launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12 October 2011 11:07, Jeroen Vermeulen <jtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> And I wonder: if a team membership request has not been approved in a year,
> say, doesn't that amount to a denial of the request?  Shouldn't we treat it
> as one?

Considering this aside from the corrupted requests we have, I think an
expiry is a good idea provided we bear in mind the principle of "It's
not our data" that Rob mentioned.

I think we can do that in a few ways, such as:

 * make expiry an opt-in at the team level
 * we send a reminder email to the team admins a week or so before a
request is about to expire, to give them a chance to deal with it
themselves.

If we decide it's something we want to work on, I'd like to talk to
some of the owners of teams that have many outstanding membership
requests.

I like Martin's suggestion of a text field that lets people say why
they're applying. I also agree that we need to better understand why
and how people use teams before we start making changes.

I have a hunch that, should we do a study, we'd find three broad
reasons for joining a team:

 * to get some kind of privs -- e.g. push rights for a project's trunk branch
 * to participate in a mailing list
 * to say, "I think this is cool and would like to be associated with
it" and, possibly, would like to hear about it from time to time.

We could handle those last two separately from teams and not really
lose anything. The likelihood is that we won't be touching mailing
lists for the foreseeable future but the "I want to associate myself
with this/get info about this" is something that we could handle as
part of our Dashboards and Walls feature.

If we offer people the ability to "follow" a project, person or team,
they'll get updates on their dashboard/wall about that item; a bit
like Facebook pages and subscriptions, right? Maybe that'll help clear
up some of the hanging membership requests we get, by steering them to
another place.

So, as for adding expiry to team memberships: our feature work is
unlikely to give us an excuse to add such a feature any time soon and
it's not a critical issue for a maintenance squad to tackle. If
someone were able to add this expiry outside of either feature or
maintenance time, I think it could be nice to have but I'd want us to
know more about why people let such requests languish.

Cheers.

-- 
Matthew Revell
Launchpad Product Manager
Canonical

https://launchpad.net/~matthew.revell