[aprssig] Information organization

[Steve Dimse]

> On Feb 17, 2022, at 1:54 PM, Scott Howard <showard at nd.edu> wrote:
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> 
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> On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 1:25 PM Steve Dimse <steve at dimse.com> wrote:
> >
> > If you want to prepare for that time when we do start moving forward and you can offer your services to the APRS group I think that is great, but I think it is not yet time for public protocol documentation.
> >
> 
> Maybe I wasn't clear, but this isn't about making any type of protocol document nor proposals on how to change the protocol. 

But just in glancing over it I see two things that are factually incorrect, and at least two that were never correctly settled and deserve an in-depth discussion among stakeholders. Now is not the time to start proofreading, merging, and discussing the myriad issues in APRS. 

If you have no interest in being involved in the formation of a guiding group, that is fine, and if you want to spend your time gathering stuff together, also fine, but to put something out in public now will divide effort at a key time, and worse leave things open to cries of "We settled this on github months ago." 

How the gather/merge happens will be up to the organizing group, but my advise is to do it similar to the way we did the spec in the APRS WG, in very small complete chunks. Maybe this week (or three) we'd talk about source address encoding. First we would gather together all the info, read it, discuss any issues that had occurred in the past or we foresaw, Ian would write a first draft, and we would iterate our way through it until we were satisfied. It is slow, but it has to be, because we all have real lives. We found if one person rushed ahead it the whole process was rushed and mistakes were made.

> It is just an initial effort of trying to figure out what is even out there. 

But much of what is out there is wrong. Moving it over to a new place when everyone can't proof and discuss it compounds the problem.

Steve K4HG