GSuite enterprise account for PBG and its Steering Committee

Hi Ralph (cc: Veronica, Jeff, Ivan, PBG SC)

 

The PBG and its newly elected Steering Committee wish to (continue to) use
Google Docs for collaboration, with the understanding that there could be
theoretically access issues in China (but at present we have no members from
that region and if we had them, probably they would have VPN capabilities).
This is a much better solution than expecting non-technical business folks
to do CVS/Github and hand-edit HTML or post PDFs especially when
accessibility issues are considered (Google Docs accessibility is now pretty
good, per George Kerscher).

 

At the moment people are using shared Google Docs in random personal Google
Drive spaces which is unreasonably fragile (docs would potentially vanish as
people changed personal email addresses, affiliations, etc.). 


The proper solution would appear to be to get a W3C enterprise account on
what's called "G Suite", one named user would be sufficient to set up a
shared folder that would not be subject to vanishment.  The price would be
$5.00/month if we can get by with 30GB storage (likely the case for a long
time) or $10.00/month if otherwise [1]. IDPF did this (although we were also
getting email management out of the deal).

 

An alternative if there are political reasons not to have a G Suite account
in W3C's name would be to have it in some other entity's name. E.g. I could
use WebPaper LLC. However, I think it would be ideal for longevity to do it
as W3C. E.g. if we do it via WebPaper and my consultancy terminates, then we
have a problem to deal with. Perhaps Ivan's host organization could do it
and he could expense it, if that was approved, I think that could be
preferable since he has regular employee status there.

 

I am not aware of any comparable collaborative document solution that is
usable directly from China but that could be investigated if & when we have
access issues. Meanwhile we know Google Docs meets the needs and we are
already using it.

 

We might also decide to use the Hangouts-based video/voice conferencing
features that come free with G Suite (up to 25 users). At the moment the BG
and its SC, along with the Pub WG, are happily using GoToMeeting in lieu of
WebEx, but that is thanks to piggybacking a single subscription with member
EDRLab, that depends on not having any time overlap in meetings. So no
present expectation to jump to Google for conference calls, and that could
lead to further political questions that may be better not to raise.

 

Please advise.


Thanks,

 

--Bill

 

[1] https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html