osdf-devteam team mailing list archive

[Andrew Ettinger <sillydeveloper@xxxxxxxxx>]

A well thought out response as always, and you have some great points. =) Let me back up a step and explain a little better about how I see us starting out, and how I think things will evolve. 

First, I consider the technical team's official communication channel to be through this mailing list. If we choose to change that as a team, I'm fine with that. But for now, the mailing list should be our official discussion board and LaunchPad is our task tracker until we decide to change it as a group. The forum, for the technical team, is a way for us to take polls and push out conversations that need to be flushed out (maybe a good example) with a broader population (that being said, we should probably remove the In Progress and Task Archive from our part of the forum =)

Second, we have a lot of other teams that are working on a lot of other things. You can see that by the sheer number of boards we have on the forum. The other teams need a way to communicate who is working on what, and the forum provides an easy way for them to get organized and provides visibility for who is working on what (the 'in progress' area; completed tasks go into the archive; etc). They will need to figure out their own best practices for how they work -- legal, the art department, and the bloggers are going to work differently than we do and probably differently from each other. I'm just trying to provide them with some initial guidelines to get their organizational juices flowing.

A listserver for those teams is just another tool for them to organize around. They will need to figure out if that fits into their process, if at all. 

Since teams are 'self organized', we need a way to rapidly see their processes. My expectation is that each team will maintain a wiki page that gives the current ways in which they are organized, so that as they evolve we have a standard document that we can reference (and new volunteers can reference) to get involved. Eddie has been working on giving an initial shape to these pages to help them get started.

Even with this loose structure, this allows the OSDF board of directors to get a weekly update on what each team is working on, act as a kind of 'steering committee', and send out a mailer with a general OSDF update. So despite the perceived chaos, there is still some operational oversight and information  flow back out to the teams. 

All this being said, right now I see the technical team goals, the goals of the people on this list, as fostering this type of organic structure and giving the other teams the tools to be successful. We need to be the enablers. Hence my inquiry on listserver ideas, which might be premature (but still something we should be ready for when they ask for one).

I think you have great points. I know it feels chaotic at this point, but the other teams are just starting to form. The technical team is a little bit ahead of the game (although Stacy and the design team is rapidly catching up to us... =)

~ Andrew

On Dec 21, 2010, at 8:32 AM, zeto28 wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 02:16:56PM -0800, Andrew Ettinger wrote:
>> I was thinking we should install / use a listserver for the other
>> teams, so they don't have to go through LaunchPad...
> 
> Finally.  However, I already see a big problem emerging: we are getting
> too many channels with no clear definition of each one's purpose.
> Having to follow both the forum and the lists will become a pain very
> quickly, and we should resolve this as early as possible.
> 
> The only things that speak for a web forum are that less tech-savvy
> people can use it more easily and that moderators can move, split and
> merge threads.  However, it is easy to DDOS, provides only very basic
> search functions (no regexps, rate-limited), is insecure (SMF stores
> passwords in the clear AND mails them around!), and lacks tree threads
> and message-level read management.  Mailing lists OTOH are fully
> decentralized, searchable on the client-side (reducing server load),
> support tree threads, offer far better read management (i.e. one has to
> only hit a key to read the next unread message), and official posts can
> be cryptographically signed so everyone knows they're genuine.  There
> will be some reasons that the Linux kernel developers don't use a forum
> as the primary means of communication.  I for one have developed kind of
> an aversion to web forums.
> 
> I created the wiki page "Communicational architecture" to collect
> thoughts on this, but it's not really well structured yet.  An
> exhaustive compilation of pros and cons regarding the decision between
> mailing lists and forum (and other means of communication) should be
> made there.
> 
>> Is there something easier to manage subscribe / unsubscribe than
>> MajorDomo that we could install? (given that this is for non-technical
>> staff)
> 
> IMHO the optimal (i.e. most secure and reliable) solution would be to
> use ezmlm and qmail.  However, since that requires quite a bit of
> knowhow, my guess is that we will have to settle for something else.
> 
> If MajorDomo is too arcane, GNU Mailman would be the next best
> alternative, I think.  There also exists a software called "Syncom"
> whose purpose it is to sync Mailman mailing lists and a phpBB forum
> using a news server.  So it would technically be possible to use both a
> forum and a mailing list, but from what I've heard the software is a
> huge pain and has limitations.  As the saying goes: "It is bad when one
> thing becomes two."
> 
> Maybe we should also ponder a bit about a mailing list naming scheme.
> An idea to start with:
> 
>       {prefix}{type}{sep}{team}{sep}{geo}@{domain}
> 
>       sep: "-"
>       prefix: "osdf-|", "x-"
>       type: "info|announce|memo","debate|discuss|discourse",
>             "chat|talk","org|coord","poll","test","private"
>       team: "all|","tech","dev","board","fundraising",...
>       geo: "us","fl.us","ca.us",...
>       domain: "lists.theosdf.org"
> 
>> OR is there a service we can use to host our lists that is also easy
>> to manage?
> 
> Google Groups would probably be technically an option, but only for
> lists where the public can't post
> (<http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead>).  Using Google
> infrastructure would make me feel uncomfortable, though.  We should only
> consider that as a last resort option, I think.
> 
> zeto
> -- 
> 
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