On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 7:55 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote: <snip> > I don't know that *anyone* has actually invited them. They have been told > what the changes are, as in mailing list messages and the sudden transfer of > Bugzilla. >
Actually, there were offline discussions between me and the forum admins back in June. They approached me, asking how to be part of the Apache project. I invited them to join. We had a thread where I explained how Apache projects worked. Every single one of the Forum guys who are now claiming offense were on that thread. I wrote to them a that time, in response to their inquiry on joining Apache: ================ Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 7:27 PM Subject Re: OpenOffice.org users forum present and future XXXX, I'm not yet an expert in how Apache works, but I tink there needs to be some chain of responsibility from the moderators to the Apache Software Foundation Board, if this is going to be hosted on Apache hardware, at an Apache-owned domain. This is necessary to ensure that Apache can ensure that the web site conforms to various national laws, from privacy policy, to responding to copyright take-down notices (in the US), to responding to requests from law enforcement, to give the moderators a way to escalate any difficulties, etc. Obviously these are very very rare, and may never occur, but my guess is Apache will want to ensure that they have control from the Board. Does that make sense? If you want to use Apache infrastructure then you need to become part of the project's meritocracy See: http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#meritocracy. We'll want to map out how your existing roles fit into the Apache roles: PMC Member == controls the project, approves releases, nominates committers, etc. Committers == members who have made sustained contributions to the project. Developers == those who contribute to the project Users == those who use the product See here for more details: http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#roles The Apache Board appoints the Chair of a project's Project Management Committee (or PMC). The Chair is an Apache Vice President and is responsible to the Board. The committers in the project elect their PMC members. The PMC does the main planning for the project. The existing committers elect new committers from developers on the project who have done consistently good work. This includes coders, but also contributors in other ways, such as forum admins. So I think this works best if all forum moderators are also "developers" or maybe "committters" The admin role could also be a "committer". And someone who wants to take responsibility for the overall user forums, from a planning perspective, and maybe associated pieces like the wiki and the mailing lists, should probably be a PMC member. Initially, we would just accept the current status quo (assuming that is working well) and propose the existing moderators and admins. But in the future, as vacancies occur, I'd expect that we'd fill them per Apache process, e.g., someone is nominated on the Apache project list and we vote. But this all starts with figuring out how your roles fit into an Apache style meritocracy. Would something like the above be a problem? All OOo volunteers will be going through a similar process, of mapping their roles into the Apache system. This is very easy for programmers and testers and documentation writers, since all projects have those roles. But with user forum admins, I think this is something new for Apache. Regards, -Rob ================ The response I received at that time was positive, a stated intent to work within the ASF meritocracy. I have no idea why they are backtracking now on that. > I'm not sure that they know they can decline our offer, also. That probably > looks suicidal. I don't believe we do have the right to the forums if they > do not consent. Unfortunately, we haven't approached them as folks who have > a say in the matter and that we want to be welcome. > Consent? We have just as much rights to the forums as we have the the wikis or the mailing list archives. It is not an exclusive right, but certainly we have what is needed to host the forums. If a particular author objects, we could remove their content if we wanted to. But that is true regardless of whether the existing forum volunteers come to Apache. In other words, even if they do come to Apache, someone could object to their content being hosted and we would probably take it down. -Rob > - Dennis > > -----Original Message----- > From: Daniel Shahaf [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Sunday, September 04, 2011 10:15 > To: Terry Ellison > Cc: [email protected]; Rob Weir > Subject: Re: Dissatisfaction amongst the community admins, moderators and > volunteers > > Terry Ellison wrote on Sun, Sep 04, 2011 at 18:09:15 +0100: >> On 04/09/11 16:49, Rob Weir wrote: >> >... we are not discussing project operations on ooo-private. We >> >use that list for voting in new committers and for exchanging >> >confidential information, like the real email addresses of new >> >committers. Almost any other attempted use of ooo-private has been >> >quickly shut down my our Mentors, rightfully, since the default >> >behavior should be to discuss things openly. In fact, if the very >> >discussion that is currently occurring (according to Terry) on the >> >private forum had occurred on ooo-private, we would have received a >> >lecture from a Mentor on the need for transparency. >> Rob we are not talking about project operations in private in >> u.s.oo.o either. We are talking about User Community business in >> private on a User Community-run server. I know that you want to >> unilaterally subsume this community into the project, but this isn't >> the status quo. It's a fundamental change that you are demanding of >> this community. >> > > If the forums community doesn't want to become part of the ASF project > then why has the PPMC asked infra to migrate the forums to ASF hardware? > > (Terry, in case it's not clear, I'm speaking with Devil's Advocate hat on.) > >
