Re: Nordic Free Software Award

[Jonas Oberg]

Hi Guido,

> Before I start spreading the word: what does the "?newtest=Y" do? 
> 
> I just want to avoid leading people submitting "new test nominations"
> instead of real ones.
> 
> https://survey.fsfe.org/index.php/167339 looks just the same to me. 

You can use the latter URL without problem :-)  The  is just a
flag to LimeSurvey which we use that you want to create a new submission,
rather than complete or update a submission you've already started.

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Executive Director

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Re: Nordic Free Software Award

[Guido Arnold]

Hey Jonas,

On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 03:08:57PM +0100, Jonas Oberg wrote:
> 
> happy to announce that nominations are now open for the Nordic Free Software
> Award. You can read about it and send your nominations here, for somoene in
> the Nordic countries you feel have made a prominent contribution to Free
> Software:
>  
>   https://survey.fsfe.org/index.php/167339?newtest=Y

Before I start spreading the word: what does the "?newtest=Y" do? 

I just want to avoid leading people submitting "new test nominations"
instead of real ones.

https://survey.fsfe.org/index.php/167339 looks just the same to me. 

Thanks!

Guido


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Re: subdomains for testing things

[Daniel Pocock]

On 08/02/18 17:51, Florian Snow wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> 
> Daniel Pocock  writes:
>> How does using a domain with the word "test" in it somewhere create more
>> work?
> 
> At some point, a service is at least supposed to go into production, so
> at that point, configuration files need to change, DNS records need to
> change, and links to the old subdomain break unless you set up
> forwarding in the server.  That may not sound like a lot, but it is
> additional work.
> 

In many organizations, they keep the test instance running after it goes
into production and they use the test instance to test new versions of
the code before production upgrades.

So that extra work increases quality and decreases downtime.

> 
>> What about the possibility that people using the service by mistake
>> creates more work too?
> 
> That is a good point.  There is a simpler solution to this, though.  We
> can either add a "test" to the logo of the page or add a description
> that describes the test nature or perhaps both.
>


That is also a great idea

Regards,

Daniel
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Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

On 23/01/18 21:24, Florian Snow wrote:
> Hi Stephane,
> 
> 
> Stephane Ascoet  writes:
>> Le 29/01/2018 à 09:53, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
>>> You can simultaneously solve your problems with public transport and
>>> finding a date by purchasing a motorbike.
>>
>> Hi, I can't believe how much you're trying to find even the silliest
>> answers to avoid seeing reality, especially here at FSFE!!!
> 
> I am pretty sure Daniel was joking here.  I don't think he believes that
> motorbikes actually get you dates.
> 


Do you have a motorbike?
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Re: subdomains for testing things

[Florian Snow]

Hi Daniel,


Daniel Pocock  writes:
> How does using a domain with the word "test" in it somewhere create more
> work?

At some point, a service is at least supposed to go into production, so
at that point, configuration files need to change, DNS records need to
change, and links to the old subdomain break unless you set up
forwarding in the server.  That may not sound like a lot, but it is
additional work.


> What about the possibility that people using the service by mistake
> creates more work too?

That is a good point.  There is a simpler solution to this, though.  We
can either add a "test" to the logo of the page or add a description
that describes the test nature or perhaps both.

Happy hacking!
Florian
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Re: subdomains for testing things

[Bjoern Schiessle]

Hi Max,

while I agree with you in general, I see a small problem here:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 12:02:02 +0100 Max Mehl wrote:
>
> Discourse could work similarly. It has been set up by a group of
> volunteers and we gave them a free hand. Later it might serve as a
> communication platform for a specific campaign or activity, and if we
> will make good experiences, other groups and parts of the organisation
> might think about picking it up for their activities, potentially now
> as an "official" service.

While git could be tested quite isolated for a few projects, small
websites, etc, a discussion platform like Discourse can only be tested
if enough people know it and participate.

I almost completely stopped looking at community.fsfe.org, simply
because I know nothing happens there. I posted a link to a blog some
time ago, but of course no discussion happened because simply nobody
knows that community.fsfe.org exists.

If we want to test it seriously we need to advertise it to people who
want to discuss FSFE activities and Free Software topic but prefer
other tools like email. As long as it is in testing we can add a
disclaimer that discussions at community.fsfe.org can disappear at any
time in case the test run is not successful.

Cheers,
Björn

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Free Software Foundation Europe (https://fsfe.org)
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Re: subdomains for testing things

[Daniel Pocock]

On 08/02/18 11:02, Max Mehl wrote:
> # Daniel Pocock [2018-02-08 11:00 +0100]:
>> There is a distinction between people volunteering to maintain a service
>> and the association choosing to rely on a service.
>>
>> This is particularly important in cases where two services do something
>> similar (e.g. Discourse acts as an alternative to the existing Mailman
>> service).  If half the group uses one service and half the group uses
>> the other, you split the organization or you double the amount of effort
>> required to community.  Metcalfe's law[1] comes to mind.
>
> I have to disagree in this case, with the positive experiences from the
> Git service [^1] in mind. Neither Discourse nor Gitea are/were
> officially planned to act as a replacement for any service.
> Git was something a few community members have wished for, and Björn and
> me just set it up. We were happy that it didn't entail any huge

Git is designed from the ground up as a distributed tool so that is
vastly different.  I would love to see a mailing list alternative that
uses a distributed architecture like Git as a back-end (although it
would still be up to the group to decide on using it)

Each project that uses Git can do so without impacting other projects.

Communication tools (Mailman, Discourse, XMPP) are a special case though
because everybody needs to use them.


> bureaucrazy [sic], we were able to make some tests right away, and to
> invite some people to give us feedback. That way we experienced that
> Gitea can also act as a replacement for SVN in the future and fits
> nicely in some workflows of our organisation. To make it official, we
> just had to announce it, no domain change, no votes of huge groups.
>
> Discourse could work similarly. It has been set up by a group of
> volunteers and we gave them a free hand. Later it might serve as a
> communication platform for a specific campaign or activity, and if we
> will make good experiences, other groups and parts of the organisation
> might think about picking it up for their activities, potentially now as
> an "official" service. There is no need that we *now* think about
> replacing the GA mailing list.
>


But it is not that simple.  If you start using it for a campaign, you
are either
a) forcing everybody who interacts the campaign to use it too, or
b) isolating the campaign from the rest of the community.

Neither is ideal.

Consider the impact by Metcalfe's Law, imagine we have 200 volunteers
using a single communication tool for all campaigns:

Value = 200^2 = 40,000

Now imagine if you have 150 volunteers using email and 50 using Discourse:

Value = 150^2 + 50^2 = 25,000

What Metcalfe's Law is telling us is that an organization committed to a
single platform is stronger than an organization that spreads itself
over different platforms.  It works either way: even if 150 volunteers
switch to Discourse and only 50 remain on email, the organization is
still weaker.

Note that in this example, I'm ignoring all the other differences
between the platforms (e.g. forums like Discourse are more prone to
censorship and tampering) and only focusing on the strength of the network.

It is also worth remembering that FSFE needs to communicate with people
beyond the community: once again the global email network has a value
with Metcalfe's Law, but each forum instance is like a little island.



> In my experience, bureaucracy frustrates volunteers for very good
> reasons. Let them define a subdomain name, let them hack around, give
> them some freedom – if such a service ever is ready for
> organisation-wide usage, we can still think about the details. But
> devaluate their service by putting a "test" in the domain name would
> demotivate me as a service maintainer and user at the same time.
>

In fact, we have a similar thing in Debian: any Debian Developer can set
up subdomains under debian.net almost instantly but only officially
supported things go under debian.org.  This strategy has been very
successful and is well understood in the Debian community.

Something can only migrate from debian.net to debian.org if there is
widespread consensus about it.

It is about the community consciously deciding which direction to go and
also being willing to support something even if the volunteers who
started it drop out.


> And, once again, your proposal solves a non-problem in my opinion.
> hellekin found harsh words to express his feelings, but his problem
> wasn't that the service implied to be official but that he didn't know
> about it.
>

Well, I hope my calculation with Metcalfe's Law helps people understand
why it is a problem, at least when we talk about communication tools.

> Best,
> Max
>
>
> [^1]: git.fsfe.org
>

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Re: subdomains for testing things

[Max Mehl]

# Daniel Pocock [2018-02-08 11:00 +0100]:

There is a distinction between people volunteering to maintain a service
and the association choosing to rely on a service.

This is particularly important in cases where two services do something
similar (e.g. Discourse acts as an alternative to the existing Mailman
service).  If half the group uses one service and half the group uses
the other, you split the organization or you double the amount of effort
required to community.  Metcalfe's law[1] comes to mind.


I have to disagree in this case, with the positive experiences from the
Git service [^1] in mind. Neither Discourse nor Gitea are/were
officially planned to act as a replacement for any service. 


Git was something a few community members have wished for, and Björn and
me just set it up. We were happy that it didn't entail any huge
bureaucrazy [sic], we were able to make some tests right away, and to
invite some people to give us feedback. That way we experienced that
Gitea can also act as a replacement for SVN in the future and fits
nicely in some workflows of our organisation. To make it official, we
just had to announce it, no domain change, no votes of huge groups.

Discourse could work similarly. It has been set up by a group of
volunteers and we gave them a free hand. Later it might serve as a
communication platform for a specific campaign or activity, and if we
will make good experiences, other groups and parts of the organisation
might think about picking it up for their activities, potentially now as
an "official" service. There is no need that we *now* think about
replacing the GA mailing list.

In my experience, bureaucracy frustrates volunteers for very good
reasons. Let them define a subdomain name, let them hack around, give
them some freedom – if such a service ever is ready for
organisation-wide usage, we can still think about the details. But
devaluate their service by putting a "test" in the domain name would
demotivate me as a service maintainer and user at the same time.

And, once again, your proposal solves a non-problem in my opinion.
hellekin found harsh words to express his feelings, but his problem
wasn't that the service implied to be official but that he didn't know
about it.

Best,
Max


[^1]: git.fsfe.org

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Re: subdomains for testing things (was: forums, mailing lists and other tools)

[Daniel Pocock]

On 08/02/18 08:27, Max Mehl wrote:
> # hellekin [2018-02-01 11:05 +0100]:
>> On Thu, Feb 01, 2018 at 07:26:42AM +0100, Florian Snow wrote:
>>>
>>> This may have been mentioned before, but there is a Discourse instance
>>> at community.fsfe.org.
>>
>> Hmmm, no there is not, only a broken page. Anyway, if it existed when
>> I proposed my services last year, nobody mentioned it. If it is more
>> recent I find it surprising and upsetting that I have to learn it from
>> the general discussion list. FSFE's community outreach has been, in my
>> experience, suboptimal -- a cool-down euphemism for catastrophic.
>
> The Discourse instance, which I think I've explained multiple times on
> this list, has been set up by volunteers. It is still in a testing
> status so it's rather senseless for the FSFE to promote it.
>
> Of course you are invited to help them [^1] and help the FSFE and its
> community to try new communication tools.
>
> Best,
> Max
>
> [^1]: https://git.fsfe.org/fsfe-system-hackers/community
>

Could we have a dedicated sub-domain for anything like this that is
running as a test?

Using a domain like "community.fsfe.org" runs the risk that it is
perceived as or used as if it were a supported service.

Renaming it to community.test.fsfe.org or community.fsfe-test.org or
something similar would be a good idea.

Furthermore, management of the subdomains for testing (call it "lab
support") could be delegated to a wider group than management of the
main fsfe.org domain (if we consider that to be "production support")

Regards,

Daniel


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Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Max Mehl]

# hellekin [2018-02-01 11:05 +0100]:

On Thu, Feb 01, 2018 at 07:26:42AM +0100, Florian Snow wrote:


This may have been mentioned before, but there is a Discourse instance
at community.fsfe.org.


Hmmm, no there is not, only a broken page. Anyway, if it existed when
I proposed my services last year, nobody mentioned it. If it is more
recent I find it surprising and upsetting that I have to learn it from
the general discussion list. FSFE's community outreach has been, in my
experience, suboptimal -- a cool-down euphemism for catastrophic.


The Discourse instance, which I think I've explained multiple times on
this list, has been set up by volunteers. It is still in a testing
status so it's rather senseless for the FSFE to promote it.

Of course you are invited to help them [^1] and help the FSFE and its
community to try new communication tools.

Best,
Max

[^1]: https://git.fsfe.org/fsfe-system-hackers/community

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