On Fri, 2012-05-18 at 07:52 +1000, Helen South wrote:
Perhaps on a more mundane level than project management, a simple workspace for collaborative text would be very useful. We had been talking about our own PiratePad/EtherPad instance - someone did have one going, though there were some issues with access (I guess these things have to be administered = more work). I have yet to find anything more convenient than PiratePad for throwing together ideas together and collaborating.
Unfortunately, I am no longer a fan of the various Pads out there. While I totally agree that as a tool it is awesome, the software itself has been so unreliable and buggy that we cannot reliably depend on them. There have been tests to try to integrate it into our infrastructure but again, software becomes the issue. Pads providers have also provided an unpleasant surprise. The most reliable one that I frequented in the past was ietherpad. Then suddenly, one day... the folks there had a crash on their EC2 host and realized.. oops, we never did a backup of our service, did we? :-) All our data from the past that openSUSE used on ietherpad is gone forever. I've tried a number of other pads, Piratepad, typewith.me, etc. And each one just doesn't stay up for very long, disconnects after a very short period of time.
Its downside is security, it's out there in a very open cloud space.
We try to be a very open and transparent project here, so I don't consider this to be much of an issue.
I've noticed a few people using GoogleDocs also.
Some have political issues about using GoogleDocs, so we must be careful not to choose a tool that offends some people in this case. Also, with my limited experience, what I've seen (and I could be wrong in how I used it) when setting a doc to public, you still can't make it publicly accessible to edit. Seems you still have to explicitly give rights to edit. :-(
As an intermediate solution, would you be able to use a management tool of your choice to maintain your own overview, importing/exporting information/lists/calendars to Google Docs?
Overall, while pads are awesome, I find they are awesome especially for collaborating together on a live document. This was especially true for when we would work on articles and we would all come on at the same time to edit the document. But pads aren't really meant to be a permanent reference page. I don't think that usecase applies for what we'd be doing here. In this case, I think our wiki is the best place to be creating such documents. Someone gathers information as it comes along and posts it to the wiki page, and it'll be a living document that evolves over time. We're less likely to be all working on the same document in realtime as we would on a pad. So let's stick with wiki which is our main tool anyway. Granted, the wiki syntax can be a bit daunting to some people, but I think in the circle of people participating here so far, we're able to tackle that with little challenge. Bryen
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org