Santiago Gala wrote:
When I said:
Just tell them. I think they are all PMC Chairs are subscribed to board, so it should be easy to tell them there to
Sideway comment from my little peanut gallery: this is (only) the second time I overheard that PMC chairs can subscribe to board@ - in three years of (increasingly intensive) reading of non-project-specific ASF mail lists. Whether this is a 'can', a 'should', or a 'you are required to' is one of these hidden nuggets of information I would like to see novice chairs to be informed of in some explicit way.
About the rest of your mail:
I totally agree that private lists can shield valuable, not-so-private information (especially about decision making processes) away from the people for which this information is part of their community experience. Since Cocoon has been moving into a TLP, and has its own PMC list, we have seen some traffic on that list, at times even too much traffic.
The nice thing is that, most of the times, one of the private list members jumps up and says "I'm gonna move this to dev or users". Still, due to the fact we @ Cocoon concluded all committers (should) care about the Cocoon community and the legal status of its codebase, so we have a policy where all committers can join the PMC list, and now our PMC list sometimes is just a hanging-out place for committers only. And yes, even though it _might_ produce unwanted side-effects (non-committer developers feeling shut out), it appears as if the subcribers of the PMC list actually like this hanging-out place to exist. We sometimes happen to discuss the proposal of new committers on the PMC list (but not often), to give an example, or whether we are going to send a mail to someone who is on the verge of infringing Cocoon's brand.
Fortunately however, no technical nor strategic vision stuff has been emerging from the PMC list so far - all discussions about Cocoon's design and future are routinely done on the dev list.
Apart from security stuff (for obvious reasons) and brand conflict issues (where public discussion might affect third parties negatively), I see the Cocoon PMC list (as it is ATM) as some way to channel friendly inter-person chat into a group thing, similar to the difference between IM and IRC - a way to have more people sharing the fun. One might debate that this fun should spread into the open lists as well, but apparently people are aware of their audience when speaking up, and sometimes prefer a cozy little list of 40 subscribers, rather than a massive forum of 500 dev-list participants. Stage freight, I assume.
Personally, I think a private list should exerce some kind of self-control to keep its existence worthwhile. It's pretty hard to ban all kinds of direct inter-person communication from a community (nor is this what you are aiming at, of course), but a closed list might move some of the inter-person banter into a channel where more people can make sense of it.
Just some thoughts...
Cheers, Santiago!
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML An Orixo Member Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
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