[Gluster-devel] Etherpads and archiving

[Kaushal M]

Hi all,

We use etherpads a lot in this community. We use it arrange meetings,
collect notes, collaborate on designs, and for a lot of other uses.

Our current preferred etherpad hosted by the FSFE, is being shutdown
[1]. This is an issue for us, as a lot of community documents are on
this etherpad instance, and are in the danger of being lost forever.
(Don't worry, there is an effort happening to archive documents from
here).

To ensure that we don't face such a situation in the future, we have
decided that
etherpads (or alternatives) should only be used for live collaboration
on text documents. After which they must be archived in the GlusterFS
github wiki [2].

This ensures us that we are not dependent on a particular etherpad
instance, and leaves us free to use/move to better alternatives when
needed. All etherpad users are encouraged to follow this.

This guideline is already being followed for the weekly community
meetings. The pad (or hackmd.io [3]in this case) is used for
collecting updates and topics through the week, and used to add
minutes during the meeting. It is then archived at the end of the
meeting [4][5], and a new pad is created for the next meeting.

Also as a part of this, we'd begun an effort to find and archive all
existing community etherpads on the FSFE etherpad. Saravana sent out a
mail [6] regarding this. We need help from the community to do this.
Let us know of any unknown etherpads you were using that need to be
archived, and archive it.

Thanks,
Kaushal

[1] https://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/System-Hackers/Decommissioning-Pad
[2] https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/wiki
[3] https://bit.ly/gluster-community-meetings
[4] https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/wiki/Community-Meeting-2016-11-02
[5] https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/wiki/Community-Meeting-2016-11-09