This morning I feel quite far from where we should be with MeetEcho, since I am unable to access any of the sessions ("Unauthorized"). I've heard out of band that others are having similar problems. It appears to be a Datatracker capacity issue compounded by MeetEcho's failure to do SSO properly (and thus 100x'ing DT load). Two bespoke tools conspiring to trip us up.
The point being that these bespoke tools have a cost, not just in units of dollars, but also in choice, reliability, etc. We should think hard about what is so essential in our DNA that it merits all the costs.
On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 1:30 AM Carsten Bormann <cabo@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2020-07-27, at 20:28, Richard Barnes <rlb@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>> We should be minimizing our dependence on customized features.
>
>> why? so we can be dependent on webex? pfui!
>
> On the contrary, the more special features we have, the more locked in we are to the tools with those special features, and the less flexibility we have to adapt with the times / budgets / needs of the community.
I would agree with the sentiment on anything that is not essential to our DNA.
We probably should not use specialized accounting software.
But running our internet-drafts repository on Typo3 (*), while it also would get rid of dependencies on customized features, is not what we should do.
Web meetings that are replacing the traditional IETF week are essential to our DNA.
Different from running an insurance company or anything else that has cookie cutter meetings, these really should be based on situated software [1].
Fortunately that can be built on a standard: The Web + WebRTC.
(Unfortunately, implementations of our own dogfood aren’t fully cooked, but that is a problem with any web-meeting software. Also, A/V fundamentally is hard, most people have little education in this space, and a lot of garbage hardware gets in the way.)
I think we are quite close to where we should be with meetecho.
We are maybe not doing the development in a sufficiently agile way.
Of course many reasons can be cited why that is hard to do right now, but we should strive for agility.
It is also not clear that we own what we develop; RFC 873 applies.
Grüße, Carsten
(*) I’m sorry, not everyone here has used Typo3, so that sentence may not invoke the horror it should.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_application
(The renaming doesn’t get the point. Well, I hope you do.)
