ubuntu-council-teams team mailing list archive

[Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Elizabeth,

On 10 February 2012 22:26, Elizabeth Krumbach <lyz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 5:33 AM, Matthew Revell
> <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> So, to move forward I'd like to know what we would need to do to free
>> Ubuntu teams from their reliance on Launchpad polls.
>
> As a "current state we're in" review:

Thanks for this.

> In order to use CIVS, teams have to either...
>
> "ask dholbach" and he uses a script which, as I understand it, pulls
> public addresses and determines email addresses from GPG keys, this is
> not optimal and will miss users who have no public address anywhere
> (this is what is done for Community Council elections and has drawn
> criticism[0])
>
> or "ask jono" and he does something magic by working with launchpad
> admins to get all addresses into CIVS and sent out (this is what
> Ubuntu Women did for our leadership election since many women in our
> community keep their addresses private to avoid harassment and we
> don't want them excluded from ability to vote)

> Instead of doing either of these, the only way "normal people" can
> currently poll their whole community (including non-public addresses)
> is via the launchpad polls. The Community Council used this for a
> recent IRC Council and Edubuntu Council votes. So while the current
> polls aren't great for this, they are the only reliable method of
> contacting everyone we currently have available.

Great, that explanation is very helpful.

This week, Curtis Hovey altered our "Contact this team" feature. Now,
team admins can use it to contact all team members directly even if
that team has a mailing list. Previously, such an email would have
gone to the team's mailing list, meaning that there was less chance
all members would see it.

So you can now contact all members of a team, regardless of whether
that team has a mailing list or whether some of its members have
hidden their email addresses. So, that makes it easier to contact team
members but you'd be sending the same email to every member of the
team. So, doesn't really help you in this situation.

I'll speak to others in the Launchpad team to see what we could do to
get around this other part of the issue: i.e. that only members of the
team should be able to vote.

I think we can agree that circumventing people's wish to hide their
email address is undesirable.

Right now, I can see three possible solutions, one of which is
technically easily but socially more difficult, while the other two
are socially easier but technically more involved:

 * Socially hard, technically easier: teams that hold polls agree with
their members that the admins should be able to see their email
addresses and we offer admins of those teams a download of team email
addresses.
* Similar to the option above but perhaps socially easier: Launchpad
assigns a self-destructing email alias to each member who hides their
email address. That alias forwards email to the hidden address but
only if that email comes from a particular email address (e.g. the
address used by CIVS) and the alias self-destructs after a certain
date. The admins could download the list of public email addresses,
along with the alias email addresses for those who've hidden their
address. When it's time for the next poll, the team admins can request
a new download with new aliases.
 * Probably both socially and technically more involved: We give CIVS
a way of knowing what Launchpad teams each particular person is a
member of. We've done this before for Drupal sites, so that someone
logs into Drupal using SSO and Drupal assigns them certain privs based
on their membership of certain LP teams.

I'm sure there are other ways around this too. I'll come back to this
list after I've discussed this further with some of my colleagues on
the Launchpad team.

> So as you can see, the major problem with moving away from launchpad
> polls is loss of the ability to include people in polls who have
> non-public addresses.

Thanks again for your thorough explanation.

-- 
Matthew Revell
Launchpad Product Manager
Canonical

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