RE: WiKi usage for ITS WG

Hi Masaki,

> I was originally thinking of a standard discussion board 
> (like there are for TMX, TBX, etc of OSCAR) simply because
> I am not a big fan of having a bunch of threaded mails in 
> a mail inbox. Online discussion boards are a lot easier to
> view threads. If W3C WiKi provides also a discussion board, 
> that would be really worth thinking of using it.

OK, I see. But, did you have a look at the archive pages of the mailing list
themselves?
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-i18n-its/2005JanMar/thread.html
It looks a lot like a board: you can display by threads, answer one, create a
new one, etc. There are probably not many difference between these pages and a
board.

One thing I useally don't like too much in a board is that I have to go there to
see the new messages (vs. being notified when they are posted). It also forces
you to navigate back and forth much more to see everything instead of getting
the emails as they are posted right in my email. Boards are also rather slow to
access when you don't have broadband access (like myself from home where I work
often early mornings and evenings). But that is just me.

Regarding a wiki. I can see much advantages in using a wiki to do some
collaborative work. It's very easy to draft up documents or chunks of documents
that could be later on integrated in our official deliverables.

One of my concerns--keeping track of the history, etc.--was unfounded: Richard
has shown me that you can easily see the list of changes and who did what wehn,
revert back, and so forth.
However, he also pointed out one issue that we may have trouble to deal with:
write-access. Currently the wiki available for the W3C is completely open (it's
part of the philosophy of wikis). Anyone could make a contribution. This, alas,
opens a can of worms regarding our IPR policy. To keep our work in the RF
(Royalty Free) framework we have in ensure that any contribution is done by
people who have officially acknowledged the W3C IPR Policy and won't introduce
the risk of patent claims in parts of our work later on. One solution would be
to somewhat restrict the write-access to members only. I'm not sure if the W3C
wiki would go for this. Using our own wiki, hosted by one of our members could
be a possible solution, but we need also to clear up the implications at the
W3C.

Cheers,
-yves

Note: I'm moving this thread to the members-i18n-its list since it's more an
'administrative' topic than something about ITS requirements.

Received on Monday, 28 February 2005 14:52:38 UTC