Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
If behavior discussions are going to occur at all, it's probably better that they happen in public rather than there be the feeling of a secret faceless committee to which users can neither respond nor appeal. The latter can lead to discontent. Exactly. And where do users go to complain about moderators? ooo-dev@ ;-) ooo-private@ I had one person contact me off list, not about the support forum moderation specifically, but about moderation in another part of OOo. He had concerns about heavy-handiness in moderation, of unpopular views being booted. This is not a matter of private discussion on users behavior or not. We shouldn't hide our heads in the sand and pretend that everything at OOo was perfect and that everyone got along, and everyone was happy. This is not true. There were power centers within the project, there was abuse and there was discontent. LibreOffice didn't just happen on a whim. I think a jolt of transparency will do us much good. We need to learn to collaborate well with each other openly. We need to be moderate in moderation. If we think we need 30 private moderation forums and 30 moderators in order to do user support, then that is a warning sign crying out that we're doing the wrong thing. I think 30 are really to much. But one might be OK. One question: how much moderation is actually happening? And why? Is it really users behavior? In fact I can't imagine 30 boards are necessary for only keeping trolls out. If possible, some stats would be fine to have a better understanding of the issue. Like I asked before, if we had zero private moderator forums, what bad thing would happen? Why can we replace secret tribunals with open, peer pressure and leadership by example? Really, is the situation so worse that secret tribunals is a matching term? (I really don't know, its not a rethoric question). I am all for openess don't get me wrong. The other mail today from Terry showed me there something strange going on. People simply want to use the tools they have used before. They want to speak their language. I think this should be possible. Reducing the tribunal factor to a minimum is a very good thing. I just don't want to read of some moderators discussing my grandmoms behavior in public. -Rob Don -- http://www.grobmeier.de
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Christian Grobmeier grobme...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 7:45 PM, Donald Whytock dwhyt...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 9:37 AM, Christian Grobmeier grobme...@gmail.com wrote: Do you really want to discuss a users behavior in public? Wow, I really don't want to do that. I strongly believe that only a few people would discuss another guys behavior in public. It happens. In fact it happened here, on this list, yesterday. There was some pretty excessive vitriol, open and in public. And yet it seemed to work into more mature and rational discussion today. If behavior discussions are going to occur at all, it's probably better that they happen in public rather than there be the feeling of a secret faceless committee to which users can neither respond nor appeal. The latter can lead to discontent. It might be different to discuss roughly at the dev forums were most people know each other than in a public message boards were even my grandmother might participate. At this project I heard the term end users very often; I don't think you can use the same rules of heavy geek-discussion for end users of OpenOffice. I agree. But I think that just means that support forum admins/moderators bring such discussions over here, to the project mailing lists. Honestly, if a forum volunteer is not already on this list, understanding what we are doing and how Apache project works and how the code base is developing, etc., then they will have a very difficult time fairly representing the project to the users. I don't think the project benefits if support volunteers are detached from the primary project discussion list. And we all are at a disadvantage if the support volunteers are not contributing to this list. The same arguments against fragmenting the project into dozens of mailing lists, also apply here. Just as we would not create a separate ooo-support-operations-discuss mailing list, we should not encourage the same from happening via a forum. The fact that support operations are also discussed in private only makes this fragmentation more problematic. This is really easy to resolve: 1) Discussions on evolving forum policies and rules must occur on ooo-dev. These are tantamount to proposals, and they are subject to Apache Way decision making, just like any other part of the project. If I wanted to suggest a different editing policy for the community wiki, or a new moderation policy for ooo-users, I would be slapped down if I raised it on ooo-private. The transparency principle applies equally to the forums. 2) Non-confidential, day-to-day operations of the forum should occur in a publicly-readable forum, or on a new public mailing list. I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. 3) Private discussions on confidential matters, including your grandmother, occur either on ooo-private or on a private forum that echos its posts to ooo-private. Again, I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. -Rob
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
It might be different to discuss roughly at the dev forums were most people know each other than in a public message boards were even my grandmother might participate. At this project I heard the term end users very often; I don't think you can use the same rules of heavy geek-discussion for end users of OpenOffice. I agree. But I think that just means that support forum admins/moderators bring such discussions over here, to the project mailing lists. Honestly, if a forum volunteer is not already on this list, understanding what we are doing and how Apache project works and how the code base is developing, etc., then they will have a very difficult time fairly representing the project to the users. I don't think the project benefits if support volunteers are detached from the primary project discussion list. +1 And we all are at a disadvantage if the support volunteers are not contributing to this list. The same arguments against fragmenting the project into dozens of mailing lists, also apply here. Just as we would not create a separate ooo-support-operations-discuss mailing list, we should not encourage the same from happening via a forum. The fact that support operations are also discussed in private only makes this fragmentation more problematic. This is really easy to resolve: 1) Discussions on evolving forum policies and rules must occur on ooo-dev. These are tantamount to proposals, and they are subject to Apache Way decision making, just like any other part of the project. If I wanted to suggest a different editing policy for the community wiki, or a new moderation policy for ooo-users, I would be slapped down if I raised it on ooo-private. The transparency principle applies equally to the forums. 2) Non-confidential, day-to-day operations of the forum should occur in a publicly-readable forum, or on a new public mailing list. I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. 3) Private discussions on confidential matters, including your grandmother, occur either on ooo-private or on a private forum that echos its posts to ooo-private. Again, I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. +1 Sounds like a plan. And by the way, my grandmother is a nice person actually ;-) Cheers -Rob -- http://www.grobmeier.de
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On 04/09/11 17:47, Christian Grobmeier wrote: It might be different to discuss roughly at the dev forums were most people know each other than in a public message boards were even my grandmother might participate. At this project I heard the term end users very often; I don't think you can use the same rules of heavy geek-discussion for end users of OpenOffice. I agree. But I think that just means that support forum admins/moderators bring such discussions over here, to the project mailing lists. Honestly, if a forum volunteer is not already on this list, understanding what we are doing and how Apache project works and how the code base is developing, etc., then they will have a very difficult time fairly representing the project to the users. I don't think the project benefits if support volunteers are detached from the primary project discussion list. +1 -0.75 Actually they don't really need to understand anything about how Apache works or how the code-base is developing. They do end-user support. The only need to understand how the product /as released and shipped/ operates for the end-users. Knowing about futures is a very low priority nice-to-have. And we all are at a disadvantage if the support volunteers are not contributing to this list. The same arguments against fragmenting the project into dozens of mailing lists, also apply here. Just as we would not create a separate ooo-support-operations-discuss mailing list, we should not encourage the same from happening via a forum. The fact that support operations are also discussed in private only makes this fragmentation more problematic. This is really easy to resolve: 1) Discussions on evolving forum policies and rules must occur on ooo-dev. These are tantamount to proposals, and they are subject to Apache Way decision making, just like any other part of the project. If I wanted to suggest a different editing policy for the community wiki, or a new moderation policy for ooo-users, I would be slapped down if I raised it on ooo-private. The transparency principle applies equally to the forums. 2) Non-confidential, day-to-day operations of the forum should occur in a publicly-readable forum, or on a new public mailing list. I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. 3) Private discussions on confidential matters, including your grandmother, occur either on ooo-private or on a private forum that echos its posts to ooo-private. Again, I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. +1 -0.75 yes we should put this to the community, but this is not how they operate today. I do know that the majority of the big hitters are really unhappy with this. Please realise that if you force this one, you will probably have a very obedient forum, but one with nobody answering any Qs -- or some revolt where they take their service en-mass elsewhere. Policy discussions are one matter, but moderation must be the business of the moderators. They have made it quite clear in the past that they really don't want to have these discussions in public view. Again we can only sound them out.
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Sun, 4 Sep 2011 13:51:56 -0400 Rob Weir robw...@apache.org wrote: Just so I am perfectly clear. There should be two kinds of project discussions: 1) Those that are in public and 2) Those that are in private because they deal with matters that are sensitive, such as handling of confidential information There is no third category of: Discussions behind the scene are not proposals; they emerge into one or more consensuses Discussions like that need to start happening in public, just like the discussions we are having right now are in public. We don't reach consensus and then do a perfunctory post of a proposal, fait accompli. That is not transparency. From beginning to end we discuss in public. Do you never walk to the water cooler and float something by someone else, as a preparatory stage in working out yuour thoughts? -- Rory O'Farrell ofarr...@iol.ie
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
Terry Ellison wrote: [Rob Weir] Honestly, if a forum volunteer is not already on this list, understanding what we are doing and how Apache project works and how the code base is developing, etc., then they will have a very difficult time fairly representing the project to the users. ... -0.75 Actually they don't really need to understand anything about how Apache works or how the code-base is developing. They do end-user support. The only need to understand how the product /as released and shipped/ operates for the end-users. I agree with Terry: the Italian forum has a few moderators, including me; I'm regularly following this list but the others do not, either for language reasons or because it is actually useless to follow the project in detail when the main focus of the user forum is peer-to-peer support (and thus the product, not the project). And with the time they save by not following international lists they answer many more user questions than I do; and it's enough for them to follow the Italian discussion lists (or the Italian association lists) to stay up-to-date with announcements, especially at release time. Regards, Andrea.
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Sun, 2011-09-04 at 13:38 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: On 04/09/11 17:47, Christian Grobmeier wrote: It might be different to discuss roughly at the dev forums were most people know each other than in a public message boards were even my grandmother might participate. At this project I heard the term end users very often; I don't think you can use the same rules of heavy geek-discussion for end users of OpenOffice. I agree. But I think that just means that support forum admins/moderators bring such discussions over here, to the project mailing lists. Honestly, if a forum volunteer is not already on this list, understanding what we are doing and how Apache project works and how the code base is developing, etc., then they will have a very difficult time fairly representing the project to the users. I don't think the project benefits if support volunteers are detached from the primary project discussion list. +1 -0.75 Actually they don't really need to understand anything about how Apache works or how the code-base is developing. They do end-user support. The only need to understand how the product /as released and shipped/ operates for the end-users. Knowing about futures is a very low priority nice-to-have. And they need to know that information on the day a new release comes out, so they can answer questions that come on day 1 of that new release. *chuckling* - you know, I hope, that at least 6 (I didn't go count fully) or more of the forum admins/mods are already PPMC members. You might not know that on the forum, the information provided to users about how and where to enter defects was updated within 24 hours of the new Bugzilla going on line - we beat the notices on the ML's and the wiki I think. //drew
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Sun, 2011-09-04 at 13:59 -0400, drew wrote: On Sun, 2011-09-04 at 13:38 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: snip And they need to know that information on the day a new release comes out, so they can answer questions that come on day 1 of that new release. *chuckling* - you know, I hope, that at least 6 (I didn't go count fully) or more of the forum admins/mods are already PPMC members. [EDIT] You might not know that on the forum, the information provided to users about how and where to enter defects was updated within 24 hours Thanks to Zoltan taking the initiative to 'just do it'. of the new Bugzilla going on line - we beat the notices on the ML's and the wiki I think. //drew
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Sun, 2011-09-04 at 18:29 +0100, Rory O'Farrell wrote: On Sun, 4 Sep 2011 12:35:05 -0400 Rob Weir robw...@apache.org wrote: This is really easy to resolve: 1) Discussions on evolving forum policies and rules must occur on ooo-dev. These are tantamount to proposals, and they are subject to Apache Way decision making, just like any other part of the project. If I wanted to suggest a different editing policy for the community wiki, or a new moderation policy for ooo-users, I would be slapped down if I raised it on ooo-private. The transparency principle applies equally to the forums. Discussions behind the scene are not proposals; they emerge into one or more consensuses, which are then considered as proposals and a selection made. I doubt there will be much objection to this. 2) Non-confidential, day-to-day operations of the forum should occur in a publicly-readable forum, or on a new public mailing list. I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. Such a publicly readable form is the Forum, which is openly accessible; to post to it requires a User to choose a Username and to indicate his OS and version of OOo or OOo fork, 3) Private discussions on confidential matters, including your grandmother, occur either on ooo-private or on a private forum that echos its posts to ooo-private. Again, I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. These occur on three dedicated channels as I outlined earlier; the offer is there to allow interested Apache personel access to them immediately. A more public (even if still private mechanism) can be worked out, such as that they can be automatically echoed to a monitorong list. Much of the discussion is merely administrative and may increase the load on such monitoring lists. I will echo this posting to the private OOo channels - perhaps we are now getting somewhere? Hello List, Wearing a three cornered hat: Founding member of the OpenOffice.org User Community Forums, Administrator of the English language forum, member in good standing of the Volunteer Group. First - the current owners of the OpenOffice.org User Community Forums, the instance of the phpBB softwaree and the content within the attached database is owned by the group of individuals known as the Volunteer Group within the forum. This group currently consists of 75 individuals. This ownership was an integral part of the agreement made between the founding members and management at Sun Micro-Systems. The arrangement was materially no different from a standard hosting contract with a commercial provider, with certain branding considerations required in lieu of cash payments. Second - The OpenOffie.org User Community Forums had no formal relationship whatsoever with the OpenOffice.org Community Council. It had no representation on the council and indeed members of the forum, by virtue of their relationship with the forums, where never offered a vote for any officers of the council. Third - The domain name user.services.openoffice.org was the property of Sun-Microsystems, later transfered to Oracle Corporation and use of said URL was at the discretion of the owner. Fourth - The owners of the OpenOffice.org User Community Forums have an explicit right to relocate the services provided at user.services.openoffice.org, along with all content generated by the site, to a new location solely at the discretion of the Volunteer Group. - Taking the hat off. It was my personal hope that this event would also, finally, allow the forums to become an actual part of the main project and ownership transfered from the volunteer group to Apache OpenOffice - still is, but the road to get there I'm afraid is just a tad bumpier now. Respectfully, Drew Jensen
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 2:40 PM, drew d...@baseanswers.com wrote: On Sun, 2011-09-04 at 18:29 +0100, Rory O'Farrell wrote: On Sun, 4 Sep 2011 12:35:05 -0400 Rob Weir robw...@apache.org wrote: This is really easy to resolve: 1) Discussions on evolving forum policies and rules must occur on ooo-dev. These are tantamount to proposals, and they are subject to Apache Way decision making, just like any other part of the project. If I wanted to suggest a different editing policy for the community wiki, or a new moderation policy for ooo-users, I would be slapped down if I raised it on ooo-private. The transparency principle applies equally to the forums. Discussions behind the scene are not proposals; they emerge into one or more consensuses, which are then considered as proposals and a selection made. I doubt there will be much objection to this. 2) Non-confidential, day-to-day operations of the forum should occur in a publicly-readable forum, or on a new public mailing list. I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. Such a publicly readable form is the Forum, which is openly accessible; to post to it requires a User to choose a Username and to indicate his OS and version of OOo or OOo fork, 3) Private discussions on confidential matters, including your grandmother, occur either on ooo-private or on a private forum that echos its posts to ooo-private. Again, I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. These occur on three dedicated channels as I outlined earlier; the offer is there to allow interested Apache personel access to them immediately. A more public (even if still private mechanism) can be worked out, such as that they can be automatically echoed to a monitorong list. Much of the discussion is merely administrative and may increase the load on such monitoring lists. I will echo this posting to the private OOo channels - perhaps we are now getting somewhere? Hello List, Wearing a three cornered hat: Founding member of the OpenOffice.org User Community Forums, Administrator of the English language forum, member in good standing of the Volunteer Group. First - the current owners of the OpenOffice.org User Community Forums, the instance of the phpBB softwaree and the content within the attached database is owned by the group of individuals known as the Volunteer Group within the forum. This group currently consists of 75 individuals. This ownership was an integral part of the agreement made between the founding members and management at Sun Micro-Systems. The arrangement was materially no different from a standard hosting contract with a commercial provider, with certain branding considerations required in lieu of cash payments. Sorry, I don't see any basis for your claimed ownership of the content. The forums right now link to a TOU page: http://openoffice.org/terms_of_use This includes: c. Other Submissions. (This Section 4.c applies to all Submissions other than source code contributed to a Project, which is governed by the preceding section.) The Host does not claim ownership of Your Submissions. However, in order to fulfill the purposes of this Site, You must give the Host and all Users the right to post, access, evaluate, discuss, and refine Your Submissions. In legalese: You hereby grant to the Host and all Users a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive and fully sub-licensable right and license under Your intellectual property rights to reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display and use Your Submissions (in whole or part) and to incorporate them in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the obligation to retain any copyright notices included in Your Submissions. All Users, the Host, and their sublicensees are responsible for any modifications they make to the Submissions of others. Host here is defined as Oracle. Second - The OpenOffie.org User Community Forums had no formal relationship whatsoever with the OpenOffice.org Community Council. It had no representation on the council and indeed members of the forum, by virtue of their relationship with the forums, where never offered a vote for any officers of the council. Third - The domain name user.services.openoffice.org was the property of Sun-Microsystems, later transfered to Oracle Corporation and use of said URL was at the discretion of the owner. Fourth - The owners of the OpenOffice.org User Community Forums have an explicit right to relocate the services provided at user.services.openoffice.org, along with all content generated by the site, to a new location solely at the discretion of the Volunteer Group. - Taking the hat off. It was my personal hope that this event would also, finally, allow the forums to become an actual part of the main project and ownership
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
In the interests of reaching an acceptable outcome for everyone, I suggest we not go down the rabbit hole of who legally owns the forums. Just so long as at the end of the road there is no question of ownership once the migration is completed, it makes no sense to pursue this issue further. From: Rob Weir robw...@apache.org To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Sent: Sunday, September 4, 2011 2:47 PM Subject: Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 2:40 PM, drew d...@baseanswers.com wrote: On Sun, 2011-09-04 at 18:29 +0100, Rory O'Farrell wrote: On Sun, 4 Sep 2011 12:35:05 -0400 Rob Weir robw...@apache.org wrote: This is really easy to resolve: 1) Discussions on evolving forum policies and rules must occur on ooo-dev. These are tantamount to proposals, and they are subject to Apache Way decision making, just like any other part of the project. If I wanted to suggest a different editing policy for the community wiki, or a new moderation policy for ooo-users, I would be slapped down if I raised it on ooo-private. The transparency principle applies equally to the forums. Discussions behind the scene are not proposals; they emerge into one or more consensuses, which are then considered as proposals and a selection made. I doubt there will be much objection to this. 2) Non-confidential, day-to-day operations of the forum should occur in a publicly-readable forum, or on a new public mailing list. I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. Such a publicly readable form is the Forum, which is openly accessible; to post to it requires a User to choose a Username and to indicate his OS and version of OOo or OOo fork, 3) Private discussions on confidential matters, including your grandmother, occur either on ooo-private or on a private forum that echos its posts to ooo-private. Again, I'd let the forum volunteers decide which. These occur on three dedicated channels as I outlined earlier; the offer is there to allow interested Apache personel access to them immediately. A more public (even if still private mechanism) can be worked out, such as that they can be automatically echoed to a monitorong list. Much of the discussion is merely administrative and may increase the load on such monitoring lists. I will echo this posting to the private OOo channels - perhaps we are now getting somewhere? Hello List, Wearing a three cornered hat: Founding member of the OpenOffice.org User Community Forums, Administrator of the English language forum, member in good standing of the Volunteer Group. First - the current owners of the OpenOffice.org User Community Forums, the instance of the phpBB softwaree and the content within the attached database is owned by the group of individuals known as the Volunteer Group within the forum. This group currently consists of 75 individuals. This ownership was an integral part of the agreement made between the founding members and management at Sun Micro-Systems. The arrangement was materially no different from a standard hosting contract with a commercial provider, with certain branding considerations required in lieu of cash payments. Sorry, I don't see any basis for your claimed ownership of the content. The forums right now link to a TOU page: http://openoffice.org/terms_of_use This includes: c. Other Submissions. (This Section 4.c applies to all Submissions other than source code contributed to a Project, which is governed by the preceding section.) The Host does not claim ownership of Your Submissions. However, in order to fulfill the purposes of this Site, You must give the Host and all Users the right to post, access, evaluate, discuss, and refine Your Submissions. In legalese: You hereby grant to the Host and all Users a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive and fully sub-licensable right and license under Your intellectual property rights to reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display and use Your Submissions (in whole or part) and to incorporate them in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the obligation to retain any copyright notices included in Your Submissions. All Users, the Host, and their sublicensees are responsible for any modifications they make to the Submissions of others. Host here is defined as Oracle. Second - The OpenOffie.org User Community Forums had no formal relationship whatsoever with the OpenOffice.org Community Council. It had no representation on the council and indeed members of the forum, by virtue of their relationship with the forums, where never offered a vote for any officers of the council. Third - The domain name user.services.openoffice.org was the property of Sun-Microsystems, later transfered to Oracle Corporation and use of
RE: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
All of this mention and talking about moderators has raised a puzzle in my mind. We have moderation on all of our lists. What is the oversight on moderator actions? - Dennis PS: Hypothetical slippery-slope arguments don't work. It is mutual in all of those categories what conditions we place on contributions and whether the contributor accepts them. We could let the OpenOffice.org forums go fish (actually, we can't stop them). But is it in the Apache OOo Podling's collective interest for that to happen? -Original Message- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Sunday, September 04, 2011 10:38 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: [ ... ] -0.75 yes we should put this to the community, but this is not how they operate today. I do know that the majority of the big hitters are really unhappy with this. Please realise that if you force this one, you will probably have a very obedient forum, but one with nobody answering any Qs -- or some revolt where they take their service en-mass elsewhere. You can see what would if support volunteers demand to work the way they have always worked, not integrating into the Apache project, and if translators demanded the same, and then technical writers demanded the same? What then? Developers demanding to work in Mercurial under LGPL? In any case, could you maybe float a counter proposal? Something --anything -- that acknowledges that transparency is important, something that makes some effort to meet us half way? Something more than your current proposal which appears to be Thanks for the hardware, Apache. Now leave us alone. Policy discussions are one matter, but moderation must be the business of the moderators. They have made it quite clear in the past that they really don't want to have these discussions in public view. Again we can only sound them out. The proposal I made had moderation decisions -- the truly confidential parts -- be done in a private forum echoed to ooo-private. So it would not be in public view. See above, #3, in case you missed it. -Rob
RE: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
As far as I can tell and there are up to three NL forums that require special karma to visit, as TerryE has already explained. At least one of them is different for each language group. That is the Forum Issues forum that is per language. The title on the English Forums is EN-Forum Issues: A place for us to cover issues about the forum overall. Another forum consists of deleted posts. It is kind of a quarantine for deleted posts and TerryE already described what happens there. I assume this is per language also, since you need to understand the language to review deleted posts. This is a common situation in forums that I have belonged to. I have had enough karma on other forum sites to see how this works (though my brief impression is that the OO.o Forums are superior in how they are handled). There is another English Admin Forum entitled Server-Site Governance, at least on the English-language Forum. There might be only one of these: the brief description is User Services Forums (NL Administrators and Moderators). I see that there is a vote occurring on that last forum this very minute to make that last forum visible to the public but read only. It strikes me that the folks there are friendly, wary of outsiders, and apprehensive about the Apache situation and the future of the forums as they know them. This is on the general forums too, but I am grateful that a lot of that among the administrators and moderators they have been worrying privately. My sense is that everyone there, at all levels, want the openoffice.org site and communities to thrive. Disruption is hard on everyone. Generosity is called for. [An interesting suggestion there: That PPMC folk come over, register on the site, and observe all we want.] We could probably find out more about this by asking them. Over there. Just as Apache folk visited the LibreOffice lists when the incubator was being proposed, and after as incubation was approved and there were still discussions over there that was worthwhile for Apache folk to contribute to. (Of course, many of us on ooo-dev and the PPMC also hang out on LibreOffice and TDF lists and are also developers there. I mean folks who have senior positions with Apache.) - Dennis, being reminded that computing is an empirical science, and so is community building -Original Message- From: Christian Grobmeier [mailto:grobme...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, September 04, 2011 08:07 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums If behavior discussions are going to occur at all, it's probably better that they happen in public rather than there be the feeling of a secret faceless committee to which users can neither respond nor appeal. The latter can lead to discontent. Exactly. And where do users go to complain about moderators? ooo-dev@ ;-) ooo-private@ [ ... ] I think a jolt of transparency will do us much good. We need to learn to collaborate well with each other openly. We need to be moderate in moderation. If we think we need 30 private moderation forums and 30 moderators in order to do user support, then that is a warning sign crying out that we're doing the wrong thing. I think 30 are really to much. But one might be OK. One question: how much moderation is actually happening? And why? Is it really users behavior? In fact I can't imagine 30 boards are necessary for only keeping trolls out. If possible, some stats would be fine to have a better understanding of the issue. Like I asked before, if we had zero private moderator forums, what bad thing would happen? Why can we replace secret tribunals with open, peer pressure and leadership by example? Really, is the situation so worse that secret tribunals is a matching term? (I really don't know, its not a rethoric question). I am all for openess don't get me wrong. The other mail today from Terry showed me there something strange going on. People simply want to use the tools they have used before. They want to speak their language. I think this should be possible. Reducing the tribunal factor to a minimum is a very good thing. I just don't want to read of some moderators discussing my grandmoms behavior in public. -Rob Don -- http://www.grobmeier.de
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
Shane there are some intrinsic differences between a DL and posting into a forum. However, reading this entire thread I get the feeling that some of the current practices on the forum may be unacceptable to Apache / the project. However in this case, I would suggest that: 1) we adopt an evolutionary approach -- that is get the forums moved and then make any changes. 2) we constitute a small group with forum experience *and* ASF experience do a specific task of reviewing current practices against Apache norms and practices, then draft some change guidelines for feeding to the forums, and an impact assessment of their implementation. We can then feed them into the ooo-dev list for comment and if needed vote on their adoption. Actually - reading this thread - I think running an support forum of this kind is something we haven't done before at apache (or at least to my knowledge). That being said we probably need to rethink of what we have done in the past. This would address such issue as: (i) Do we allow the forum moderators use the forum itself to discuss forum management or must this be done on ooo-dev In tradition, all ASF related matters - code, users etc - are discussed in public on the dev list. The user lists has been utilized to do support to users. Now there is an forum in addtiion to a list. The credo is:if it happened on list, it didn't happen. Ok, the board is not on list - so it didn't happen. I think management of the board can also happen on the board as Terry suggested (i think he did). But that my personal opinion. (ii) Do we permit the NL forum moderators to use their own NL for this or are we insisting that this is done in English? I am all for native language, as long as committers are around who can understand this language. (iii) Do we permit the use of a closed access forum / DL for discussing forum conduct? To discuss general rules and how to run the board, I am for ML - because all committers can read. For specific cases, like bad user behaviour or such, a closed forum on the forum would apply imho I have my own opinions on the consequences of some of these points, for example, many NL moderators / volunteers have poor working use of English; many moderators would be unwilling to discuss moderation issues for establish consensus if this had to be done in public. My feeling is that if we choose to forced them to work this way then we will lose many of our moderators / forum contributors who answer most of the Qs. But let us at least draft this guideline and vote on it before executing. +1, as you said, ooo was always a multi-language project and we should not reduce. But there must be people who have an oversight - a few committers must speak the language, than it is ok. I will post a synopsis of this thread to the forums and ask them to comment back here. Oh thanks :-) I should answered on the board right? ;-) Cheers
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:28 AM, Christian Grobmeier grobme...@gmail.com wrote: Shane there are some intrinsic differences between a DL and posting into a forum. However, reading this entire thread I get the feeling that some of the current practices on the forum may be unacceptable to Apache / the project. However in this case, I would suggest that: 1) we adopt an evolutionary approach -- that is get the forums moved and then make any changes. 2) we constitute a small group with forum experience *and* ASF experience do a specific task of reviewing current practices against Apache norms and practices, then draft some change guidelines for feeding to the forums, and an impact assessment of their implementation. We can then feed them into the ooo-dev list for comment and if needed vote on their adoption. Actually - reading this thread - I think running an support forum of this kind is something we haven't done before at apache (or at least to my knowledge). That being said we probably need to rethink of what we have done in the past. This would address such issue as: (i) Do we allow the forum moderators use the forum itself to discuss forum management or must this be done on ooo-dev In tradition, all ASF related matters - code, users etc - are discussed in public on the dev list. The user lists has been utilized to do support to users. Now there is an forum in addtiion to a list. The credo is:if it happened on list, it didn't happen. Ok, the board is not on list - so it didn't happen. I think management of the board can also happen on the board as Terry suggested (i think he did). That logic doesn't really work. The fact that it is not a mailing list (and therefore it didn't happen) is not magical permission to do things in a project that would otherwise not be allowed. For example, could we create a forum for project-level fundraising, for paying developers, for developing code not under ALv2 and for selling CD's of AOOo, and argue that this is OK, because, the board is not on list - so it didn't happen? But that my personal opinion. (ii) Do we permit the NL forum moderators to use their own NL for this or are we insisting that this is done in English? I am all for native language, as long as committers are around who can understand this language. (iii) Do we permit the use of a closed access forum / DL for discussing forum conduct? To discuss general rules and how to run the board, I am for ML - because all committers can read. For specific cases, like bad user behaviour or such, a closed forum on the forum would apply imho I have my own opinions on the consequences of some of these points, for example, many NL moderators / volunteers have poor working use of English; many moderators would be unwilling to discuss moderation issues for establish consensus if this had to be done in public. My feeling is that if we choose to forced them to work this way then we will lose many of our moderators / forum contributors who answer most of the Qs. But let us at least draft this guideline and vote on it before executing. +1, as you said, ooo was always a multi-language project and we should not reduce. But there must be people who have an oversight - a few committers must speak the language, than it is ok. I will post a synopsis of this thread to the forums and ask them to comment back here. Oh thanks :-) I should answered on the board right? ;-) Cheers
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
Rob Weir wrote on Fri, Sep 02, 2011 at 08:14:31 -0400: On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:28 AM, Christian Grobmeier grobme...@gmail.com wrote: Shane there are some intrinsic differences between a DL and posting into a forum. However, reading this entire thread I get the feeling that some of the current practices on the forum may be unacceptable to Apache / the project. However in this case, I would suggest that: 1) we adopt an evolutionary approach -- that is get the forums moved and then make any changes. 2) we constitute a small group with forum experience *and* ASF experience do a specific task of reviewing current practices against Apache norms and practices, then draft some change guidelines for feeding to the forums, and an impact assessment of their implementation. We can then feed them into the ooo-dev list for comment and if needed vote on their adoption. Actually - reading this thread - I think running an support forum of this kind is something we haven't done before at apache (or at least to my knowledge). That being said we probably need to rethink of what we have done in the past. This would address such issue as: (i) Do we allow the forum moderators use the forum itself to discuss forum management or must this be done on ooo-dev In tradition, all ASF related matters - code, users etc - are discussed in public on the dev list. The user lists has been utilized to do support to users. Now there is an forum in addtiion to a list. The credo is:if it happened on list, it didn't happen. Ok, the board is not on list - so it didn't happen. I think management of the board can also happen on the board as Terry suggested (i think he did). That logic doesn't really work. The fact that it is not a mailing list (and therefore it didn't happen) is not magical permission to do things in a project that would otherwise not be allowed. For example, could we create a forum for project-level fundraising, for paying developers, for developing code not under ALv2 and for selling CD's of AOOo, and argue that this is OK, because, the board is not on list - so it didn't happen? You're taking the phrase too literally. If it didn't happen on-list, it didn't happen means: things that didn't happen on-list cannot constitute a PMC decision. You can't vote for a release or a committer on any place other than the list. If the PMC were to meet at a convention center and hand out pamphlets claiming that the foundation rips off third world countries in order to manufacture feathers, the Board would probably step in.
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
In tradition, all ASF related matters - code, users etc - are discussed in public on the dev list. The user lists has been utilized to do support to users. Now there is an forum in addtiion to a list. The credo is:if it happened on list, it didn't happen. Ok, the board is not on list - so it didn't happen. I think management of the board can also happen on the board as Terry suggested (i think he did). That logic doesn't really work. The fact that it is not a mailing list (and therefore it didn't happen) is not magical permission to do things in a project that would otherwise not be allowed. For example, could we create a forum for project-level fundraising, for paying developers, for developing code not under ALv2 and for selling CD's of AOOo, and argue that this is OK, because, the board is not on list - so it didn't happen? i just wanted to outline that a forum is already extraordinary for support questions. Using message boards for support questions but not using it to ban users from the same board sounds strange. For the quote I used I would like to refer you to this excellent slides: http://bit.ly/rkUbSM Anyway: all projects decisions should happen on list and not on Jabber or on a message board. I am doubting the banning of a user is a real project decision. On your example, if you are paying developers for proprietary code or sell CDs outside the ASF and donate the money - why not? You should just respect the branding requirements and do it on your own.
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Christian Grobmeier grobme...@gmail.com wrote: In tradition, all ASF related matters - code, users etc - are discussed in public on the dev list. The user lists has been utilized to do support to users. Now there is an forum in addtiion to a list. The credo is:if it happened on list, it didn't happen. Ok, the board is not on list - so it didn't happen. I think management of the board can also happen on the board as Terry suggested (i think he did). That logic doesn't really work. The fact that it is not a mailing list (and therefore it didn't happen) is not magical permission to do things in a project that would otherwise not be allowed. For example, could we create a forum for project-level fundraising, for paying developers, for developing code not under ALv2 and for selling CD's of AOOo, and argue that this is OK, because, the board is not on list - so it didn't happen? i just wanted to outline that a forum is already extraordinary for support questions. Using message boards for support questions but not using it to ban users from the same board sounds strange. Banning a user is just pressing a button. The technology does not require a discussion. Same as mailing lists. A list moderator can kick out a user without having a discussion. However, our process may require more deliberation. So it is then a question of: 1) Where does this deliberation occur? 2) And does it require confidential treatment? We have several places where abusive behavior could happen, for example: 1) On mailing lists 2) On the community wiki 3) On the support forums 4) On the IRC channel Do we really want a proliferation of private venue for discussing user behavior? A different one for each technology? For the quote I used I would like to refer you to this excellent slides: http://bit.ly/rkUbSM Anyway: all projects decisions should happen on list and not on Jabber or on a message board. I am doubting the banning of a user is a real project decision. When Drew described the use of one of the private support forums he wrote: Rounding out this group of boards is the actual moderator board and that is where these peer reviews and discussion on specific posts by named users takes place. Although anyone can bring up whatever topic they want on that board. So it is not just banning users. It sounds rather open-ended, I'm sure that you've observed, as I have, that new podlings tend to over-user their private lists, that without regular reminders and correction from Mentors, there is a tendency to discuss things in private, not because it is necessary, not because it is confidential, but merely to avoid controversy, to avoid public viewing of project disagreements. Mentors and others try to correct this, because they know that it is important for projects to work transparently. Remember also that the forum moderators, for the most part, are not PPMC members. They have not worked on the private list, nor have they received the constant reminders that we need to operate transparently. They are like the PPMC was on our first day. On your example, if you are paying developers for proprietary code or sell CDs outside the ASF and donate the money - why not? You should just respect the branding requirements and do it on your own. Irrelevant, since the support forums will soon be part of the project, running on Apache infrastructure, under PPMC oversight., They are not independent. The way in which users are treated will reflect on the project and on Apache overall. The support forums are part of the public face of the project. We should be ensuring that this public face reflects project and Apache values, including transparency. I'm not comfortable saying that non-PPMC members will be having private discussions about our users, in 30 different private forums, and deciding among themselves what users will be banned or not, all without PPMC oversight. In other words, how do we ensure that the support forums reflect Apache and project values if the moderation occurs in private, by non-PPMC members, not appointed by the PPMC, without PPMC oversight? -Rob
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
i just wanted to outline that a forum is already extraordinary for support questions. Using message boards for support questions but not using it to ban users from the same board sounds strange. Banning a user is just pressing a button. The technology does not require a discussion. Same as mailing lists. A list moderator can kick out a user without having a discussion. Of course banning a user is clicking a button, but I didn't mean that we need to discuss HOW to click that button. The discussion is around IF. However, our process may require more deliberation. So it is then a question of: 1) Where does this deliberation occur? 2) And does it require confidential treatment? We have several places where abusive behavior could happen, for example: 1) On mailing lists 2) On the community wiki 3) On the support forums 4) On the IRC channel Do we really want a proliferation of private venue for discussing user behavior? A different one for each technology? Do you really want to discuss a users behavior in public? Wow, I really don't want to do that. I strongly believe that only a few people would discuss another guys behavior in public. From the list above IRC channel is not sufficient, because you cannot refer to something. Wiki - if a user trolls a forum, he will probably terrorize the wiki when his name occurs. For the quote I used I would like to refer you to this excellent slides: http://bit.ly/rkUbSM Anyway: all projects decisions should happen on list and not on Jabber or on a message board. I am doubting the banning of a user is a real project decision. When Drew described the use of one of the private support forums he wrote: Rounding out this group of boards is the actual moderator board and that is where these peer reviews and discussion on specific posts by named users takes place. Although anyone can bring up whatever topic they want on that board. So it is not just banning users. It sounds rather open-ended, Thanks for quoting. I think (and I wrote that already) only moderation related topics can/should be discussed in the moderation area. I'm sure that you've observed, as I have, that new podlings tend to over-user their private lists, that without regular reminders and correction from Mentors, there is a tendency to discuss things in private, not because it is necessary, not because it is confidential, but merely to avoid controversy, to avoid public viewing of project disagreements. Mentors and others try to correct this, because they know that it is important for projects to work transparently. I have not made the experience. All the podlings I was in touch with have made it pretty prober from the beginning. I agree it is important to work transparent but there are some topics which cause only grief and pain when discussed in public. I even know projects who discuss committer nominations votes in private - and thats ok. I also think that the ooo podling is different to all other podlings. Transparency is key, I do not doubt this. But discussing someone else in public can only lead to anger. Remember also that the forum moderators, for the most part, are not PPMC members. They have not worked on the private list, nor have they received the constant reminders that we need to operate transparently. They are like the PPMC was on our first day. Question: is there not a single PPMC member on the moderation queue of the forum? If there are PPMC members on the forum, then it is pretty fine - they can oversee the topics and bring them to public. If not than you have lots of trusted individuals - committers - who should be able to do the same. Again, what actually are the use cases for this private moderation forum? At the moment I have only: - deleting spam posts - banning users What else? I believe forum moderators can make sure that nothing else is discussed there. On your example, if you are paying developers for proprietary code or sell CDs outside the ASF and donate the money - why not? You should just respect the branding requirements and do it on your own. Irrelevant, since the support forums will soon be part of the project, You brought up this rhetoric question - I thought I need to answer it. running on Apache infrastructure, under PPMC oversight., They are not independent. The way in which users are treated will reflect on the project and on Apache overall. The support forums are part of the public face of the project. We should be ensuring that this public face reflects project and Apache values, including transparency. +1 I think transparency is given, even when spam posts and troll users are discussed in private on the message board. I'm not comfortable saying that non-PPMC members will be having private discussions about our users, in 30 different private forums, and deciding among themselves what users will be banned or not, all without PPMC oversight. Aha, thats another point! Now you are
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 9:37 AM, Christian Grobmeier grobme...@gmail.com wrote: snip What, if a the click on the ban button does send an email to the private@ mailinglist? As I heard it is the phpBB board which is used, so only a online is necessary for that. It would also conform to commit then reviewguidelines. ;-) It would be good, if the click on the ban button needs a ban comment - to my knowledge this comment is already implemented in phpBB. The comment point to a discussion thread in which the moderators have discussed their action. Any PPMC can then have an oversight on this. Of course, all moderation actions allowed for that board need a similar functionality. In addition, I think it is possible to send new topics in a moderation board to the private list. Then the PPMC is even aware of newly starting discussions and can follow if they want. What do you think about that? It is hard to disagree with that idea, especially since I proposed something similar yesterday: http://markmail.org/message/a5hxqjnkh655xdvy I list the reasons there. -Rob Cheers Christian -Rob -- http://www.grobmeier.de
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 9:37 AM, Christian Grobmeier grobme...@gmail.com wrote: Do you really want to discuss a users behavior in public? Wow, I really don't want to do that. I strongly believe that only a few people would discuss another guys behavior in public. It happens. In fact it happened here, on this list, yesterday. There was some pretty excessive vitriol, open and in public. And yet it seemed to work into more mature and rational discussion today. If behavior discussions are going to occur at all, it's probably better that they happen in public rather than there be the feeling of a secret faceless committee to which users can neither respond nor appeal. The latter can lead to discontent. Don
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On 2011-09-02 12:16 PM Rob Weir wrote: On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 1:45 PM, Donald Whytockdwhyt...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 9:37 AM, Christian Grobmeiergrobme...@gmail.com wrote: Do you really want to discuss a users behavior in public? Wow, I really don't want to do that. I strongly believe that only a few people would discuss another guys behavior in public. It happens. In fact it happened here, on this list, yesterday. There was some pretty excessive vitriol, open and in public. And yet it seemed to work into more mature and rational discussion today. If behavior discussions are going to occur at all, it's probably better that they happen in public rather than there be the feeling of a secret faceless committee to which users can neither respond nor appeal. The latter can lead to discontent. Exactly. And where do users go to complain about moderators? I had problems with a moderator on http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/index.php a few years ago. I complained about his removal of posts of mine that disagreed with him and his removal of a new thread complaining about his removals. His moderator privileges were removed, and he subsequently left the forum. I had one person contact me off list, not about the support forum moderation specifically, but about moderation in another part of OOo. He had concerns about heavy-handiness in moderation, of unpopular views being booted. And what has that got to do with the forum? The forum is not part of OOo on Oracle. It is just hosted on their server. The other older OOo forum is hosted on their own server. We shouldn't hide our heads in the sand and pretend that everything at OOo was perfect and that everyone got along, and everyone was happy. This is not true. There were power centers within the project, there was abuse and there was discontent. LibreOffice didn't just happen on a whim. Again, irrelevant to discussion about http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/index.php I think a jolt of transparency will do us much good. We need to learn to collaborate well with each other openly. We need to be moderate in moderation. If we think we need 30 private moderation forums and 30 moderators in order to do user support, then that is a warning sign crying out that we're doing the wrong thing. Like I asked before, if we had zero private moderator forums, what bad thing would happen? Why can we replace secret tribunals with open, peer pressure and leadership by example? Perhaps you should take up Terry's offer to email him requesting access to all parts of the forum. He will then raise you to volunteer so that you can see the main closed forums. You could spend some time there to his how an user community driven forum works. Then you could make informed comments about how to incorporate it into Apache without alienating the volunteers on that forum who give support. So far, their impression of Apache OOo is not great. Terry Ellison is a great asset that some people on this project have successfully managed to alienate. -- _ Larry I. Gusaas Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan Canada Website: http://larry-gusaas.com An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs. - Edgard Varese
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: Anyone is able to join the OOo Community forums, but we also have a number of closed forums use for internal management of the site. If any committers would like to have access to these, then just make sure that they've got an active account on the current production service (not ooo-forums.apache.org) and email me me from it requesting access. I will then raise you to volunteer so that you can see the main closed forums. -1 I propose that we eliminate any such internal management forums. Having these goes against the transparency that we should be expressing in all of our work as an Apache project. If something truly does require confidential treatment then it could be brought to the ooo-private list, where committers already have access. And equally important, ooo-private is readable by our podling mentors and by Apache Members, to ensure we do not abuse the use of such private lists. If something requires special treatment because it relates to site security, then that belongs with Apache Infra. If we're merely discussing internal management of the site on these closed forums, this may be boring to most site visitors, but that is not a sufficient reason to conduct this work in private. -Rob Please note: the forum rules apply to all and all volunteers are expected to follow them -- including me or any other committer. Regards Terry
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: Rob, This was a polite invitation to committers if they wanted to see how the forums operate. I will take your -1 to mean that you don't want to take me up on the offer. Let me be clearer then. The -1 is to your proposal to invite committers and assign them permissions to a private forum. This is not a technical objection, but a policy objection. Please do not take further steps on this until we can get a Mentor to weigh in on. Thanks, -Rob Your reply is a valid topic but entirely off *this* topic. Unfortunately since this is a DL and not a forum, I can't move this to new topic which relates to your point. However, if you care to make this on another thread on the topic you discuss, then I will reply there. Can we try to maintain some thread discipline, please? Regards Terry On 01/09/11 17:59, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Terry Ellisonte...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: Anyone is able to join the OOo Community forums, but we also have a number of closed forums use for internal management of the site. If any committers would like to have access to these, then just make sure that they've got an active account on the current production service (not ooo-forums.apache.org) and email me me from it requesting access. I will then raise you to volunteer so that you can see the main closed forums. -1 I propose that we eliminate any such internal management forums...snip
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
OK, Rob, I now understand your point. I will do as you request. However, it seems to me that by making this request you are creating an interesting catch-22: I far as I can see there are two facets to this invitation. * *Sufficiency*. These forums are closed because this gives the attendees freedom to discuss matters (such as individual poster behaviour) that shouldn't be discussed on a public forum. We only invite trusted forum members to join these lists. (That's is that they've demonstrated that they are responsible and have built up a body of karma with their forum contributions.) I would have thought that being elected a committer could reasonably be deemed to be sufficient to show such trust. * *Necessity*. You seem to want to discuss policy on the governance of the forums from within this DL or ooo-private. I also recall some of your previous comments which indicate that these people (who have committed hundreds if not thousands of hours to supporting this service) do not merit committer status unless they have a wider engagement in the project, and they are therefore excluded from any ooo-private discussions. Yet, it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable that anyone contributing to this discussion should at least have a working knowledge of how the forums operate in practice and currently govern themselves. So I do think it necessary as well. Hence in my view, this invitation makes eminent sense. Is your counter proposal that only committers who are entirely ignorant of how the forums work should decided on their future governance and existence? I feel that most Europeans would regard this as a typical American attitude to the rest of the world ;) Regards Terry On 01/09/11 19:05, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Terry Ellisonte...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: Rob, This was a polite invitation to committers if they wanted to see how the forums operate. I will take your -1 to mean that you don't want to take me up on the offer. Let me be clearer then. The -1 is to your proposal to invite committers and assign them permissions to a private forum. This is not a technical objection, but a policy objection. Please do not take further steps on this until we can get a Mentor to weigh in on. Thanks, -Rob Your reply is a valid topic but entirely off *this* topic. Unfortunately since this is a DL and not a forum, I can't move this to new topic which relates to your point. However, if you care to make this on another thread on the topic you discuss, then I will reply there. Can we try to maintain some thread discipline, please? Regards Terry On 01/09/11 17:59, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Terry Ellisonte...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: Anyone is able to join the OOo Community forums, but we also have a number of closed forums use for internal management of the site. If any committers would like to have access to these, then just make sure that they've got an active account on the current production service (not ooo-forums.apache.org) and email me me from it requesting access. I will then raise you to volunteer so that you can see the main closed forums. -1 I propose that we eliminate any such internal management forums...snip
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: OK, Rob, I now understand your point. I will do as you request. However, it seems to me that by making this request you are creating an interesting catch-22: I far as I can see there are two facets to this invitation. * *Sufficiency*. These forums are closed because this gives the attendees freedom to discuss matters (such as individual poster behaviour) that shouldn't be discussed on a public forum. We only invite trusted forum members to join these lists. (That's is that they've demonstrated that they are responsible and have built up a body of karma with their forum contributions.) I would have thought that being elected a committer could reasonably be deemed to be sufficient to show such trust. * *Necessity*. You seem to want to discuss policy on the governance of the forums from within this DL or ooo-private. I also recall some of your previous comments which indicate that these people (who have committed hundreds if not thousands of hours to supporting this service) do not merit committer status unless they have a wider engagement in the project, and they are therefore excluded from any ooo-private discussions. Yet, it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable that anyone contributing to this discussion should at least have a working knowledge of how the forums operate in practice and currently govern themselves. So I do think it necessary as well. This is incorrect. We're obviously discussing the policy on the public list. We have not discussed this on ooo-private. Discussion of policy regarding the treatment of confidential information is itself not confidential. In fact, such discussions should probably always be public. You are also incorrect in your assumption that volunteers need to contribute in several areas in order to be committers. Someone who makes substantial contributions as a support forum moderator could make a great committer candidate. Ditto for a documentation writer, a tester, a translator, etc. Committers are not just coders. It is about commitment to the project. You are suggesting two problems: 1) We have forum moderators who understand how the forums work, but have not made visible contributions to the project yet, so they are not currently being nominated as committers. 2) We have committers who are not familiar with how the forum operates. And I'm raising the 3rd issue: 3) How the forum operates should not be something that occurs in private. There is a clear solution here: 1) Have those who understand how the forum operates today write this up in detail as a contribution to the project's website 2) This would help other committers understand how this works and avoids the newbie problem you are concerned with, though we are probably not half as dumb as you seem to be assuming. I, for example, have run a phpBB board before. 3) This also gives the PPMC and Mentors an opportunity to review the forum procedures and ensure they conform Apache expectations, etc. This is something we should be doing anyways. 4) This effort, both in writing up the procedures, and educating the existing committers, and through this mutual discussion, would probably be a sufficient sign of commitment to get the moderators who are do this work to be nominated as project committers. So a win-win situation, all around. -Rob
RE: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
Rob, I believe Terry is talking about the openoffice.org domain in situ and the existing OOo forums there. This has nothing to do with anything under Apache ooo custody at this time, nor does it have anything to do with the test version he has running in order to learn how to port. It was an offer to provide any interim support on the live openoffice.org forums, and understand their administration ther, not anything on Apache. I assume that the rights that Terry Ellison has on openoffice.org is not anything that were conferred to him via the ASF. I believe that there is no policy matter here, and if it is it is between Oracle and Terry and those Terry approves to be there. - Dennis POLICY MATTERS THREADS There is certainly a policy matter on how administration is done on a port to Apache if we insist on operating it on an apache.org domain. There is a different policy matter, but still one, if we continue to operate it on the openoffice.org domain even though hosted in some sanitary way on Apache infrastructure. We already have unresolved discussions on other threads concerning that. -Original Message- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 11:05 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: Rob, This was a polite invitation to committers if they wanted to see how the forums operate. I will take your -1 to mean that you don't want to take me up on the offer. Let me be clearer then. The -1 is to your proposal to invite committers and assign them permissions to a private forum. This is not a technical objection, but a policy objection. Please do not take further steps on this until we can get a Mentor to weigh in on. Thanks, -Rob Your reply is a valid topic but entirely off *this* topic. Unfortunately since this is a DL and not a forum, I can't move this to new topic which relates to your point. However, if you care to make this on another thread on the topic you discuss, then I will reply there. Can we try to maintain some thread discipline, please? Regards Terry On 01/09/11 17:59, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Terry Ellisonte...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: Anyone is able to join the OOo Community forums, but we also have a number of closed forums use for internal management of the site. If any committers would like to have access to these, then just make sure that they've got an active account on the current production service (not ooo-forums.apache.org) and email me me from it requesting access. I will then raise you to volunteer so that you can see the main closed forums. -1 I propose that we eliminate any such internal management forums...snip
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Terry Ellison ter...@apache.org wrote: On 01/09/11 20:14, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: OK, Rob, I now understand your point. I will do as you request. However, it seems to me that by making this request you are creating an interesting catch-22: I far as I can see there are two facets to this invitation. * *Sufficiency*. These forums are closed because this gives the attendees freedom to discuss matters (such as individual poster behaviour) that shouldn't be discussed on a public forum. We only invite trusted forum members to join these lists. (That's is that they've demonstrated that they are responsible and have built up a body of karma with their forum contributions.) I would have thought that being elected a committer could reasonably be deemed to be sufficient to show such trust. * *Necessity*. You seem to want to discuss policy on the governance of the forums from within this DL or ooo-private. I also recall some of your previous comments which indicate that these people (who have committed hundreds if not thousands of hours to supporting this service) do not merit committer status unless they have a wider engagement in the project, and they are therefore excluded from any ooo-private discussions. Yet, it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable that anyone contributing to this discussion should at least have a working knowledge of how the forums operate in practice and currently govern themselves. So I do think it necessary as well. This is incorrect. We're obviously discussing the policy on the public list. We have not discussed this on ooo-private. Discussion of policy regarding the treatment of confidential information is itself not confidential. In fact, such discussions should probably always be public. You are also incorrect in your assumption that volunteers need to contribute in several areas in order to be committers. Someone who makes substantial contributions as a support forum moderator could make a great committer candidate. Ditto for a documentation writer, a tester, a translator, etc. Committers are not just coders. It is about commitment to the project. You are suggesting two problems: 1) We have forum moderators who understand how the forums work, but have not made visible contributions to the project yet, so they are not currently being nominated as committers. 2) We have committers who are not familiar with how the forum operates. And I'm raising the 3rd issue: 3) How the forum operates should not be something that occurs in private. There is a clear solution here: 1) Have those who understand how the forum operates today write this up in detail as a contribution to the project's website 2) This would help other committers understand how this works and avoids the newbie problem you are concerned with, though we are probably not half as dumb as you seem to be assuming. I, for example, have run a phpBB board before. The issue isn't about phpBB, its more about we operate *these* forums. 3) This also gives the PPMC and Mentors an opportunity to review the forum procedures and ensure they conform Apache expectations, etc. This is something we should be doing anyways. 4) This effort, both in writing up the procedures, and educating the existing committers, and through this mutual discussion, would probably be a sufficient sign of commitment to get the moderators who are do this work to be nominated as project committers. So a win-win situation, all around. Rob, I think that on your last comments we are lot closer than on your first reply. However, we can either choose to make this change: A) a disruptive one: that is we lay down some (from the perspective of the volunteers who are currently doing this work) arbitrary and seemly irrational new rules on a love it or leave it basis. In my experience many or most will leave given this sort of diktat. It's a good way to kill off a service. B) an evolutionary one: that is we engage constructively and get to understand the range of perspectives then move the service incrementally to an end-point that is mutually acceptable. In my experience many or most supporters will leave when faced with the (A) sort of diktat. (B) works a LOT better, especially when the people involved are making their commitments pro-bono. So I tend to feel that people who start with (A) really have an agenda of shutting down a service and those who start from (B) want it to prosper. Transparency is not just a nice to have at Apache. Transparency is not irrational. Transparency is not something we slowly evolve towards in order to accommodate working habits of volunteers. Transparency is fundamental about how we do things. If operating transparently is seen as disruptive, then that may mean that we are doing a
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Thu, 2011-09-01 at 19:56 +0100, Terry Ellison wrote: OK, Rob, I now understand your point. I will do as you request. However, it seems to me that by making this request you are creating an interesting catch-22: I far as I can see there are two facets to this invitation. * *Sufficiency*. These forums are closed because this gives the attendees freedom to discuss matters (such as individual poster behaviour) that shouldn't be discussed on a public forum. We only invite trusted forum members to join these lists. (That's is that they've demonstrated that they are responsible and have built up a body of karma with their forum contributions.) I would have thought that being elected a committer could reasonably be deemed to be sufficient to show such trust. * *Necessity*. You seem to want to discuss policy on the governance of the forums from within this DL or ooo-private. I also recall some of your previous comments which indicate that these people (who have committed hundreds if not thousands of hours to supporting this service) do not merit committer status unless they have a wider engagement in the project, and they are therefore excluded from any ooo-private discussions. Yet, it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable that anyone contributing to this discussion should at least have a working knowledge of how the forums operate in practice and currently govern themselves. So I do think it necessary as well. Hence in my view, this invitation makes eminent sense. Is your counter proposal that only committers who are entirely ignorant of how the forums work should decided on their future governance and existence? I feel that most Europeans would regard this as a typical American attitude to the rest of the world ;) Could of done with out the last line there Terry, IMO, even if Rob comes on a bit strong at times. Anyway - given that the status of the forums is in reality changing, finally, it makes sense that it is also open of review by the PPMC. First what I think are the easy cases. There are three closed boards per language level forum that I submit need to remain closed. The first is named forum-admin, but this can be a bit of misnomer. It's purpose is quite simple, emails sent to the admin mailing address are handled by a semi-automated process. 1) An email auto responder emails back a canned message, crafted over time that explains simple problem solving steps the user can take on their own. This tends to clear a very large majority of issues without further intervention. 2) The full email is posted to the forum-admin board along with the users email address. This is the only board on the site where the email address is given in clear text. Every moderator can see that board and is asked to take a part in reviewing these requests - if the problem is clearly handled by the canned reply email no action is required. On the other hand if it is one of the outliers and does require human intervention they can grab it, do what they think needs dong and add a comment to the email showing what they did. This has worked out quite well over time. The next closed board that needs to stay that way is the Quarantine board. This board serves a dual purpose. When any post is deleted on a public board, either by the posting user or a moderator the post is moved to quarantine, rather then being immediately removed from the database. As this point all moderators can view these deleted posts and a clock starts. After three days if no action is taken the post is permanently removed from the database. During this time however a post can be restored. This happens from time to time with users accidentally deleting a post, they just need to ask a moderator to un-delete it for them. In the case of obvious spam no one does anything and it just slides into oblivion. Now normally, if a moderator wants to remove a post for some cause they would bring it up on the moderator list, but even if they didn't and they just deleted a post the quarantine list then acts as a peer review mechanism. Terry mentioned rules, this is a big one, a moderator can't do something lie this without informing the group as a whole as to what they did and why. (this includes removing 'obvious' spam...they still must report the action) Again from time to time it is the judgment of the larger group to reverse the individuals decision, in which case the post is restored. Rounding out this group of boards is the actual moderator board and that is where these peer reviews and discussion on specific posts by named users takes place. Although anyone can bring up whatever topic they want on that board. To the others on the list here that are admins and moderators at the forums I would say, I agree with Rob - everything else should really be open to all. Anyway - hope that helps.
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:00 PM, drew d...@baseanswers.com wrote: On Thu, 2011-09-01 at 19:56 +0100, Terry Ellison wrote: OK, Rob, I now understand your point. I will do as you request. However, it seems to me that by making this request you are creating an interesting catch-22: I far as I can see there are two facets to this invitation. * *Sufficiency*. These forums are closed because this gives the attendees freedom to discuss matters (such as individual poster behaviour) that shouldn't be discussed on a public forum. We only invite trusted forum members to join these lists. (That's is that they've demonstrated that they are responsible and have built up a body of karma with their forum contributions.) I would have thought that being elected a committer could reasonably be deemed to be sufficient to show such trust. * *Necessity*. You seem to want to discuss policy on the governance of the forums from within this DL or ooo-private. I also recall some of your previous comments which indicate that these people (who have committed hundreds if not thousands of hours to supporting this service) do not merit committer status unless they have a wider engagement in the project, and they are therefore excluded from any ooo-private discussions. Yet, it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable that anyone contributing to this discussion should at least have a working knowledge of how the forums operate in practice and currently govern themselves. So I do think it necessary as well. Hence in my view, this invitation makes eminent sense. Is your counter proposal that only committers who are entirely ignorant of how the forums work should decided on their future governance and existence? I feel that most Europeans would regard this as a typical American attitude to the rest of the world ;) Could of done with out the last line there Terry, IMO, even if Rob comes on a bit strong at times. Anyway - given that the status of the forums is in reality changing, finally, it makes sense that it is also open of review by the PPMC. First what I think are the easy cases. There are three closed boards per language level forum that I submit need to remain closed. The first is named forum-admin, but this can be a bit of misnomer. It's purpose is quite simple, emails sent to the admin mailing address are handled by a semi-automated process. 1) An email auto responder emails back a canned message, crafted over time that explains simple problem solving steps the user can take on their own. This tends to clear a very large majority of issues without further intervention. 2) The full email is posted to the forum-admin board along with the users email address. This is the only board on the site where the email address is given in clear text. Every moderator can see that board and is asked to take a part in reviewing these requests - if the problem is clearly handled by the canned reply email no action is required. On the other hand if it is one of the outliers and does require human intervention they can grab it, do what they think needs dong and add a comment to the email showing what they did. This has worked out quite well over time. The next closed board that needs to stay that way is the Quarantine board. This board serves a dual purpose. When any post is deleted on a public board, either by the posting user or a moderator the post is moved to quarantine, rather then being immediately removed from the database. As this point all moderators can view these deleted posts and a clock starts. After three days if no action is taken the post is permanently removed from the database. During this time however a post can be restored. This happens from time to time with users accidentally deleting a post, they just need to ask a moderator to un-delete it for them. In the case of obvious spam no one does anything and it just slides into oblivion. Now normally, if a moderator wants to remove a post for some cause they would bring it up on the moderator list, but even if they didn't and they just deleted a post the quarantine list then acts as a peer review mechanism. Terry mentioned rules, this is a big one, a moderator can't do something lie this without informing the group as a whole as to what they did and why. (this includes removing 'obvious' spam...they still must report the action) Again from time to time it is the judgment of the larger group to reverse the individuals decision, in which case the post is restored. Rounding out this group of boards is the actual moderator board and that is where these peer reviews and discussion on specific posts by named users takes place. Although anyone can bring up whatever topic they want on that board. I could see an operational need for the first two. They are not used as
RE: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
This should really be on its own thread as Terry requested. In any case, I believe the private forums are for roughly the same reasons that the PPMC list is private. The administrators address disputes, deal with bad behavior, etc. I notice that moderator actions on lists here are not dealt with transparently and why should they be? We don't even know who the moderators are, in general, especially for lists created before there were any lists on which to learn such things. I believe this is similar, in that there are moderation privileges and a place for those with such privileges to discuss matters in private. If not there already, it would be easy to have a public forum in each cluster for issues about the forum itself. There still needs a private means of communication on what are sensitive matters, in the current live system and any counterpart under Apache auspices. - Dennis -Original Message- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 12:59 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Terry Ellison ter...@apache.org wrote: On 01/09/11 20:14, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: OK, Rob, I now understand your point. I will do as you request. However, it seems to me that by making this request you are creating an interesting catch-22: I far as I can see there are two facets to this invitation. * *Sufficiency*. These forums are closed because this gives the attendees freedom to discuss matters (such as individual poster behaviour) that shouldn't be discussed on a public forum. We only invite trusted forum members to join these lists. (That's is that they've demonstrated that they are responsible and have built up a body of karma with their forum contributions.) I would have thought that being elected a committer could reasonably be deemed to be sufficient to show such trust. * *Necessity*. You seem to want to discuss policy on the governance of the forums from within this DL or ooo-private. I also recall some of your previous comments which indicate that these people (who have committed hundreds if not thousands of hours to supporting this service) do not merit committer status unless they have a wider engagement in the project, and they are therefore excluded from any ooo-private discussions. Yet, it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable that anyone contributing to this discussion should at least have a working knowledge of how the forums operate in practice and currently govern themselves. So I do think it necessary as well. This is incorrect. We're obviously discussing the policy on the public list. We have not discussed this on ooo-private. Discussion of policy regarding the treatment of confidential information is itself not confidential. In fact, such discussions should probably always be public. You are also incorrect in your assumption that volunteers need to contribute in several areas in order to be committers. Someone who makes substantial contributions as a support forum moderator could make a great committer candidate. Ditto for a documentation writer, a tester, a translator, etc. Committers are not just coders. It is about commitment to the project. You are suggesting two problems: 1) We have forum moderators who understand how the forums work, but have not made visible contributions to the project yet, so they are not currently being nominated as committers. 2) We have committers who are not familiar with how the forum operates. And I'm raising the 3rd issue: 3) How the forum operates should not be something that occurs in private. There is a clear solution here: 1) Have those who understand how the forum operates today write this up in detail as a contribution to the project's website 2) This would help other committers understand how this works and avoids the newbie problem you are concerned with, though we are probably not half as dumb as you seem to be assuming. I, for example, have run a phpBB board before. The issue isn't about phpBB, its more about we operate *these* forums. 3) This also gives the PPMC and Mentors an opportunity to review the forum procedures and ensure they conform Apache expectations, etc. This is something we should be doing anyways. 4) This effort, both in writing up the procedures, and educating the existing committers, and through this mutual discussion, would probably be a sufficient sign of commitment to get the moderators who are do this work to be nominated as project committers. So a win-win situation, all around. Rob, I think that on your last comments we are lot closer than on your first reply. However, we can either choose to make this change: A) a disruptive one: that is we lay down some (from
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton dennis.hamil...@acm.org wrote: This should really be on its own thread as Terry requested. In any case, I believe the private forums are for roughly the same reasons that the PPMC list is private. The administrators address disputes, deal with bad behavior, etc. But that fact is we don't use ooo-private for that kind of thing. You know that. We've never, ever discussed a bad behavior, dealt with disputes, etc., on ooo-private.We resolve disputes here, on ooo-dev, in full public view. Why would you suggest that we have ever done otherwise? I notice that moderator actions on lists here are not dealt with transparently and why should they be? We don't even know who the moderators are, in general, especially for lists created before there were any lists on which to learn such things. We don't do moderation in the sense that the forums do. We don't hold back posts that are off-topic, that are showing bad behavior, etc. That is not what list moderators do. All we really do is catch posts that come from non-subscribers and do a quick glance to see if they are spam. If not, we let them through.If you read Drew's description of how the forums are dealing with moderation, it sounds like they have a much more intense, secret, deliberative process around moderation. I believe this is similar, in that there are moderation privileges and a place for those with such privileges to discuss matters in private. If not there already, it would be easy to have a public forum in each cluster for issues about the forum itself. There still needs a private means of communication on what are sensitive matters, in the current live system and any counterpart under Apache auspices. We have such a method, if it were needed. It is called ooo-private. If we think that 30 private forums are needed in order to discuss bad behavior in support posts (3 forums per each of 10 languages) then I think we're doing support moderation wrong. -Rob - Dennis -Original Message- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 12:59 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Terry Ellison ter...@apache.org wrote: On 01/09/11 20:14, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: OK, Rob, I now understand your point. I will do as you request. However, it seems to me that by making this request you are creating an interesting catch-22: I far as I can see there are two facets to this invitation. * *Sufficiency*. These forums are closed because this gives the attendees freedom to discuss matters (such as individual poster behaviour) that shouldn't be discussed on a public forum. We only invite trusted forum members to join these lists. (That's is that they've demonstrated that they are responsible and have built up a body of karma with their forum contributions.) I would have thought that being elected a committer could reasonably be deemed to be sufficient to show such trust. * *Necessity*. You seem to want to discuss policy on the governance of the forums from within this DL or ooo-private. I also recall some of your previous comments which indicate that these people (who have committed hundreds if not thousands of hours to supporting this service) do not merit committer status unless they have a wider engagement in the project, and they are therefore excluded from any ooo-private discussions. Yet, it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable that anyone contributing to this discussion should at least have a working knowledge of how the forums operate in practice and currently govern themselves. So I do think it necessary as well. This is incorrect. We're obviously discussing the policy on the public list. We have not discussed this on ooo-private. Discussion of policy regarding the treatment of confidential information is itself not confidential. In fact, such discussions should probably always be public. You are also incorrect in your assumption that volunteers need to contribute in several areas in order to be committers. Someone who makes substantial contributions as a support forum moderator could make a great committer candidate. Ditto for a documentation writer, a tester, a translator, etc. Committers are not just coders. It is about commitment to the project. You are suggesting two problems: 1) We have forum moderators who understand how the forums work, but have not made visible contributions to the project yet, so they are not currently being nominated as committers. 2) We have committers who are not familiar with how the forum operates. And I'm raising the 3rd issue: 3) How the forum operates should not be something that occurs in private.
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
Crazy idea. But is it possible at all to cause all posts to private forums to be echoed to the ooo-private list? That would address several of my concerns: 1) Guaranteed archiving of these posts in a form that Apache Members can inspect, if there is ever a future dispute 2) Allows PPMC and Mentor oversight of the traffic, to ensure that it is not being abused. 3) Makes the full range of contributions of moderators more obvious to the PPMC, which helps make a better case for them being offered committer status. -Rob On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Terry Ellison ter...@apache.org wrote: On 01/09/11 20:14, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: OK, Rob, I now understand your point. I will do as you request. However, it seems to me that by making this request you are creating an interesting catch-22: I far as I can see there are two facets to this invitation. * *Sufficiency*. These forums are closed because this gives the attendees freedom to discuss matters (such as individual poster behaviour) that shouldn't be discussed on a public forum. We only invite trusted forum members to join these lists. (That's is that they've demonstrated that they are responsible and have built up a body of karma with their forum contributions.) I would have thought that being elected a committer could reasonably be deemed to be sufficient to show such trust. * *Necessity*. You seem to want to discuss policy on the governance of the forums from within this DL or ooo-private. I also recall some of your previous comments which indicate that these people (who have committed hundreds if not thousands of hours to supporting this service) do not merit committer status unless they have a wider engagement in the project, and they are therefore excluded from any ooo-private discussions. Yet, it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable that anyone contributing to this discussion should at least have a working knowledge of how the forums operate in practice and currently govern themselves. So I do think it necessary as well. This is incorrect. We're obviously discussing the policy on the public list. We have not discussed this on ooo-private. Discussion of policy regarding the treatment of confidential information is itself not confidential. In fact, such discussions should probably always be public. You are also incorrect in your assumption that volunteers need to contribute in several areas in order to be committers. Someone who makes substantial contributions as a support forum moderator could make a great committer candidate. Ditto for a documentation writer, a tester, a translator, etc. Committers are not just coders. It is about commitment to the project. You are suggesting two problems: 1) We have forum moderators who understand how the forums work, but have not made visible contributions to the project yet, so they are not currently being nominated as committers. 2) We have committers who are not familiar with how the forum operates. And I'm raising the 3rd issue: 3) How the forum operates should not be something that occurs in private. There is a clear solution here: 1) Have those who understand how the forum operates today write this up in detail as a contribution to the project's website 2) This would help other committers understand how this works and avoids the newbie problem you are concerned with, though we are probably not half as dumb as you seem to be assuming. I, for example, have run a phpBB board before. The issue isn't about phpBB, its more about we operate *these* forums. 3) This also gives the PPMC and Mentors an opportunity to review the forum procedures and ensure they conform Apache expectations, etc. This is something we should be doing anyways. 4) This effort, both in writing up the procedures, and educating the existing committers, and through this mutual discussion, would probably be a sufficient sign of commitment to get the moderators who are do this work to be nominated as project committers. So a win-win situation, all around. Rob, I think that on your last comments we are lot closer than on your first reply. However, we can either choose to make this change: A) a disruptive one: that is we lay down some (from the perspective of the volunteers who are currently doing this work) arbitrary and seemly irrational new rules on a love it or leave it basis. In my experience many or most will leave given this sort of diktat. It's a good way to kill off a service. B) an evolutionary one: that is we engage constructively and get to understand the range of perspectives then move the service incrementally to an end-point that is mutually acceptable. In my experience many or most supporters will leave when faced with the (A) sort of diktat. (B) works a LOT better, especially when the people
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Thu, 2011-09-01 at 16:26 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:00 PM, drew d...@baseanswers.com wrote: On Thu, 2011-09-01 at 19:56 +0100, Terry Ellison wrote: snip 5) If, hypothetically, you did not have the ability to do peer reviews and discussion on specific posts by named users, what would happen then? Is there any particular reason why you could not have a public discussion about a post that you are considering deleting? Maybe in a forum that only moderators can post to, of course. But is there any reason you could not be transparent about how moderation works? This might actually help enforce what your usage expectations are. I just described the process - in practice it happens quite infrequently - the overwhelming deletes are just simple and not so simple attempts to use the forums as a link farm. There are people that actually run adds for contractors to do this type of thing - and it usually takes a few posts to catch on to what they are up to. Simply being discourteous or rude isn't going to get you here. People show up all the time pissed and frustrated and often blow off steam, sometimes quite vigorously and that's fine - but if it turns into f this and f that, and you sob this or bastards that...then quite frankly no that will not be tolerated. Nearly all of what a person does there is just as you described, getting people to refine a question so it makes sense, or getting it to the right place, or recognizing a bug report and getting it into the issue tracker. As for trusting people, we do that in spades, it's not about trust it is about working collaboratively. I noticed for instance that just today on the Apache Infra mailing list, Terry had implemented something, another person on the list rolled it back and then told Terry why - they then discussed it - I don't think that was a matter of lack of trust, it was a matter of them learning to work together. //drew
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Thu, 2011-09-01 at 16:40 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: We have such a method, if it were needed. It is called ooo-private. If we think that 30 private forums are needed in order to discuss bad behavior in support posts (3 forums per each of 10 languages) Come on Rob, people like to work in there own language what is so hard to understand about that?
RE: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
We have not had the bad-behavior/HR-type problems that would require the PPMC to have private discussion. I do believe that it is one of the PPMC responsibilities however. A dispute between users here, or a complaint to the PPMC about user conduct would likely be handled on ooo-private. From the PMC guide, http://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html, All PMCs SHALL restrict their communication on private mailing lists to ONLY issues that cannot be discussed in public *such* *as*: [*emphasis* mine] * re-disclosure of security problems * pre-agreement discussions with third parties that require confidentiality * nominees for project, project committee or Foundation membership * **personal** *conflicts* among project personnel - Dennis -Original Message- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 13:40 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton dennis.hamil...@acm.org wrote: This should really be on its own thread as Terry requested. In any case, I believe the private forums are for roughly the same reasons that the PPMC list is private. The administrators address disputes, deal with bad behavior, etc. But that fact is we don't use ooo-private for that kind of thing. You know that. We've never, ever discussed a bad behavior, dealt with disputes, etc., on ooo-private.We resolve disputes here, on ooo-dev, in full public view. Why would you suggest that we have ever done otherwise? I notice that moderator actions on lists here are not dealt with transparently and why should they be? We don't even know who the moderators are, in general, especially for lists created before there were any lists on which to learn such things. We don't do moderation in the sense that the forums do. We don't hold back posts that are off-topic, that are showing bad behavior, etc. That is not what list moderators do. All we really do is catch posts that come from non-subscribers and do a quick glance to see if they are spam. If not, we let them through.If you read Drew's description of how the forums are dealing with moderation, it sounds like they have a much more intense, secret, deliberative process around moderation. I believe this is similar, in that there are moderation privileges and a place for those with such privileges to discuss matters in private. If not there already, it would be easy to have a public forum in each cluster for issues about the forum itself. There still needs a private means of communication on what are sensitive matters, in the current live system and any counterpart under Apache auspices. We have such a method, if it were needed. It is called ooo-private. If we think that 30 private forums are needed in order to discuss bad behavior in support posts (3 forums per each of 10 languages) then I think we're doing support moderation wrong. -Rob - Dennis -Original Message- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 12:59 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Terry Ellison ter...@apache.org wrote: On 01/09/11 20:14, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: OK, Rob, I now understand your point. I will do as you request. However, it seems to me that by making this request you are creating an interesting catch-22: I far as I can see there are two facets to this invitation. * *Sufficiency*. These forums are closed because this gives the attendees freedom to discuss matters (such as individual poster behaviour) that shouldn't be discussed on a public forum. We only invite trusted forum members to join these lists. (That's is that they've demonstrated that they are responsible and have built up a body of karma with their forum contributions.) I would have thought that being elected a committer could reasonably be deemed to be sufficient to show such trust. * *Necessity*. You seem to want to discuss policy on the governance of the forums from within this DL or ooo-private. I also recall some of your previous comments which indicate that these people (who have committed hundreds if not thousands of hours to supporting this service) do not merit committer status unless they have a wider engagement in the project, and they are therefore excluded from any ooo-private discussions. Yet, it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable that anyone contributing to this discussion should at least have a working knowledge of how the forums operate in practice and currently govern themselves. So I do think it necessary as well. This is incorrect. We're obviously discussing the policy on the public list. We have not discussed
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 7:01 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton dennis.hamil...@acm.org wrote: We have not had the bad-behavior/HR-type problems that would require the PPMC to have private discussion. I do believe that it is one of the PPMC responsibilities however. A dispute between users here, or a complaint to the PPMC about user conduct would likely be handled on ooo-private. From the PMC guide, http://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html, All PMCs SHALL restrict their communication on private mailing lists to ONLY issues that cannot be discussed in public *such* *as*: [*emphasis* mine] * re-disclosure of security problems * pre-agreement discussions with third parties that require confidentiality * nominees for project, project committee or Foundation membership * **personal** *conflicts* among project personnel But that is not what we're talking about on the support forums, right? 1) users on the forum are not project personnel and 2) the moderators are discussing posts not personal conflicts and 3) The persons having the conflicts are not involved in the private discussions. Of course, if support moderators themselves get involved in personal conflicts that need discussion, then by all means bring that to ooo-private. I don't think there is a legitimate place in a project for one group of people to talk about a different person, in a restricted list, without checks and balances provided by the PPMC/Mentor oversight of lists like ooo-private. -Rob - Dennis -Original Message- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 13:40 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton dennis.hamil...@acm.org wrote: This should really be on its own thread as Terry requested. In any case, I believe the private forums are for roughly the same reasons that the PPMC list is private. The administrators address disputes, deal with bad behavior, etc. But that fact is we don't use ooo-private for that kind of thing. You know that. We've never, ever discussed a bad behavior, dealt with disputes, etc., on ooo-private. We resolve disputes here, on ooo-dev, in full public view. Why would you suggest that we have ever done otherwise? I notice that moderator actions on lists here are not dealt with transparently and why should they be? We don't even know who the moderators are, in general, especially for lists created before there were any lists on which to learn such things. We don't do moderation in the sense that the forums do. We don't hold back posts that are off-topic, that are showing bad behavior, etc. That is not what list moderators do. All we really do is catch posts that come from non-subscribers and do a quick glance to see if they are spam. If not, we let them through. If you read Drew's description of how the forums are dealing with moderation, it sounds like they have a much more intense, secret, deliberative process around moderation. I believe this is similar, in that there are moderation privileges and a place for those with such privileges to discuss matters in private. If not there already, it would be easy to have a public forum in each cluster for issues about the forum itself. There still needs a private means of communication on what are sensitive matters, in the current live system and any counterpart under Apache auspices. We have such a method, if it were needed. It is called ooo-private. If we think that 30 private forums are needed in order to discuss bad behavior in support posts (3 forums per each of 10 languages) then I think we're doing support moderation wrong. -Rob - Dennis -Original Message- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 12:59 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Terry Ellison ter...@apache.org wrote: On 01/09/11 20:14, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Terry Ellison te...@ellisons.org.uk wrote: OK, Rob, I now understand your point. I will do as you request. However, it seems to me that by making this request you are creating an interesting catch-22: I far as I can see there are two facets to this invitation. * *Sufficiency*. These forums are closed because this gives the attendees freedom to discuss matters (such as individual poster behaviour) that shouldn't be discussed on a public forum. We only invite trusted forum members to join these lists. (That's is that they've demonstrated that they are responsible and have built up a body of karma with their forum contributions.) I would have thought that being elected a committer could reasonably be deemed to be sufficient to show such trust. * *Necessity*. You seem to want to discuss
Re: An invitation to committers to the OOo Community Forums
On 02/09/11 00:46, Shane Curcuru wrote: Separately from how moderation is done and separately from the issue that many traditional participants/contributors to a lot of OOo areas are non-english speakers, I just wanted to mention an additional factor about mailing list norms at Apache. For community-focused lists, we should aim to have fewer lists rather than more. Why? Because splitting lists and having discussions happening in various different places tends to split part of the active community. Having a single ooo-dev@ list here can seem like there's a lot of traffic on it (which there is!). But even if when people skip threads that aren't of immediate interest to them, everyone has a chance to see all the discussions happening. Having all the different discussions on the same list ensure that everyone can stay on the same page, and see where the active community of contributors is moving. With multiple different lists running a single community, not only can specific decisions not be well communicated to the other lists, but the community sense is much harder to keep synchronized on multiple lists versus a single list. Note that it *is* appropriate to have multiple lists for different functions or primary sets of participants - so I do expect that there will be an ooo-user@ list, etc. Does that make some sense? It's part of why it's a better idea to transition project management into a few discrete lists here at @apache.org, rather than leaving project decision making in a variety of different places. - Shane NOTE: The above being said, I definitely see wisdom in Terry's comment earlier in the thread about B) an evolutionary one: ... in terms of making changes to existing forum management processes in careful and well-communicated steps, instead of simply forcing changes in the immediate term. Shane there are some intrinsic differences between a DL and posting into a forum. However, reading this entire thread I get the feeling that some of the current practices on the forum may be unacceptable to Apache / the project. However in this case, I would suggest that: 1) we adopt an evolutionary approach -- that is get the forums moved and then make any changes. 2) we constitute a small group with forum experience *and* ASF experience do a specific task of reviewing current practices against Apache norms and practices, then draft some change guidelines for feeding to the forums, and an impact assessment of their implementation. We can then feed them into the ooo-dev list for comment and if needed vote on their adoption. This would address such issue as: (i) Do we allow the forum moderators use the forum itself to discuss forum management or must this be done on ooo-dev (ii) Do we permit the NL forum moderators to use their own NL for this or are we insisting that this is done in English? (iii) Do we permit the use of a closed access forum / DL for discussing forum conduct? I have my own opinions on the consequences of some of these points, for example, many NL moderators / volunteers have poor working use of English; many moderators would be unwilling to discuss moderation issues for establish consensus if this had to be done in public. My feeling is that if we choose to forced them to work this way then we will lose many of our moderators / forum contributors who answer most of the Qs. But let us at least draft this guideline and vote on it before executing. I will post a synopsis of this thread to the forums and ask them to comment back here.
