There are a few people who routinely email me privately about non-personal matters where I'm not the only one with the answer. In many cases I reply, adding dev@ to the CC, and I've also asked the people to use the mailing lists instead of emailing me privately, but the message has obviously not gotten through. I'm not just being fussy and I know I'm not the only one. Taking it off-list has consequences:
- information is siloed / single points of failure - if I'm on vacation or otherwise not immediately available, you're blocked from getting the thing done - others lose out on the chance to contribute to the community - decisions made via private email actually violate our community standards, except in some very specific instances such as software security bugs - it's annoying and exclusionary - it can be intimidating - it can lead to inadvertently or unintentionally taking credit for someone else's work I'd like to propose that we add something to the code of conduct to discourage using private email threads in the hbase community except for social or personal conversations. Thoughts?
