Open Stack

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