Opening Confluence to general public
JW – 1) There are a few successful OS projects who share their meeting notes and displays their struggle on some topics and that has changes my perspective. 2) The issues and other stuff we find and document on Confluence are more a feature than a bug.
DM – Downside is that people may not upload/share things as readily if they’re concerned about scrutiny. This would impede coordination.
KCJ – It’s not too difficult to move things between spaces Except blog posts.
DM – Could have an OpenFF “Internal” space.
KCJ – This would mix up our ability to find important documents.
DM – I think these are the two choices: Either stay as we are, or accept some organizational cost to separate public/private info
KCJ – We should prioritize getting people to document their work, so if this will reduce that, we shouldn’t do it
MT – I think it’s worth having many things be public, with identified places for private documents. It will add some decision burden when taking/organizing notes.
KCJ – Agree that it will add a decision burden or make people double-guess. Maybe we could restructure spaces (this needs to be done anyway) to better enable a public/private split.
JW – I’d be happy to open up infrastructure space, which I think it’s pretty well baked and there’s nothing too horrible in it, but keep the other spaces for now. We can sit on this decision for a while and revisit again.
MT – There are different levels of accessibility – People probably won’t know how to navigate confluence (or the way that WE specifically use confluence). Is the intent to make things passively accessible or actively distributed?
JW – It’s a good question and I would put us in the first category (passively accessible). We have a perfectly good website to publish more polished content.
KCJ – OpenFF confluence comes up in search results, but it’s very buried in the results. Would we advertise the link on the website? Would we send the link to people that want it?
MT – Linked somewhere from the website, easy to find if you’re looking for it, but not heavily advertised.
JW - We can vote on opening Infrastructure, which I think
KCJ – Keep Force Fields open?
Should whole spaces/project areas be open by default?
JW + DM – Yes
KCJ – I’m not sure. This will put additional burden on people doing everything (eg. drafting meeting agendas, sketching quick notes), and that will add up.
DM – Maybe we should step back and come up with more pointed options, and then vote on them.
KCJ – Agree that more fine-grained options would be good
MT – My experience has been that “optional” things that require any level of polish never actually get completes / are deprioritized
JM – Agree with DM + JW
DD – In working with partners on benchmarking, we had trouble with Confluence access (we started on Infrastructure, but had to move to Public). Now that they have access we’ve had positive feedback about it.
DC – Our main product is force fields, the codes that make them, and conversion machinery. I think it’s really important that FF parameter science, validation benchmarks be open. Beyond that, I’m not sure that there’s much value in having people see meeting notes. There is a lot of irrelevant information that would make the useful info hard to find. We’re well short of the line of being harmfully secret about our science, and more information might make the useful things hard to find. Beyond the artifacts that we already produce, I don’t think that we have a pressing need to make things more open.
DM – We certainly don’t want to make everything public