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Posted to community@apache.org by Santiago Gala <sg...@hisitech.com> on 2003/10/23 22:50:23 UTC
Private mail lists [was: Inappropriate use of announce@]
El miércoles, 22 octu, 2003, a las 06:18 Europe/Madrid, Phil Steitz
escribió:
> Maybe I am way off base here, but I see the whole community as
> responsible. The Board and PMCs (relatively stable "authorities") have
> to exist for legal reasons and to make program-level decisions
> (including how charters are defined and how community decision-making
> works); but the responsibility for day to day decisions (such as how
> to distribute the newsletter) belongs with the community -- especially
> those who are stepping up to do the work.
>
> I know that it may be naive to assume that the "community" can
> effectively decide everything and that the discussion/voting process
> will always lead to consensus. I have seen a few situations where
> this has failed; but I don't see pushing decisions off to "responsible
> parties" or "ultimate authoriteies" as any better than letting
> individuals *take* responsibility and defend their ideas and actions
> among the community.
>
Some days ago (I'm swamped with work), there was a discussion in
members@apache.org about how private are private mailing lists in
Apache.
I asked about subscription to some pmc mailing lists (private),
remembering I had read something Stefano Mazzochi published back in
June [1] in his excellent introduction to Apache Membership and its
meaning.
There you could read:
> all members have access to the entire
> history of the foundation, including legal and financial stuff. They
> can
> subscribe to any mailing list, including all PMC lists, the licensing
> committee, and even the board mail list.
The discussion settled down slowly, the fact got confirmed. Ken Coar
remembered us:
> however, this does raise an interesting point -- namely, that the
> non-member subscribers to some lists (like the non-asf-member pmc
> members) may not be aware that any asf member can read the archives.
>
The members who read those lists archives are, of course, bound by the
same privacy requirements as the members of the list themselves.
This mail serves to a couple purposes. One is to remember non Apache
members in pmc lists that ASF members can see what they post there.
When I said:
> Just tell them. I think they are all PMC Chairs are subscribed to
> board, so it should be easy to tell them there to
and offered a sample mail, Greg Stein replied:
> I think your sample is missing some context about why this has come
> up. If
> some non-Member PMC-member read this, they would wonder what the heck
> is
> going on and why they should (or should not) be concerned.
>
>> ...
>> Just copy it and send it, or give me the ok ,and I'll do it myself.
>
> Who should "give [you] the ok" ?? You're a Member. You should already
> know
> that this is a good thing to send out, and can take the lead on doing
> so.
What was going on? This is actually the main objective of this email,
and why I think it is interesting in the context of Phil's post.
I was looking for public information on XXXXXXXXX(it does not actually
matter). Nothing, or barely something could be found about some
decision process in public lists.
Actually I could find some information in some pmc lists. And what
looked interesting is not what I found there, but the fact that it was
not public. Possibly because all people involved in the discussion saw
it in three or four lists, they took it as public info in their mind.
Actually it was not.
What I have found reading a sample of pmc posts of several pmcs is that
80% to 90% of the posts there should/could be public, and that our
decision processes would be simpler and less confusion would arise if
at least summaries of the results of the processes are posted publicly.
Unfortunately, not at the information handled there can be public. But
I think the volume of a lot of those pmc lists is beginning to be big
enough so that people forget to tell those outside of the pmc about
decisions.
A place where this is happening is jakarta. More and more of the things
that used to come in jakarta-general are now discussed in the pmc list.
This is, no doubt, because the PMC has increased a lot in size, but the
fact leaves the committers outside of the PMC, which are still most of
them, and the community at large, completely outside of the loop.
Another troublesome and interesting case is incubation processes. There
are messages going back and forth between the incubator and the
relevant pmc to take the project, and quite often the final acceptance
decision is not documented anywhere, or barely so. And the process
looks obscure from the outside, even when, reading the relevant
(private) messages makes the process obvious and non-controversial.
Should most of those processes be held in public? I think public
decision processes is crucial to Apache community culture, and
switching to committee decision would in the long term damage the
community.
Regards
Santiago
[1]
http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/
ReadMsg?listName=community@apache.org&msgId=744290
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Re: Private mail lists [was: Inappropriate use of announce@]
Posted by Nicola Ken Barozzi <ni...@apache.org>.
Santiago Gala wrote:
...
> Another troublesome and interesting case is incubation processes. There
> are messages going back and forth between the incubator and the
> relevant pmc to take the project, and quite often the final acceptance
> decision is not documented anywhere, or barely so. And the process
> looks obscure from the outside, even when, reading the relevant
> (private) messages makes the process obvious and non-controversial.
>
> Should most of those processes be held in public?
Yes.
--
Nicola Ken Barozzi nicolaken@apache.org
- verba volant, scripta manent -
(discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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Re: Private mail lists [was: Inappropriate use of announce@]
Posted by Berin Lautenbach <be...@ozemail.com.au>.
Steven Noels wrote:
> Santiago Gala wrote:
>
>> When I said:
>>
>>> Just tell them. I think they are all PMC Chairs are subscribed to
>>> board, so it should be easy to tell them there to
>
>
> Sideway comment from my little peanut gallery: this is (only) the second
> time I overheard that PMC chairs can subscribe to board@ - in three
> years of (increasingly intensive) reading of non-project-specific ASF
> mail lists. Whether this is a 'can', a 'should', or a 'you are required
> to' is one of these hidden nuggets of information I would like to see
> novice chairs to be informed of in some explicit way.
FWIW I received an e-mail immediately after the board meeting that voted
on my becoming chair that described duties etc. and included the
suggestion to subscribe to board@. My read was that this was just a
"standard thing".
Cheers,
Berin
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Re: Private mail lists [was: Inappropriate use of announce@]
Posted by Rodent of Unusual Size <Ke...@Golux.Com>.
Steven Noels wrote:
> Santiago Gala wrote:
>>> Just tell them. I think they are all PMC Chairs are subscribed to
>>> board, so it should be easy to tell them there to
>
> Sideway comment from my little peanut gallery: this is (only) the second
> time I overheard that PMC chairs can subscribe to board@ - in three
> years of (increasingly intensive) reading of non-project-specific ASF
> mail lists. Whether this is a 'can', a 'should', or a 'you are required
> to' is one of these hidden nuggets of information I would like to see
> novice chairs to be informed of in some explicit way.
it's actually wider than that; implicit in the outcome of the recent
discussion, and as a matter of apparently inadequately stated policy,
any asf member may subscribe to the board@ list. in fact, all are
encouraged to do so, that they can keep themselves informed.
something that also came out of the recent discussion is that private
(not even members) lists are permitted, though discouraged, as long
as no asf-affecting decisions are made on them. all such decisions
need to be made in the light where members can see them.
--
#ken P-)}
Ken Coar, Sanagendamgagwedweinini http://Golux.Com/coar/
Author, developer, opinionist http://Apache-Server.Com/
"Millennium hand and shrimp!"
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Re: Private mail lists [was: Inappropriate use of announce@]
Posted by Steven Noels <st...@outerthought.org>.
Santiago Gala wrote:
> When I said:
>
>> Just tell them. I think they are all PMC Chairs are subscribed to
>> board, so it should be easy to tell them there to
Sideway comment from my little peanut gallery: this is (only) the second
time I overheard that PMC chairs can subscribe to board@ - in three
years of (increasingly intensive) reading of non-project-specific ASF
mail lists. Whether this is a 'can', a 'should', or a 'you are required
to' is one of these hidden nuggets of information I would like to see
novice chairs to be informed of in some explicit way.
About the rest of your mail:
I totally agree that private lists can shield valuable, not-so-private
information (especially about decision making processes) away from the
people for which this information is part of their community experience.
Since Cocoon has been moving into a TLP, and has its own PMC list, we
have seen some traffic on that list, at times even too much traffic.
The nice thing is that, most of the times, one of the private list
members jumps up and says "I'm gonna move this to dev or users". Still,
due to the fact we @ Cocoon concluded all committers (should) care about
the Cocoon community and the legal status of its codebase, so we have a
policy where all committers can join the PMC list, and now our PMC list
sometimes is just a hanging-out place for committers only. And yes, even
though it _might_ produce unwanted side-effects (non-committer
developers feeling shut out), it appears as if the subcribers of the PMC
list actually like this hanging-out place to exist. We sometimes happen
to discuss the proposal of new committers on the PMC list (but not
often), to give an example, or whether we are going to send a mail to
someone who is on the verge of infringing Cocoon's brand.
Fortunately however, no technical nor strategic vision stuff has been
emerging from the PMC list so far - all discussions about Cocoon's
design and future are routinely done on the dev list.
Apart from security stuff (for obvious reasons) and brand conflict
issues (where public discussion might affect third parties negatively),
I see the Cocoon PMC list (as it is ATM) as some way to channel friendly
inter-person chat into a group thing, similar to the difference between
IM and IRC - a way to have more people sharing the fun. One might debate
that this fun should spread into the open lists as well, but apparently
people are aware of their audience when speaking up, and sometimes
prefer a cozy little list of 40 subscribers, rather than a massive forum
of 500 dev-list participants. Stage freight, I assume.
Personally, I think a private list should exerce some kind of
self-control to keep its existence worthwhile. It's pretty hard to ban
all kinds of direct inter-person communication from a community (nor is
this what you are aiming at, of course), but a closed list might move
some of the inter-person banter into a channel where more people can
make sense of it.
Just some thoughts...
Cheers, Santiago!
</Steven>
--
Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML An Orixo Member
Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/
stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
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