[J3] (SC22WG5.6190) RE: [ukfortran] October meeting visa invitation letter

[Steve Lionel]

On 4/29/2020 11:10 AM, Bill Long via J3 wrote:
> As an alternative, I suspect there would be less concern if off-line discussions could be facilitated through the J3 website.  This does not address concerns about such a mode of operation in general (of which several have been discussed in this thread), but at least the J3 website is something we control, and it avoids the issues mentioned above.   Of course, it is unfair to “volunteer” Steve to do work here, so such a path would require further discussion.

I had already been thinking along these lines. When I was at DEC in the 
80s and 90s, we made great use of "NOTES files", topic-separated 
discussion groups not unlike the way Github discussions work. Project 
teams would bounce ideas off each other, and the discussions preserved 
for later reference. It was also easy to see only new entries with 
one-key navigation, something I haven't yet figured out how to do in 
Github, which forces me to keep redoing the sort and bouncing around. (I 
am sure there is a way, just haven't discovered it yet.)

(An ex-DECcie has made privately available an indexed archive of 
hundreds of DEC's NOTES files, both on product and personal subjects, 
with tens of thousands of entries. It has been a fascinating trip to 
revisit my posts from so long ago!)

I could install a message board (using one of several open-source tools 
I am familiar with) accessed through the J3 site, and we could organize 
it by subgroup and topic. I don't see this as a replacement for the 
Github, but it could be a more focused place for J3 to work on items 
without the real concerns Bill has noted. When I am done with a current 
project I will experiment with this and let people try it out to see if 
it might work.

Steve