Hi Everybody,
During the last Infrastructure meeting
<https://github.com/jenkins-infra/documentation/blob/main/meetings/2021-05-04.md>,
Daniel Beck came with an interesting question.
Considering the proliferation of Google documents and other random tools to
take notes,
shouldn't we consider bringing back Confluence?
While I am not convinced that a wiki is THE solution, I definitely share his
frustration.
I feel we did a major step backward in terms of knowledge management across the
Jenkins project.
Nowadays, the default behavior is to create a Google document to take notes
during meetings or event organizations.
This approach is very easy for synchronous collaboration but it also has bad
side effects. It's difficult to find old documents unless you bookmarked them.
And, documents lifecycle are affected by the "new" google storage policy or
corporate google accounts.
Historically, we used the wiki to take notes and write documentation.
https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS
That central place was really convenient to share and find information across
community initiatives.
That being said, I didn't forget the reasons to move away from Confluence, and
here are some of them:
1. Spammers, because of the nature of the Jenkins project we tend to attract a
lot of spammers. Then *someone* has to do some clean-up.
2. Maintaining confluence is a major distraction that nobody wants to do.
3. Confluence in the current state is very slow mainly due to point 2 and due
to unfinished infrastructure work.
The two last elements could be solved by asking the Linux Foundation to
maintain Confluence. The same way they do for Jira <https://issues.jenkins.io/>
Also, it's worth keeping in mind that Atlassian is deprecating their on-prem
solution in 2024.
Several weeks ago, I started an experiment on the infrastructure project to use
hackmd.io to allow synchronous collaboration on meeting notes.
During a meeting or a maintenance window, everybody can participate then at the
end of the meeting someone pushes the notes to a git repository like
https://github.com/jenkins-infra/documentation/#documentation
To me it combines two approaches, it's as easy as a Google document to collect
notes and then we can easily store them on a git repository directly in
Markdown.
Unfortunately, I am not convinced by the asynchronous collaboration workflow.
There is a demo here - https://youtu.be/1s2Y3aPXTOI?t=126 (Sorry for the poor
video)
As I said it's an experiment, the purpose is to simplify synchronous
collaboration and then persist the content on a git repository that can easily
be browsed.
I would be curious to know your feeling about all of this and if you have other
suggestions.
Cheers
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