Re: Is posting to this list easy or hard?

[Shane Curcuru <as...@shanecurcuru.org>]

Justy touches on an fundamental issue of the ASF itself: openness in 
(most) mailing lists.  It's fundamental to how we do things - both make 
technical decisions about projects on pmc@ or dev@ lists, as well as on 
community-based lists like women@ or community@ (or party@).

I'm not sure how to make the openness easier; I'm so used to it I don't 
even think about it anymore (my Google number is all about my past xml 
project participation).  A couple of random thoughts:

- Anything you email to a group is nearly public anyways.  Remember, 
every single person who gets your email probably saves it somewhere, may 
forward it to other folks who find it useful, and in some cases may make 
it public anyway (either on purpose or mistakenly).  So posting to an 
ASF list with a public archive isn't that much more exposure than other 
emails you've sent.

- Having the public archive is critical for community building.  Don't 
think about the tiny possibility that you'll be embarassed by something 
you wrote a year from now.  Think of all the readers to the list (or 
archive) who will either 1) learn something from the answers to your 
question, or 2) feel more comfortable posting to the list themselves.

Public archives are also fundamental to how the ASF views communities of 
all sorts.

- Trust me - if you're reading this, and you've read the list for a bit 
and thought about good netiquette, then you're not going to be 
embarassed about a posting.  If you're worrying about it, you'll do just 
fine.  There are plenty of examples of people who don't think about it 
at all and post all sorts of dumb stuff who can take up all the 
embarassing slots.

Note that we do have a number of mailing lists which are not publicly 
archived, like board@, legal-blah@, and so on.  These are kept private 
for various legal and organizational reasons, since much of the official 
running of the ASF as a corporation cannot effectively be done in 
immediate public view.  Note that board minutes and other items are 
always posted publicly later

- Shane

### Faqtoid:
What the heck does "party@" mean?
That's shorthand for the party -at- apache =dot= org mailing list. 
Folks often use just the name of the list as shorthand; the domain name 
is either apache.org or the 'obvious' domain name (i.e. xml.apache.org, 
or jakarta.apache.org, etc.)

Justyna Horwat wrote:
> I think that this touches on a fundamental issue that many women (and  
> men) have with how to participate in the Apache Software Foundation.
> 
> The ASF functions in the open with all of the lists publicly  available 
> and archived.