Folks,
I wanted to send this ahead of tomorrow’s call because I want to ensure we are on the same page with respect to drafting and editing for v1.1 (and eventually v2.0). Right now, I'm juggling a few tools, and I don’t think any one of them is doing the whole job well. I think we have three options, all with different sets of problems. Sadly, the problems are likely to be even worse if we don't land on one of the options.
Option 1: Confluence: This is already home base for the Work Group. Kantara hosts it, our meeting notes and votes live there, and everyone already has a login. No new tool to learn.
The catch: Confluence just isn’t built for real collaborative drafting. Formatting gets clunky fast, tracking who changed what is awkward, and editing a long document with several people in it at once is not what it’s good at.
Option 2: Google Docs: Google is genuinely good at the thing Confluence is bad at: real-time collaborative writing. Comments, suggestions, and multiple people typing at once are all functional. The catch: it depends on each of us keeping track of our own Google Doc links and sharing permissions. Links go stale, sharing settings get missed, and someone’s always asking, “Wait, which doc is the current one?”
Option 3: GitHub: GitHub solves the link problem: one repository, one address, always up to date, and it works whether you’re inside or outside a Google account. It also gives us a clean, dated record of who wrote what and when, which is genuinely useful for our IPR obligations under the Non-Assertion Covenant. The catch: it has a learning curve. If you’ve never used GitHub, the idea of commits, branches, and pull requests can feel like a lot just to leave a comment on a document.
Full disclosure: I’m personally partial to Markdown writing, mostly because I already write these drafts in Markdown on my own machine, so it fits how I work. But that should not be a determinative factor for the group.
Have a think so you can express your preference (or your objections) to tomorrow’s call or in a reply to this email.