What is the best way to discuss the specs of a minimum viable exchange format?

[BrunoWinck]

What is the best way to discuss the specs of a minimum viable exchange format?

In my view:

• It has to be a safe place to contradict and negotiate. Is an open place the best? We have also Twitter.
• Threads are a must because topics tend to spread over weeks.
• it should allow someone to expose his views in all details, including short snippets of sample code.
• It should all people in different timezones to follow. So a plain chat tool like discord is not helpful. It's hard to figure out what was talked about in 24 hours.
• I would prefer if we can limit to a circle of contributors first.

[BrunoWinck]

In fine given that the conversation was in a Twitter group DM there was an urgency to move on and I created a discourse instance.

[Oshyan]

Link to Discourse here? Or keeping it closed for now?

[BrunoWinck]

Yes closed but welcoming. It's going to be pretty technical discussions Are you interested?

[Oshyan]

I am not a developer, so if it's primarily going to be spec-level discussion, then perhaps not. I am mainly interested in keeping abreast of the ongoing interop developments in the space. Mostly as an observer rather than active participant. Unless there is reason for secrecy I'd suggest the forum be at least "view only" access for the public in any case, which might address my particular interest anyway.

[bmann]

Discourse has a lot of options @BrunoWinck -- I wouldn't bother making it closed, because mostly people won't care.

If you have enough people who want to discuss things -- amazing! That's a good thing. Give them their own spaces within the Discourse forum.

[flancian]

My proposal would definitely be 'shared doc', as in, a space that can be concurrently edited by many.

Additionally I would suggest we adopt [[wikilinks]] as a convention. The [[flancia collective]] is working on implementing [[wikilinks everywhere]]. But I would of course follow any reasonable convention for metadata/side channel.

[flancian]

The [[agora]] has a world writable shared document I started last year with others; see https://anagora.org/agora-protocol or more directly https://stoa.anagora.org/p/agora-protocol.

My proposal for a viable approach is summarized here: https://hyp.is/i3iUMtOSEeudHIML10vbwQ/iannotate.org/2021/program.html, linked also at [[agora protocol]]. I believe 'plain text plus wikilinks or hashtags' could be a reasonable 'layer 0' for exchange between tools of thought.

[Oshyan]

For what it's worth, Discourse does have a decent "wiki mode" on a per-topic (or per-category) basis that can allow any registered member of a forum to edit particular topics communally. It also has a pretty solid "history"/changes feature to help manage multiple edits.