On Fri, 2013-02-01 at 09:20 +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:
Dave Neary wrote:
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?
That's been my suggestion too. The workflow that Mark suggests is likely to result in thread duplication, missing elements in some threads vs. the other, and overall confusion, especially with a population that's not necessarily following strict ML etiquette.
Using two lists (with one of them being the "open discussion" list for the topics formally introduced on the first one) is a classic setup that is simpler and more foolproof imho.
I see this model panning out one of two ways: 1) The majority of the discussion happens on the open list and we are very successful at getting non-directors involved in healthy open discussions. This means massive email threads which I expect many of the directors to find overwhelming and not follow or participate in the discussion. That could mean little in the way of collaborative discussion amongst directors, or those discussions happening privately somewhere. 2) The majority of the discussion happens amongst directors on the readonly list with maybe summaries sent to the open list. Non-directors are annoyed because they can only follow the discussion by looking at the archives and it's difficult to take part of the discussion amongst the directors and discuss the topic amongst the wider audience. Basically, I think a big part of the value committee like this is the members actively and directly engaging with each to understand their points of view. In an ideal world, the committee members would also listen to the points of view of non-members. But if we end up with a situation that the volume of discussion is so large that it's hard to even just have a discussion amongst committee members, then you'll get a least some of the members giving up completely on the discussion. I think this is even true of the TC - if we had discussions on the TC list, I think TC members would be more engaged. Instead, we have it on the -dev list and have more participation, but less participation from the committee members. I think the problem will be worse with the board, where many of the directors just aren't used to massive mailing list discussions. What I'm trying to figure out is a model where directors engage fully with each other in open discussions, but we also have a very active open discussions amongst non-directors which directors can dip in and out of. Cheers, Mark.