Infrastructure

Scenarios

Requirements are based on the following scenarios:

People will propose ideas in the Community Forum. Others will comment. Ideas with enough support will lead to the creation of a Community Group.
People will view existing Community Groups, express support for creation of groups, or join groups.
Joining a group involves authorized parties making IPR commitments. These commitments will be archived. There are also IPR commitments recorded when a group wishes to finalize a document. Leaving a group may also have a IPR implications (depending on when the party leaves).
People will hold discussions in community groups, create and edit documents, and comment on documents.
Business groups will likely be created through different means, but the base infrastructure will be similar. There will need to be payment collection and also connection between joining and payment.
Members and other organizations will want by-organization views.

Contributors must have identity.
Affiliation information must be clear when someone is joining as an organization rep.
Lightweight account creation
Polling tool (thumbs-up, down)
Accessible UIs
Email notification (whether digest or individual notices). In social web system will need to be configurable to keep noise down.
Skins for this infrastructure to give community groups distinct brand.
Styles for documents must be different than TR documents.
(Persistent) URIs for all important objects in the system (messages, comments, proposals, people, organizations)

Important consideration: Open source

Anyone can read. Question: do you have to have identity/be logged in to read?
Need identity to post and to comment
Polling used to express support for ideas; groups pop into existence when ideas have enough support. (This is different from, e.g., google groups, where anyone may create a group at any time).

IPR commitments on join
Public archiving of IPR commitments. IPR policy indicates that person who joins is authorized to make commitments on behalf of their organizations. By convention, this means that AC reps may do joining. In this case, they need to either invite or enable others to be in the group. Note that act of leaving a group may also have IPR implications per draft policy.
Summary of "final text" IPR commitments

Archived discussion (whether blog style or mailing list)
Public and non-Public discussion capabilities (both for business groups and for some admin for public groups).
Wiki
- If mailing lists, improve views of discussions?
Version control system (e.g., mercurial, git, subversion)
Tracking tool (e.g., tracker)
Organizational view of all groups (e.g., to allow Members to know who from their org is participating in what groups).
- Ensuring AC reps know when people join a group, either by having AC Reps do the inviting, or through notification

Community group features plus:

social web features such as microblogging, following people, tagging items of interest, etc.
feeds
semantic web linkages
reputation capabilities