It's important to distinguish between archival platforms, versus
collaboration platforms. It's then important to distinguish between
currently-popular platforms vs. ones with marginal use.
The topic, here, is collaboration. That is, the activity of developing
an I-D by a group. So it only needs to be useful today. It doesn't
have to be useful tomorrow. As noted, this is about an integrated
service, not just a technology.
Today, there are only a small number of large-scale, highly popular
collaborative platforms. Github most certainly is one.
d/
ps. With respect to archiving, the IETF in fact does not do museum-level
long-term protection of its data. Nor should it. But it /should/ plug
its output into a place that does. Museum-quality archive is an entirely
different animal from daily crash protection, which of course the IETF
does do.
On 1/26/2016 2:39 PM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
On 26 Jan 2016, at 14:02, Ross Finlayson wrote:
Why are IETF Working Groups using a random ‘Mickey Mouse’ third party
like ‘GitHub’?
Because it is not a random third party. Huge swathes of significant open
source development are done on GitHub, so many people already have
accounts and understand some of how it works.
Does the IETF not have its own servers (nor its own protocols for
document collaboration)?
Yes; no. Further, this goes well beyond "protocols": it is mostly about
interface for WG participants.
--Paul Hoffman