Hi All, I have been poking around various apache project lists on how brainstorming of various topics is done. I could not find an alternative example but using Mailing lists for all communications and decisions. Many projects are using JIRA for easy recording of a topic, mainly because they intern hit the mailing lists. Most of the projects also have a IRC channel to hash out any opinions on a topic and summarize it back to the ML thread.
I suggest we also follow the same protocol and once a conclusion is made, record it on the Wiki. Here is my personal opinion on why we should avoid any document links and email itself: * The whole point of communication is to engage the community. The elegance of free form writing and in-line comments is far out-weighed by grabbing community attention on a topic. The more the merrier and an increased chance of attention. Community engagement is already a tough battle many open source projects deal with and communication is the last thing we want to reduce. * With so many sites mirroring and archiving apache mailing lists, making the content first class searchable is undeniable. * All mailing list context is guaranteed to be persistent, external documents are outside the scope and cannot be guaranteed. I can go on, but in short, I strongly vouch we avoid important architecture brainstormings in google docs and put the content in a JIRA and comment on it with every one’s opinions recorded. Suresh
