Hi Sasha, Hi all, Sorry for not responding earlier.
I'd say that for a WG to publish a RIPE document, it would need to have consensus on the content. A four-sentence document referencing an external document that will change over time is technically possible. It would define that the WG trusts the maintainers of that external document to the point that the BCP is "do whatever they say".
I can see issues with that :)
Personally I would prefer a style where the community works together on the text (whether in GitHub or elsewhere), reaches consensus that a certain revision is "ready enough", and then publishes that as a BCP. Potentially referring to the GitHub repo as "this is the place where future work on this will take place". When the live document has been updated enough that the community doesn't feel that the RIPE document represents the new best practices, a new revision can be taken and the consensus process can be done again, resulting in a new RIPE document which obsoletes the old RIPE document.
That way the actual text is declared a BCP by consensus, the document can evolve, and consensus can be reached on the updates.
Sander, thanks for summarising this to eloquently. This is pretty much what I had in mind when suggesting to publish it as a BCP. Publishing this as a ripe-document has the advantages that it is a stable document and people can find it and refer to it. Prerequisite is - as you point out - that there is consensus in the community/WG that this is indeed a good practice that you want to implement and encourage.
We had the same issues with RIPE501/554/772. We used a different mechanism to discuss the updates, but in essence did what I described above: collect updates, propose a certain text for the new version, get consensus and publish it as a new RIPE document.
Indeed. Publishing an updated version of a ripe-document is really not that difficult. It is not uncommon to discover gaps or details that need to be changed in a document after we gained some more experience with a certain process or practice. Kind regards, Mirjam (RIPE Chair)