So the poddling didn't even exist at that time. Amazing. Of course, there is no allowance for the incubation and podling transition in this note, something that provides quite a bit more for managing a transition.
And they had no idea what they would see on ooo-dev at that time (nor did we), nor how they would be approached by folks associated with the podling. - Dennis PS: Yes, my use of "consent" was incorrect. What you described, about not using material that the contributor did not want us to use, is my understanding too. -----Original Message----- From: Rob Weir [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, September 04, 2011 17:21 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Dissatisfaction amongst the community admins, moderators and volunteers 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 [ ... ] 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. [ ... ]
