would be good
improvement. Or actually I would say 30 days after last edit (and if
the last editor has datatracker account we could send email notifying
that the note will expire in 7 days or similar). 

In addition that we do need an easy way to transfer data from the
notes.ietf.org to the datatracker. I.e., a way I can go to the
datatracker for my WG, and say this note in the notes.ietf.org should
be imported to the datatracker with this title (i.e., interm meeting
notes, or IETF xxx minutes or whatever). 

> Or, don’t offer the service at all?
> (Probably better than deleting it 30 days after creation (!).)
> 
> Most of the people who have done work in the IETF know about the
> value of accessing random traces of that work from the past. After a
> couple of decades, we mostly got rid of the 6-month ideology around
> Internet-Drafts; I wouldn’t want to repeat that painful experience.
> 
> Collecting notes in our own service (as opposed to hackmd.io or
> Google docs) gives us more control. Another benefit of having a
> common service is that, after a while, everybody knows how to use it
> and we can integrate it into other tools.
> 
> Crippling such a service because we can’t figure out how to keep up
> some ideology strikes me as an expression of contempt for the work
> of the IETF’s contributors. You don’t have to feel the same way, but
> it should be well understood that this is the signal that is being
> sent.

The problem with notes.ietf.org is not that we can't keep the data,
itis that we can't find the data. I have no idea what was the etherpad
url for my session 4 years ago. I can most likely find it from the
chair slides if I happened to copy it there, but otherwise I would
need to go and find it from the somewhere else.

If we force people to move pages out from notes.ietf.org after the
session finishes, they are archived in the location where we can
actually find them. They can be stored to the datatracker as minutes
etc, or they can be moved to the working group wiki or similar.

Storing data is useless if people can't find it, and
etherpad/notes.ietf.org are both in that category.
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