On 05/09/11 15:04, Rob Weir wrote:
You present yourself as the "leader" here so newbies make the mistake of thinking of you as one.On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 5:11 PM, Terry Ellison<[email protected]> wrote:Rob,There is a small control domain where any Hosting or sponsoring organisation may decide to define a set of constraints on the subgroups for which it is responsible. It may also wish to shape direction. This issue is for the mentors to give guidance on. Look, I am not practising a Christian, but even I know Matthew 22:21: "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s ... " Here you are just another PPMC member, and you have absolutely no track record on running forums, as far as I know. In my view, you should leave the running of user community forums to people who know how to run these forums and have been doing it for years. Ditto, developers are the best people to work out how to develop, etc., or are you going to start people how to debug code next? Surely we all stick to should our core competencies, and win the trust of other groups before we stick our noses it their business. I phrase it this way because I know that the same criticism could also be applied to me.Terry, your penchant for whipping out your resume at the slightest provocation as been noted, and dismissed, elsewhere on the list. It is an approach that lacks substance . It reminds me those small aquatic creatures (does anyone know the name?), who lacking any other defense mechanisms puff themselves up to look much larger that they are, in hopes of intimidating potential foes. I suppose it works for fish. It does not work for me. I'm not impressed. But luckily I'm not a foe either. I'm here to help. I've listed some important, substantive concerns with the integration of the forums to Apache. My support is contingent on a reasonable plan for addressing these issues. These concerns rest on their own logic and should be self evident to anyone who reads them and has even passing familiarity with how Apache works. These points do not rely on my CV. But since you raise the issue, you might be interested to know that yes, I have setup and admin'ed a community forum, based on phpBB. I later migrated it to vBulletin because I wanted some of the social features on that platform, including Facebook integration. I've also, in my career, been in a support role, delivering commercial support, both for end user applications as well as developers tools. I've worked also in a support technology team, collaborating with a local university's information retrieval lab to integrate their cutting edge technology into our support tools. In that role I also worked closely with technical editors to tighten the feedback cycle between customers, support engineers and technical writers. And I've also worked as a programmer on an office suite, C/C++, as well as related components in Java and ActiveX, moving on to become a software architect, etc., as well as working on related standards and strategic topics. So I've had a nice career working general in this area. I've seen this from end-to-end. I may not have worked in your small corner of the world, but I do have perspective on what is necessary to bring this effort to scale. I get the "big picture", although I acknowledge that my vision is by no means the only vision possible.
You criticise me for whipping out a résumé then list off a far longer one of your own accomplishments. The main point that I draw from this rather comprehensive list is that few if any are relevant to the running of an end-user support organisation in 10 languages which is the scope of this discussion. You might have run a forum. Big deal. You know very little about what goes on within these forums in terms of their governance, and this is an entirely personal decision on your part. The Apache rules say that decisions should be made on this DL, but AFAIK there is nothing to say that you can't engage with the forum teams or accept their offer, as some of the mentors have done, to look at their work and to engage with them.
Does the fact you are paid to your job on this project by IBM make your input here more relevant (despite your ignorance of this domain) than that of the people doing this work for nothing? Rob, yes to might be here to help, but your "help" so far nearly caused the bulk of our moderator to decide to walk and unravel a a group that 6 other PPMC members have spent a large part of the last 4-5 years building.
Your main reaction was to suggest: "we'll need to explore alternative approaches, such as point users to http://www.oooforum.org/";. With help like that, I am sure that the project is going to "succeed". What will be your comment if it does fail: Oh dear, never mind. IBM, what's my next job? Oh, by the way, we'll need to explore alternative approaches, such as point users to http://http://symphony.lotus.com/ ?
Some of what you say makes sense and merits consideration, but it deliberately and blatantly ignores some of the other constructive discussions and points that have been made on these threads. It that how Apache lazy consensus works? I am busy working at the moment. I will try to look at it the next few days.
In any case, my points stand on their own rather than on my CV. Do you have any substantive response to my concerns? I tried to be comprehensive. In most cases these are issues that have been raised elsewhere on the list, by me or others. You might think of this as an outline for a proposal that the Forum Volunteers might want to make on ooo-dev for how they want to integrate into the project. These are the kinds of points you would want to address in the proposal. -RobRegards Terry On 04/09/11 21:36, Rob Weir wrote:I'm putting aside for sake of this note the alternate approach, suggested by some, of allowing the support Forums to operate independently outside of Apache. I'm merely talking about what would make the forums into a well-integrated part of the project, in terms of decision making, accountability, branding, etc. I'm not talking about technical integration, since that appears to be the easier topic., and one that Apache Infra and Terry are already working on. If the Forums are to be well-integrated into the project, I think we need: == PPMC Oversite and Approval of Forum Policies == Remember, the Forum volunteers -- 75 of them -- are not all committers or PPMC members. Very few of them are. Very few of of them are following this ooo-dev list. Obviously we should give great deference to the real-world experience of current Forum volunteers, but we also need to ensure that the Forum works well with project and Apache policies as well. 1) The Terms of Use and other policy documents used by the Forum should be reviewed and approved by the PPMC, and for the former, also by Apache legal. 2) We need to develop a privacy policy for the Forums, also to be reviewed by the PPMC and Apache legal 3) Changes to Forum policies, TOU and privacy policy would require a proposal on ooo-dev, and discussion and consensus reached there. It is possible that preliminary public discussions could occur in other places first, such as on the Forums themselves. But the project's official discussions and decisions are made on ooo-dev. In other words, if it didn't happen on the project's main list (ooo-dev), it didn't happen. 4) We need the Forum website to conform to Apache branding requirements, including the podling-specific requirements ==Approval of Forum roles== My understanding is that forums have essentially three roles: a) Users b) Moderators, who delete, edit and move all posts, ban users, etc. c) Admins who can also create new forums and assign moderator rights 5) Users require no special treatment. They are like subscribers to a users list. 6) Being listed as an "admin" or "moderator" on a public-facing Apache website suggests endorsement by the project, and aside from any enhanced Forum capabilities enhances your ability to keep order on the Forums. In other words, it is the star that makes the sheriff, not the gun. But this endorsement, to be meaningful, should be made authentic. So Admins and Moderators should be approved by the PPMC. This kind of routine approval is given all the time for those who want to be list moderators. I see no reason why we cannot, initially at least, simply receive a list of current volunteers to ooo-private and approve them all. 7) Future grants of admin/moderator rights would require a proposal to ooo-dev seeking lazy consensus. Such a proposal could originate from a forum volunteer or could originate from anyone on ooo-dev. This is no different than someone asking to be a moderator for a mailing list. 8) Any project committer, on request, will be made a forum admin or moderator. This is how it works with every other project resource -- mailing lists, source code, website, etc. Committers have rights to pretty much everything on the project. We trust our committers. We don't segregate the project into exclusive zones of ownership. ==Transparency== 9) We need all private forum discussions to be echoed to a log or mailing list where PPMC and Apache Members can view them. One way of doing this is to echo posts to ooo-private. Another way is to periodically commit logs to the PPMC's private directory. There may be other ways as well. 10) The use of private forums must be used for only discussions of specific moderation cases. It must not be used for discussion of routine board operations. ==Integration into the larger AOOo community== Although the forum volunteers appear to have been previously isolated, not involved in larger project discussions and decision making, this is not optimal for providing support, and it is not optimal for the project overall. We need to encourage cross-pollination and sharing of information. Forums operating in isolation from the rest of the project will limit our future success. 11) One admin or moderator from each of the 10 language-specific boards should be signed up on the ooo-dev list and ooo-users list. This could also be done by requiring that Forum Admins also be Committers, but that is not something we are starting with, though it could be an eventual goal. 12) We should also encourage existing committers to participate directly in answering questions on the support forum. It is valuable to see how ordinary users use the product and the difficulties they encounter. It puts our coding decisions in perspective. This is a two-way street. It is not just to encourage support volunteers to be more aware of other parts of the project, but also to make other parts of the project more involved with support, or at least more aware. We're all on the same project. Our actions and decisions impact each other. 13) The PPMC should give serious consideration to forum admins/moderators who help with the above tasks, for approval as Committers and PPMC members. It is important that the PPMC always be looking out for merit that should be recognized. It does not matter that the forum volunteers did not previously participate in overall discussions of the project's direction. That was then, this is now. We will all benefit from having support volunteers as part of the decision making process, including the important decision of approving a release. Regards, -Rob
