launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Last week I spent some time chatting with Laura Czajkowski about the team
polls issue. I also opened a discussion on the mailing list used by the
various councils in the Ubuntu community, to better understand their needs.

Here's the Launchpad side: we want to remove polls from Launchpad because
they are hard to use, they are limited in their functionality and, quite
frankly, they don't justify their maintenance cost.

Why don't we just fix them? Well, external services do a better job and
polls are a non-core feature for Launchpad. The time we have to work on
Launchpad needs to be spent elsewhere.

At this stage, I think that even if someone came to us with a good plan for
fixing polls and they were willing to do the work, I'd be doubtful about
accepting their offer. Ultimately, the maintenance burden would still fall
to the Canonical Launchpad team.

In reply to my email to the Ubuntu councils, Elizabeth Krumbach explained
that one main thing stands in the way of the Ubuntu community permanently
moving away from Launchpad team polls. When electing council members, all
of the relevant team's members need the opportunity to vote. They use the
CIVS service, which sends an individual link to each eligible vote; that
let's them ensure only the eligible voters can vote and that there's one
vote per person.

The problem is this: there's no legitimate way to contact all of a team's
members with an individual email because some team members hide their email
address.

I see two realistic ways in which we can fix this:

 * Either the Ubuntu councils make sharing your email address with the
team's admins a condition of membership and we provide admins with a plain
text download of a team's members' email addresses. In every other
circumstance, hidden email addresses remain hidden. I think this is a
quick-fix from our side but it's not really satisfactory socially.

 * Or people who hide their email addresses get a self-destructing email
forwarder, again available only to the admins of the team that is holding a
poll, that will forward email from a single email address (it was Daniel
Holbach's for the most recent Ubuntu Community Council election) to their
hidden address. That forwarder then becomes inactive when the poll is over.
The team admins can download a plain text list of both the public addresses
and these one-time forwaders in place of the hidden addresses. This seems
like more work for us but I expect would be more socially acceptable.

There are arguments for and against both of these.

I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on the viability of either of
these or other approaches.

Cheers!


-- 
Matthew Revell
Launchpad Product Manager
Canonical

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