Switching away from Google Docs?

[omaitzen]

I just noticed that the actual Google Docs files themselves (i.e. those with the extensions .gdoc and .gsheet) are just "symlinks" to URLs, which (presumably) won't change as changes are made to the documents. As such, changes to these documents are handled by Google's version control, not Git's, which kind of defeats the purpose of storing them on Git.

Should we switch to using, say, LibreOffice documents, expecting that every contributor to these documents can be trusted to pull/push/merge their changes? This would probably work for some documents, e.g. outreach letters; but definitely not for others, like the more publicly-editable spreadsheets that store information.

Conversely, I wonder if there's some attachment to GitHub we can add such that these Google Docs & Sheets can actually be displayed, and even edited, inside GitHub's interface. Right now, opening one of these documents just displays plaintext JSON - see an example here - which is obviously less useful.

[Stuperfied]

I did cover legacy documents in my initial readme file however it was just an example, rather poorly worded and was overwritten as intended. My suggestion was that legacy documents be uploaded or linked to and maintained in the short term and creators/maintainers of such documents can make their own determination for the long term. GitHub is not intended to limit, simplify (except for versioning) or replace any current technologies being used, it is only intended as a central repository for access as opposed to the decentralized system we had been using to date.

Your idea of an attachment to GitHub has merit and should be looked into. Maybe there is a module or plugin which can provide this functionality. There are integration's available such as this one.
https://zapier.com/apps/github/integrations/google-docs

As you pointed out, it is also possible to download google docs and have them included directly in this repo via a pull request. Docs could then be sync'd to local copies and edited however it might be more productive in the initial phase of the document creation to just keep it on google until all the initial fast paced input has passed.