  Inspired by recent work of Mourgoglou and the second named author, and
earlier work of Hofmann, Mitrea and Taylor, we consider connections between the
local John condition, the Harnack chain condition and weak boundary Poincar\'e
inequalities in open sets $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}$, with codimension
$1$ Ahlfors--David regular boundaries. First, we prove that if $\Omega$
satisfies both the local John condition and the exterior corkscrew condition,
then $\Omega$ also satisfies the Harnack chain condition (and hence, is a
chord-arc domain). Second, we show that if $\Omega$ is a $2$-sided chord-arc
domain, then the boundary $\partial \Omega$ supports a Heinonen--Koskela type
weak $1$-Poincar\'e inequality. We also construct an example of a set $\Omega
\subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ such that the boundary $\partial \Omega$ is
Ahlfors--David regular and supports a weak boundary $1$-Poincar\'e inequality
but $\Omega$ is not a chord-arc domain. Our proofs utilize significant advances
in particularly harmonic measure, uniform rectifiability and metric Poincar\'e
theories.
