Real time collaborative tools for authoring documents and spreadsheets

[isedwards]

We need real time collaborative tools for authoring documents and spreadsheets.

This issue was first raised in the May 2019 workshop in Reading. Google Docs and Met Office SharePoint were suggested and discussed during the meeting and also in some depth over subsequent months.

At the time, there was broad support for Google Docs. Concerns with Met Office SharePoint included:
a) Relying on a single partner's tools which may be changed or removed over time
b) Concern that the project should remain independent of WMO or any NMHS

(Our project also needs mailing lists. A parallel conversation dismissed the idea of using Meteo France's public mailing lists with address like opencdms-discussion@meteofrance.fr).

There was one suggestion that we should maintain our own solution, on our own severs, due to privacy concerns and since future collaborators may not be able to access Google products (e.g. in China). This additional suggestion was not pursued for several reasons:

1. Lack of resource to maintain a server installation of an open-source collaborative tools suite
2. Privacy issues relate to all solutions
3. As an open source project most, if not all, material created with these particular tools will be shared publicly
4. The possible needs of future collaborators must be put second to the more immediate needs of current collaborators

Last year there was overall support for using Google Docs, but the project had no mechanism to make a desision.

On the 11th August 2020 we asked for proposals for preferred collaborative document writing tools. Google Docs and Met Office SharePoint (Office 365 were proposed). Between Friday 14th August and Tuesday 18 August the group voted using an (overly simple, but free) online voting tool.

The results were:

Tool	Votes
Google Docs	3
Met Office SharePoint	4
Either	2

This exercise has resulted in the following recommendations:

1. Met Office SharePoint should be the default tool for the project for a six month period on a trial basis
2. A report should assess whether the project should remain independent of WMO and individual NMHSs and a further recommendation put to the PMC in 6 months
3. Better online voting tools should be investigated and a recommendation made for future surveys

[Steve-Palmer]

On the mailing list question. If we move the registration of the opencdms.org domain name to the UK2 service (where climsoft.org, met-elearning.org and commonwealthmet.org already reside), we would automatically get 5 mail forwarding addresses as default, and we could buy more if necessary including mailboxes to store the email traffic. Or we might be able to buy a mail forwarding service from the current domain name hosting service. This would have the advantage of being in the form list@opencdms.org

[isedwards]

We already have unlimited mail forwarding, but ideally we're looking for a solution that makes all messages publicly available and searchable (since we're an open source project this allows others to review what we are doing and get involved more easily).

Our current mailing lists opencdms@wmo.int and reading@wmo.int were online and searchable (although I'm not sure whether this changed recently). But they are closed groups and cannot be made open so that anyone can join or view the discussion.

Here is an extensive example of searchable/archived mailing lists for open source projects spanning many years:
https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo

See for example the archive of open discussions of the OSGeo board of directors: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/

They are using old software called Mailman. I could set this up for us, but it's a pain to install and maintain.

@6a6d74 maybe able to advise whether the OpenWIS Association Discourse instance allows interaction through email. We could agree to use this without it being located at the opencdms.org domain.

[DenisStuber]

The owner of the mailing lists : opencdms@wmo.int and reading@wmo.int is able to open the lists to anyone on Internet .