Use of Google Docs for discussion

W3C has traditionally been very good about maintaining a
rich historical record of discussions and decisions with
its mailing lists, issue trackers, well-versioned
documents, IRC records, and meeting minutes -- all
extensively inter-linked.

An important discussion is taking place right now in the
margin of a Google doc [1].  I am not aware of any plans
to preserve this document, which will almost certainly
disappear. Contributions to discussion in the marging not
only have no persistent identifiers; they have no citable
identifiers at all.

Relegating serious issues to the margins of Google docs
makes it hard for anyone not actively participating in
the discussion to see what is happening and will make it
impossible for anyone in the future to reconstruct the
rationales for decisions. Why should anyone take care in
formulating their thoughts if the context makes them easy
to ignore and guarantees that they will disappear?

Could we at least perhaps limit comments on Google docs
to points of detail and keep discussion of substantive
issues on the mailing list?

Tom

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/10i9oSb548T3EpK0aPFDhBNR8ycy7QFthiJgPx-pdi0Q/edit

-- 
Tom Baker <tom@tombaker.org>

Received on Saturday, 29 June 2019 09:17:21 UTC