Re: signal-to-noise on d-d-l

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Luis Villa">

> Jeff, I don't think your proposals really solve the problem, they just
> diffuse the problem over more lists, as far as I can see- most people
> will still need to read all of them if they want to understand what is
> going on, and wade through the attendant crap. Is my gut sense on this
> wrong?

Not over more lists -> we shift the 'global' discussion to gnome-hackers,
and let d-d-l stay on-topic for desktop issues. It makes no sense that the
general development list in "The GNOME Project" is d-d-l. It also means that
if you want to be involved in decision making in a certain area of the
project, you have to be involved in the list, instead of getting an end run
around everyone simply by being on the cool kids list.

> * d-d-l becomes subscribers-only for posting, with a readonly list. [I
> know the admins hate this, but... I think it's important in this case.]

d-d-l already is subscribeers-only for posting (just about all GNOME lists
are). But a big hearty NO NO NO to any list elitism via readonly lists and
stupid crap like that. You're essentially proposing to dunk d-d-l into the
same fetid mess that gnome-hackers/gnome-private have been, and ruling out
contribution from sensible people, simply because there are some noisy
useless twats around the place.

PLEASE let's not use a technical solution to a social problem. If someone is
posting regularly to a major project list, and only providing useless noise,
TELL THEM privately, and if they persist, TELL THEM publically.

No more barriers! I've proposed removing barriers from gnome-hackers. If we
add more to a project-specific list like d-d-l, then we're just going
further down a terrible path. We started on that path when GNOME was having
serious problems - let's keep solving problems, instead of sticking our
heads in the sand.

> * we make sure the moderators are active- I volunteer myself for this,
> since I read all the crap anyway, so it can't really make my life worse,
> per se, and hopefully it'll make it better for others.

Moderators are good generally.

> * all foundation members (someone else has already done the screening,
> right?) get subscribed to start, and after that the bar is low-
> moderators should accept subscriptions from anyone who has done even a
> modicum of work for any module, inc. hacking, translation, bugs, docs,
> marketing, a11y, UI, etc.. Enough to show that you've paid some
> attention to GNOME and made effort to play nicely with others- nothing
> huge, so that we make our best effort to encourage commentary and
> contributions from new contributors.

Foundation members may not have anything at all to do with development on
the desktop... DESKTOP DEVEL LIST. It is not the best list for general GNOME
project discussion, but it has ended up that way because we have been
careless about community management. We can fix that.

Let *anyone* subscribe to gnome-hackers and desktop-devel-list, and if they
can't behave, solve the problem socially.

- Jeff "unravel the mistakes of the past" Waugh

-- 
GVADEC 2004: Kristiansand, Norway                    http://2004.guadec.org/
 
             make: *** No rule to make target `whoopee'.  Stop.