Re: Mailing list cleanup proposal

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> writes:

> <quote who="Owen Taylor">
> 
> > My proposal (nothing I haven't said before multiple times)
> > 
> >  - Make gnome-hackers public subscription
> 
> gnome-hackers would then essentially be a lowish-traffic central organising
> and conversation list for all of GNOME? Pretty much is now - great! :-)

Yeah. "Discussions of general interest to the GNOME community not
covered by other lists." Basically. Stuff like this thread :-)

> >  - Make gnome-private exactly gnome-foundation members. 
> >    (Some problem if we are only processing membership applications
> >    once a year, but maintaining a separate heuristically 
> >    maintained group of "cool people" is just not feasible 
> >    at the current size of the GNOME project.)
> 
> Which, presumably, would not be such a great idea now that pretty much
> anyone who has something to do with GNOME can be a Foundation member? It
> would be hard to feel secure posting to that list, which would negatively
> impact positive collaboration there (and make negative stuff that much more
> open to leakage).

Yeah.. that is sort of a problem. Though it differs in that regard
from "270 random people" that currently are members of gnome-private
not at all. Currently we have no record of who the people on 
gnome-private-members are or why they were added. A random
sample indicates that I can identify about half of the people
on gnome-private-members. And even in the people I can identify,
I'm not really sure why all of them should be involved in
private GNOME discussions.

The only real difference is that the people on gnome-private-members 
were considered semi-trustworthy by someone at some point in time,
which isn't a qualification for foundation membership. This
concept of "trust-worthiness" does have relevance elsewhere; like
being eligible to get a CVS account or login account, but I have
no idea how to encode it other than to have some sort of explicit
N sponsors, signed GPG key and a snail-mail address process...

In the absence of a formal idea like this, I think "It's the
foundation members; if you don't trust them, go to private email"
is really best."
 
> I personally don't see any reason for having invisible lists. Private
> archives for precious few, sure, but invisible lists are just annoying (and
> with better descriptions, I don't think random subscription attempts will be
> a problem).

I don't know... what's the point of telling people about lists they
can't subscribe to and can't see the archives of? Will just cause 
frustration :-) Plus it makes the already long list of lists longer.

The complete list of unadvertised lists are:

 gnome-private

 Team lists:
 gnome-events-team, gnome2-release-team, gnome-1.4-release-team, 
 gnome-marketing, guadec-planning, release-team, marketing-wg, G3web

 Foundation related lists:
 advisory-board, board-list, Foundation-announcement, 
 gnome-corporate-interest, past-board-list

 Sysadmin lists:
 bugzilla-maintainers, gnome-ftp-maint, gnome-listadmin,
 gnome-sysadmin, gnome-webmaster-list, listowners

 List implementation details
 gnome-hackers-posters, gnome-love-posters, gnome-private-posters
 gnome-private-members

 Random stuff:
 gnome-gui-list, gnome-os

Most of these are legitimately private archives, private subscription.
I don't think the world would be a better place for having them
on the listinfo page. 

There are a couple of these where publically advertising them so people 
could "apply for membership" might make sense (gnome-events-team, 
gnome-marketing, say.) There are a couple that are public but unadvertised 
(for perhaps silly reasons), but I don't think there is a general
problem.

Regards,
                                        Owen