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.
