On 8/3/19 9:29 AM, Lars Eggert wrote:
On Aug 3, 2019, at 14:03, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think we need to be asking ourselves as a broader community whether GitHub is an appropriate tool to use,
I think a significant part of the broader community has asked itself this question, and has answered it positively.
I think it's been found to be useful, but evaluation of the risks has
been sorely lacking. Especially in light of our mostly-newfound
awareness of privacy risks. Again, these are questions we should ask
ourselves about any new tool, particularly one using the web,
particularly if externally hosted and not under IETF control, and
particularly if there is significant potential of conflict of interest
between IETF and that tool's operator.
and the same questions should be asked of any new tool that we expect people to use.
Why only ask this about new tools? Hell, I would like us to stop using email. It’s insecure, attracts spam, viruses and phishing, has archaic formatting and quotation functionalities that are ill-suited to dynamic communication and isn’t used by anyone under 30.
And yet, it's still superior, at least for IETF purposes, to every other
form of group communication currently in existence. It's standard,
widely implemented, universally available, extremely fault tolerant, and
does not impose central control (at least over private messages). It
doesn't impose silly length constraints, it actually has extensible
metadata, it's easily archived and easily searchable, etc. And any
decent MUA is more usable than anything that relies on a web browser.
(Though it could certainly be improved on, and I was just thinking this
morning that email would be MUCH better if we used some variant of
markdown rather than HTML or anything XML-based. Good luck getting
everyone's user agent to adapt to it though.)
Keith
