On 2/27/21 10:00 PM, John Levine wrote:
It is sheer hubris to imagine that we are so special that nobody else could have built collaboration tools that would work for us.
No it's not, because:
- IETF does have fairly unique requirements. Few organizations collaborate among thousands of volunteer contributors and reviewers to write complex technical documents that must be universally accessible, publicly searchable, and archived.
- Nearly all existing collaboration tools with the assumption that those collaborating can be forced to use those tools (e.g. because employers require it), whereas IETF cannot reasonably do that especially if (a) the tools are platform-specific, (b) the tools have significant per-user costs (we can't expect IETF participants to pay to use a common toolset), or (c) the tools violate users' privacy (which is true of all web sites that use tracking cookies) (Want examples of sheer hubris, consider the many companies who think it's perfectly ok to track every bit of personal behavior that they possibly can of millions or billions of people.)
- Most of these collaboration tools have vendor-lockin as part
of their design, limiting their applicability for an
organization that needs its documents to be maintainable for
many decades.
- Many collaboration tools do not work well for attendees in highly diverse time zones, especially if they expect people to watch for incoming instant messages.
- Many collaboration tools that I see have lousy facilities for searching and archiving.
- We are capable of evolving the tools we use to meet our needs,
much more than can be said for tools that others provide.
- Most of the collaboration tools that I see are actually worse than email in nearly every respect.
- Any tools that are maintained by some company out there have a decent chance of not existing within a few years, or existing only in a form that isn't compatible with older files. That goes even for tools made by Big Companies.
- Forcing people to use crippled tools kills innovation.
I'm not saying that there absolutely is no solution out there,
but it's pretty hard to beat what we have with COTS tools, and
much easier and safer to do what we're doing than to expect some
company to provide what we need.
Keith
