[OpenISO] Software and Documentation for procedures?

[Norbert Bollow]

"Std Lib0" <stdlib0 at googlemail.com> wrote:

> That's why I thought about peertopatent.org, their software seems to
> do a decent job when discussing drafts (I'm using it) and extra
> features suitable to openiso could be added accordingly.

Ok, well, do you know what CMS system they've based the site on?  Is
that publicly available?  If so, under what license?

> But probably a wiki would do pretty well initially, while the
> procedures are explored. What about an openiso.wikidot.com for now
> (http://www.wikidot.com/features)? Lots of features, private
> backups, for free. Noooxml uses it. Great for integration of
> communities.

On the other hand, adopting wikidot for OpenISO.org as a whole would
probably hinder the efforts to create a web-based system supporting
specifically the kind of workflow that we want for OpenISO.org, and
in addition it would seem pretty absurd to me for an "open" standards
organization to rely on software that we cannot modify.

But since Wikidot comes with such high praises, and we need something
right away to get started with and gain experiences that allow us to
understand what workflow we want to implement in the OpenISO.org
workflow management system, it seems an ok idea to me to use Wikidot
for a "Working Group on OOXML", with the understanding that as soon
as OpenISO.org has a general workflow management system (with all the
important features and decent usability) we will switch to using that
exclusively.

So I've set up a "Wikidot"

http://F29500.OpenISO.org/
"secret password": open

At the same time, let's also continue moving forward with defining
OpenISO.org procedures and approval criteria in general, and producing
and overview of an important set of protocols and data formats.

I'd like to get started as soon as possible with a systematic
evaluation of various specifications that get called "standards".

> I also would like to suggest having a look at the new commenting system of
> the free software foundation
> (http://gplv3.fsf.org/wiki/index.php/Comment_system
> ) called stet. It was used first to handle the comments for the GPLv3. See
> for instance it working for the Gnu Affero draft:
> http://gplv3.fsf.org/comment/agplv3-draft-2.html
> . It looks very intuitive for mass revision, highlighting in a saturation
> scale the sections in which there are more disagreement.

I agree that this appears to be a useful tool in the context of
soliciting comments on relatively short documents of perticularly
high importance.

For example I could imagine using something like this when soliciting
comments on an OpenISO.org approval criteria draft.

Do you know whether it is accessible to people with disabilities?

> > The "online editing" would be similar to how you edit a page in a
> > wiki, but with the additional constraint that the text should be not
> > only suitable for converting to HTML but also suitable for displaying
> > in plain text format suitable for quoting in text emails.
> 
> This reminds me of a wiki markup called markdown:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

Looks like a good starting point, yes.

> as for the underlying storage backend, it would be very interesting to use
> the idea of git (the revision control of linux,
> http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/Git): each revision has a unique
> cryptographic hash, so that from the knowledge of this short hash
> alone, it is possible to obtain the original authentic document even
> if the document is stored in an untrusted storage: any undue
> modification in any letter of the document would result in a
> different hash, so each hash can be seen as a pointer to the
> authentic document.  this is very nice feature to have on
> distributed documents.

What about the idea of building the OpenISO.org "workflow management
system" so that it is in fact a front-end for Git?

> ps: Any software, however, will have to deal with the entities of the
> standardization process. What are the fundamental entities?

I really think that we should get started with doing the work, and
then gradually build tools to support us in doing so...

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org