On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 08:31:21AM -0600, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote:
I understand that increasing of online collaboration, when applied to
the IETF, is in fact two different things. The first one is replacing
good old email collaboration by web-based collaboration. I would use the
Linux kernel project, arguably one of the most successful collaborating
project, as a counter-example of that trend, as is entirely managed
through email, and seems to thrive is spite of having very little other
kind of online collaboration.
That's because email is STILL the very best collaboration tool available:
nothing else even comes close.
1. It's low-bandwidth.
2. It can be utilized offline.
3. It's asynchronous.
4. It can be used with the UI (mail client) of the participant's choice,
as long as that mail client is reasonably well-behaved.
5. It automatically builds an archive.
6. Individual participants can build their own archives.
7. Which means that they can also search those archives with the
mechanism of THEIR choice rather than one forced on them.
8. Which means that (taken as an aggregate) there are numerous ways
to ensure the completeness and integrity of the archives.
9. It scales magnificently.
10. Privacy/security issues are minimized.
11. Attacks/abuse/etc. against it are well-understood and easy to handle.
12. It's extremely fault- and delay-tolerant.
13. It's push, not pull.
14. It's highly portable, e.g., list-rehosting and list software upgrading
or changing are all relatively painless processes.
15. There are some very good choices for well-supported, mature,
stable, open-source software to manage it.
16. (more which I'll omit for now)
Moving to web-based collaboration would be a massive downgrade: it's
a truly horrible idea.
---rsk