On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 12:30:22AM -0500, Stephen Taylor wrote: > > Co-op is first co-operative and second technically > adept. > > This co-op probable got going because technically > adept people formed a co-op. Technical first, co-op > second.
Well, we have to be practical here. Without skills, we could be just a bunch of "wannabees" that form a coop and then don't know what to do with it. I don't think HCoop would grow much more past the initial 4 members/founders if they were coop first, technical second. "Technical" here could mean law skills too - if Nathan was obviously coop first, "technical" second, we wouldn't trust him to do the serious work of HCoop incorporation and other legal matters that had to be done. Likewise, if Adam was "Ok, we are a coop now, life is good", that wouldn't lead to significant progress in any direction either. I'm not saying that I personally want to neglect the coop aspect, or that I encourage to do so. I'm saying that everyone fits a certain role within HCoop - the role each one of us chose based on necessity or their personal preferences - so it is only normal that, with time, you get to learn what kind of general input can be expected from each individual person. While I value technical and coop aspect equally high, I am largely tuned into the technical aspect now because that's where I see the work waiting to be done, because that's what I like doing at the moment, and because I do not feel there are any negative "trends" going on that are endangering the coop perspective and that would need special attention from me. If you do feel that other subjects need to be discussed - that's excellent. Your posts can get that thread running in parallel. Sometimes this requires involvement from Board members; I hope the next elections with 5 board members will add more coop-oriented people to our organizational structure, so no one will have an impression of their concerns being ignored. At any point in time, there will be people tuned into other aspects of HCoop (like yourself), which in the end results in balanced "coverage" of all aspects. And the roles might change over time, which is all right. > And sought people with general *nix/web skills when > they really meant people with skills > similar_to_theirs. That's a reasonable necessity. Again for practical reasons it is not useful to search for people with skills not similar to ours (and in turn, the setup that we have and need to maintain and expand). >From the regular members perspective, we don't require any special skills as long as the person is able to read a few wiki pages. > If like me, members find the "package", the > combination of hosting site and price a good deal. But > hesitate to participate because the reward for making > a mistake or asking before reading the docs is not > shared laughter or "look it up in XXX and if you don't > find the answer, let us know" It is criticism or > technical problems because (I surmise) after X number > of errors, it stops working. There are folks who used to react somewhat negatively to basic inquiries by members. One of those was a previous (and hopefully future) admin Adam Megacz. But then when explicitly asked about this, he stated his preference for not being bothered with this kind of questions, and that was alright. Other than that, I really can't remember any persisting examples of this problem. With the addition of hcoop-help list, which I explicitly requested to be offered in style of "no question here gets bad treatment", I think this problem is completely resolved. > Examples: > > J. Settino's discovery that his experience was not > enough and it was his problem. It looks like you think a response from a sysadmin or a Board member is some kind of a "verdict". Like, "person X complained, we discussed it, Board member Y decided it was X's problem and there was nothing X could do about it". While on the contrary, it only means that the sysadmin or Board member is honestly not able to make another member's experience better at that point in time. Which does not stop the member in question to find other ways of achieving his or her goal. And sysadmin or Board help can always be counted on, in as great capacity as they are realistically able to provide. > My blunders when I joined and asked for help. > > The bounced e-mails I never received -- until I asked. > The problem I created yesterday with a bad .forward > file. I fixed it, it tests okay but I'm missing mail. How could we help that? I mean, how is this solved worse at HCoop than at virtually any other setup? You could work on a solution, say "Here, I've done this, integrate it into our setup", and thus make HCoop unique in one more way. You could also load that work onto sysadmins, but in that case you get no influence on the timeframe for resolving it, as it is neither a real "bug" nor a task that is likely to preempt other work at sysadmins' plate. > The lack of response (1) to my h-discuss e-mail full > of suggestions; some would make a better co-op. I remember that email. Speaking for myself, it was good but targetted problems I did not perceive as serious enough to require attention there and then. (Again, increasing board members to 5 should help this problem). In any case, we often revisit old posts, so the lack of immediate replies doesn't mean anything. Even if you do not bring this post up again yourself, other members who appreciated it will. > The failure of the moderator system. Mail to > hcoop-misc, get warning cause address is unknown; get > nothing more and no sign of correction. This is a technical issue, it might have been a simple On/Off switch in mailman that says whether unregistered senders get a moderation notice or not. Again I don't see how a setting of either Yes or No makes a difference compared to all other setups out there. It just works this or that way at HCoop, and attaching 'good' or 'bad' conotations to it makes no sense. If we turned moderation notices off due to spam, then probably that decision makes more overall good than an occassional misunderstanding does bad as in your case. Especially since you can just ask what's up. > The wiki. To me, it's a brainstorming, organzing, etc. > tool. Response I got said it's for technical data. Not every member, but every person out there, being a member or not, can edit our Wiki. We use it for technical data; if you want to use it for brainstorming and organizing, who's stopping you? And if you want to post about it to our lists, to let other members know about it, you're welcome. > The etiquette thing. Unstated rules about adding your > reply to the end of someone's post need to be stated. Possibly. I never thought this was a big deal, nor I could recall a case when someone was answered in style of "didn't you read the etiquette?!". In any case, fell free to make improvements where needed (on the Wiki, in the mailing list welcome message etc.), and submit a bug through https://bugzilla.hcoop.net/ with notes of what sysadmins need to do to make your changes visible in plces where you don't have write permission. Filing Bugzilla reports is great; they don't disappear, so any report that makes sense will receive attention sooner or later, and it'll be easier for everyone to point to the patch and accumulated discussion about it by pointing to bugzilla bug ID, rather than browsing mailing list archives. More work you do yourself, more towards the "sooner" side we'll move. > ----------------- > I know the people who made HCoop work hard. I say > share the work. Find people skilled enough, reliable > to help: moderators; wiki-gnomes (people who watch > for wiki spam and delete it); I'm sure there's more > that doesn't require an experienced sysadmin to do it. Yes. So what's stopping you or anyone else to take on the task of "wiki-gnome" or other function? Anyone can do any part of the work they like, and thus "promote" themselves to certain position. However, for tasks that require administrator privileges, we can't give access to many people, of which everyone would work on just a small subset. First of all, doing so increases the chances of our setup "breakage" many times, and second of all, person with sysadmin privileges focusing on just one or two specific things doesn't see how their work could affect other components. Finally, judging by the experience we had with this in the past, granting people only some privileged actions (enough to do their work), costs more of maintenance than if the admins just did the work themselves. > And I think the non-American's ntk (Nathan) refers to > find it even harder to join in negative talk. > > Let's make a co-op so we can do whatever with our > piece of it. Isn't this what we've been doing all along? The problem only happens when certain things are just not possible, and members go to blame it on "management" rather than taking realistic view at the situation and understanding why something is either impossible, or needs more work invested in it so that admins/board members can do something with it. > And get the IRC identities known This is listed under Contact information on the portal; I don't remember if IRC nicknames were supported. IIRC Adam opened a bugzilla bug about it, if it's not resolved yet, it should be in a short while. > - a voluntary departure (and arrival) survey of > going/coming members. What hooked/unhooked them. Great. I am not capable to offer any more organizational support other than what I've been doing already, which is asking members on their leave to tell us their specific reasons. The last 3 or 4 members who left did not care to reply. Other 2 or 3 before them shortly said HCoop was not what they expected. If you are willing to work on this, you can place yourself on the CC: list for Bugzilla bugs in the "Financial" category. There, as members submit account cancellation requests, you can send them an inquiry about it before their account is closed. I would not be surprised if, introducing yourself as a regular member, you had more success with it than I did. Thanks, -doc _______________________________________________ HCoop-Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.hcoop.net/listinfo/hcoop-discuss
