Is it too hard for MUN-ers to sign the agreement?

[VietThan]

MUN-ers aren't coders, will they be able to get up to speed to working on GitHub where the tooling is directed towards programmers?

Advantages of this method:

• MUN-ers learn some programming-adjacent skills
• It will be like a tutorial for people on how to contribute to VietnamMUN.org projects

Disadvantages

• The barriers might be too high:
  • First barrier is people need to make another account
  • Second barrier is all the new words/terms/actions people have to learn

[VietThan]

After discussing with @trung4t, a general map could be:

1. vietnammun.org -> GitHub Pages, simple landing page
2. guides.vietnammun.org -> GitHub Pages, the comprehensive guides to Model UN in Vietnam, created using mdbook.
3. wiki.vietnammun.org -> A wiki server hosted on AWS free tier for all to access and edit

The idea is that the wiki serves as an easy-to-access, easy-to-start way for non-tech-savvy people to get started. Higher quality content/ideas/projects can then be elevated and editorialized on their own subdomain. The subdomains will have a better look and feel than the wiki (limitation of the skills of contributors and myself and also less hassle).

Not sure how to get people to sign and enforce the contributor agreement yet. something for @trung4t to think about regarding onboarding.

Trung's concern is that there could be a split/scaling problem regarding community. Counter argument is it would be like if Nature and Arxiv is hosted by only one entity.

[VietThan]

@quinn-toolbox, dragging you in this conversation

[quinn-toolbox]

I definitely think Github is too difficult to convince the average MUN-er to use. Even I, having used Github before, am not familiar with all of its features (for example, this commenting thing I was not aware of). When you said Github I was thinking that we would be using Github to host a website with a more user-friendly interface. I suppose this is done through Github Pages? I have never used Github Pages before. Are you planning to allow anyone editing access to the website?

[VietThan]

@quinn-toolbox. Unfortunately, GitHub Pages only allows free hosting of static sites.

The advantages are:

• it's free and there's a great host of tutorials already on how to use it. For example, https://guides.vietnammun.org/ is actually currently statically hosted by GitHub Pages, you can see the repository at https://github.com/VietnamMUN/guides
• If anyone wants to propose an edit they can feel free to submit a pull request for review or create an Issue like this one.

The disadvantages are

• that these sites are static. They can't be dynamically changed permanently purely through user interactions (for example: editing a page through a textbox). they can only be changed through code.
• If anyone wants to propose an edit they have to submit a pull request for review or create an Issue like this one.

These considerations pretty much drove me to look into hosting a wiki platform. Your comment actually reminded me of that btw so thanks! 👍

Are you planning to allow anyone editing access to the website?

If we model this upon how open source code and their community works, I will be the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) or until a reasonable framework can be developed on decision making. I will probably contribute the most because I like this project. Hopefully there will be an active, but probably small, number of people who also regularly contributes and can take on more responsibilities and permissions (whether that through github or the wiki). My current views on this is if they've contributed 1-3 Pull Requests or made some substantial contribution to the wiki then people are reasonably trustworthy to be handed "the keys to the kingdom" so to speak.

But the most important is the infrequently active, but large, number of people who do fly-by-contributions. They are the community I wish to serve and I want the whole project (website, wiki, guides, any future project) open, accessible, and transparent to those who wish to contribute.

Even moving conversations like this to GitHub instead of Messenger is in a way expressing the ethos of what this project can be and what I like it to be.

Again, I don't anticipate many people to contribute but I really do hope there are a few.