On Fri, 2013-02-01 at 09:20 +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:

Dave Neary wrote:

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On 01/31/2013 10:20 PM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

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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.

On Sat, 2013-02-02 at 17:12 +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:

Mark McLoughlin wrote:

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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.

I see where you're going... My main gripe with it is that I don't see how the duplicate-thread-to-EE and reply-to-both-lists rules can be enforced in the ML setup, so it will rely on people applying it.

If we can't get developers to use subject prefixes, I somehow doubt we can get directors to follow thread replication rules between two mailing-lists. And the discussion can quickly get messy if a subset of people don't follow the rules.

Right, I'm not proposing a solution. I'm proposing some requirements for an ideal solution and looking for ideas. You think it can't be done, I get that :)

The alternative setup doesn't depend so much on people following a copy rule, so my impression is that it would be more successful in the end ?

You mean Dave's idea? It's certainly fairly close to the requirements I laid out, but I don't think Dave is certain mailman can even do that much. Cheers, Mark.

Hi, On 02/04/2013 02:01 PM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

You mean Dave's idea? It's certainly fairly close to the requirements I laid out, but I don't think Dave is certain mailman can even do that much.

I pointed out the various Mailman configuration which needed to be done to enable that solution. It's certainly possible. The usual discussions that come up is whether opening up previously closed archives might constitute a breach of confidentiality for past discussions. There is no way to open up the archives only from a given date onwards. That seems like a topic for the board - if there is board agreement for opening up past discussions, then it's a rather simple matter to enable read-only subscriptions and open archives. 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

The substantive questions are: 1. Is the board elected to make/ratify decisions on behalf of the membership? - If not, why does it exist at all? The fact is that by conducting a 'national' referendum on every issue the organisation becomes just a large electoral machine. The original aims will be lost in the machinery. 2. Are all our decisions non-competitive in nature? - Clearly some decisions or strategies are commercial in confidence; is it proposed that we allow competitors to read these as they are formulated and perhaps not even actioned yet? Such a transparent process will allow them to stymie every effort of the foundation by (them) being aware of the initiatives as soon as we are. This is lacking common sense. Perhaps this might be handled using a series of quarantine periods relating to a sensitivity scale to provide some measure of security. This format is used by governments all over the world to protect sensitive information, and has been proven to be acceptable to the majority of citizens.

-----Original Message----- From: Joshua McKenty [mailto:joshua@pistoncloud.com] Sent: Wednesday, 6 February 2013 8:24 AM To: Dave Neary Cc: foundation@lists.openstack.org Subject: Re: [OpenStack Foundation] Opening up the board mailing list

I've added some discussion of transparency to the agenda for the next board meeting, and will try and go through the archives before then to audit for anything that really ought to stay confidential (HR and personnel discussions, mostly).

On Feb 4, 2013, at 1:39 PM, Dave Neary <dneary@redhat.com> wrote:

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Hi,

On 02/04/2013 02:01 PM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

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You mean Dave's idea? It's certainly fairly close to the requirements I laid out, but I don't think Dave is certain mailman can even do that much.

I pointed out the various Mailman configuration which needed to be done to enable that solution. It's certainly possible.

The usual discussions that come up is whether opening up previously closed archives might constitute a breach of confidentiality for past discussions. There is no way to open up the archives only from a given date onwards.

That seems like a topic for the board - if there is board agreement for opening up past discussions, then it's a rather simple matter to enable read-only subscriptions and open archives.

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

_______________________________________________ Foundation mailing list Foundation@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/foundation

_______________________________________________ Foundation mailing list Foundation@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/foundation

On Sat, 2013-02-02 at 10:33 +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

On Fri, 2013-02-01 at 01:00 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:

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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).

I have no idea whether it is possible, but if it is then it would work pretty well except the "non-directors need to change the Reply: header when replying" part. That's not terrible, and we can actively encourage people to do it.

I've filed a bug on this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-ci/+bug/1160466 The main issue is dealing with the existing archives. I'd like to create a new, hidden mailing list (which only board members can access) to hold those archives for now. Perhaps later we can remove confidential information from the archives and re-instate the leftovers under foundation-board. Cheers, Mark.