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Re: Wikis for RFCs

2011-09-17 19:44:51
Keith Moore wrote:
I think the Annotated CPAN example ( http://www.annocpan.org/) is near perfect 
for our needs:

- The main text is visually distinguished from the annotations.
- Annotations are visually near the relevant text, rather than appended at the 
end.
- The main text cannot be changed.
- Annotations can be freely added by anybody, it is trivial to open an account.
- Users are identified but with no strong authentication.
- One user can comment on another user's comment, but cannot change it.
- There is some moderation behind the scenes (I haven't studied it, but it's 
essential in order to avoid spam).
- There's an average of 1-2 comments a day, so a small number of moderators can 
handle the traffic.

As a starting point, this might not be too bad, especially if the code is 
available and can be adapted (even if it is written in Perl, sigh).   Though I 
think that anything of this nature is going to have to adapt over time as 
experience with it is gained.


+1.

The thing is that this is all deja-vu. Consider, we are talking about professional collaboration and there are many tools that help in this area which in short, emulated the older "red-lining" ideas of getting comments. Geez, I recall when we have a in/box box on our desktop and each morning new docs come in and others you were done red-lining went out. Or you had a distribution list attached to it, and you crossed your name out and the next person on the list is the one you sneaker net the document to.

For our product, it started as online only, then slowly the users spread out, to offline, using POP3 then mailing list. At least with Exchange, NNTP and IMAP you were still online and single sourcing the data. Today, we still constantly battle trying to single source the offline with online. Something other vendors eventually learned too - i.e. Google.

So with the IETF/IESG, you will have similar issues as well:

   - Initial I-D collaboration
   - Any WG mailing list collaboration
   - Any IETF/IETF PS preview collaboration
   - Any IETF/IETF LAST CALL collaboration
   - Any IETF/IETF TS collaboration

My suggestion to first framework this with the I-D as an experimentation. I get my start with the I-D submissions and that email can have an URL to some site where we can begin the collaboration. for example, like this one that came in at 3:20pm EST today with this URL

    http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketprotocol-15.txt

changing it to:

    http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketprotocol-15

takes you to a more interesting page (IMO).

I should be able to see all current comments at the bottom and also add a comment, all nicely displayed at the bottom.

I agree with you that a commenter should be able to EDIT, DELETE its own comment but not others, only the AUTHOR or some other "sysop" can have that level of alteration. A history is needed though so that people can see where/why changes/deletions were made.

Here is one idea for Fred Baker:

I would donate our own package which does still continue to offer all the input portals we have today, but its windows based, and there are other simpler web based only packages that is 100% open source.

Take an existing open source CMS package with a "Topical" framework, i.e. like PHPBBS or the very simple PHP package like SMF from http://www.simplemachines.org/smf. This last one is pretty flexible, simple and should work under any OS box.

For each new I-D, automatically added as a new TOPIC where users can follow up and in this topic/blog style format.

A CMS package is all that is needed that offers easy

  - User/Group profiles
  - Calendaring
  - voting and polling
  - Public vs Private messaging
  - EMAIL, Mailing list integration

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