Hi, On 01/31/2013 10:20 PM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
There's a standing desire by some (many?) board members for the foundation-board mailing list to be made public so that anyone can follow their discussions.
Personally, I'd also like a way for folks who aren't on the board to easily be able to participate in any board discussions. However, there needs to be some way for board members to easily separate the discussion between board members from the discussion with the wider foundation membership.
I think of this is an "inner circle"[1] mailing list setup:
- Two mailing lists - "inner circle" and "everyone else", lets call them the IC and EE lists
I've been thinking of foundation as EE, in which case the board list is IC - and opening the archives of board discussions/allowing read-only subscriptions would give the transparency to the operation of the board. Since board members are all members of the foundation list already (correct?) the foundation list would be the avenue for members to engage with the board. Problem solved, without the need for Yet Another Mailing List or a complicated workflow. Am I missing something?
I've come across cases where this would be useful several times - has anyone seen a mailman configuration that resembles this?
It is possible in Mailman to restrict posting to a list to a subset of the members - you set the "Moderation" flag and set behaviour for all moderated users to "Discard" or "Reject" (reject lets the poster know the mail was rejected, which might be better) in "Privacy options->Sender filters" - then you unset the mod bit for all board members in "Membership management". That would allow you to have non-board-members subscribe to the board list, get all the email, but not be able to post. If members really want to raise issues related to the board member post, then it can be done on foundation, but you'd need to manually change the header (which might be an effective social control to bike shedding board conversations, rather than trying to figure out how to have reply-to set to a different list for a subset of the membership). Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary - Community Action and Impact Open Source and Standards, Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13