Hi,

regarding changing the way we document past (and more importantly future) changes, I've always been a big fan of the FLIP analogy [1]. I would love if we could make this work for Beam as well, while preserving the 'informal' part that I believe all of us want to keep. On the other hand, this could make the design decisions more searchable, transparent and get more people involved in the process. Having design documents durable is of course a highly important part of it.

 Jan

[1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/whfy3706w2d0q6rdk4kwyrzvhfd4b5kg

On 5/29/24 15:04, Kenneth Knowles wrote:
Hi all,

Yesterday someone asked me about the design doc linked from https://github.com/apache/beam/issues/18297 because it is now a 404.

There are plenty of reasons a Google Doc might no longer be accessible. They exist outside the project's control. This is part of why ASF projects emphasize having discussions on the dev@ list and often put all their designs directly onto some ASF-hosted infrastructure, such as a Wiki (Example: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/Flink+Improvement+Proposals). In the early days we had a project-owned shared folder but it fell into disuse.

In my opinion, Google Docs are still the best place for design docs to get feedback and be revised, but the lack of durability is a downside to stay aware of. I've also gotten lots of complaints of lack of discoverability and lack of systematization of design docs, neither of which would be addressed by a shared folder.

I don't have a proposal or suggestion. I don't think this is super urgent, certainly not my personal highest priority, but I thought I'd just share this as food for thought.

Kenn

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