Gentoo Archives: gentoo-council

From: Lukasz Damentko <rane@g.o>
To: Denis Dupeyron <calchan@g.o>
Cc: gentoo-council@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-council] Meeting format
Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:30:35
Message-Id: 3c32f69c0907071030i45338953see923b6a92254052@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-council] Meeting format by Denis Dupeyron
1 2009/7/7 Denis Dupeyron <calchan@g.o>:
2 > Scheduling a live meeting is difficult due to the council members
3 > being spread over different time zones.
4
5 Let's create a Council sub-forum on f.g.o:
6
7 - "Council" forum, main place where people would discuss issues
8 concerning Gentoo as a whole.
9 - "Proposals" sub-forum where everyone could start a thread with an
10 issue Council should in his opinion discuss.
11 - "Council Chambers" subforum where council would discuss between
12 themselves and start threads in which votes would be collected. Only
13 Council Members would be able to post there.
14
15 - #gentoo-council channel should stay where it is as a secondary way
16 of communication between Council Members and wide community but should
17 be replaced in decision-making by the forum.
18
19 Advantages:
20
21 - No need to be in one place at one time, you can comment when you
22 have time. Just start a poll with a time-out (7 days, 3 days?) and
23 wait for council members to vote.
24 - Ability to moderate. Lock threads when they go too wild, delete
25 unwanted posts, edit your previous posts, edit thread titles, sticky
26 important things. All the things you can't do on IRC or on mailing
27 lists. Just imagine the possibilities.
28 - You could copy half a thread and move it to another place to discuss
29 there separately. Something that would prevent derailing discussion
30 which happens on regular basis on mailings lists.
31 - You can "watch" threads you consider important and receive e-mails
32 with information about new posts in them.
33 - You can open a sub-forum for bigger issues (like EAPI stuff for
34 example which is currently spread over many meeting summaries and
35 posts on mailing lists) to keep them organised and in order.
36 - No dependance on Freenode team (with all due respect and
37 appreciation to their hard work they put into providing best IRC
38 service there is to our project). Forum would be on a machine
39 belonging to Gentoo, run by Gentoo Infra and moderated only be people
40 named by Gentoo.
41 - All other features that made civilised world to abandon mailing
42 lists and switch to forums.
43
44 And most importantly.
45 - People put more thought into what they write to forums than they do
46 when they use IRC. There would be less chit-chat and even if some
47 appears it'll be easy enough to move it somewhere else.
48
49 Disadvantages:
50
51 - Would need edits in the GLEP, like for example rethinking whole
52 "slacker" and "proxy" concepts.
53 - Forum project would have to agree to hand a forum over to where
54 Council would be sole moderators and rule makers. This issue is
55 probably not a big problem but since no-one asked them yet, I wouldn't
56 take it for granted.
57 - Would need moderators. There's one secretary already and I think it
58 could be a start for a future moderating team.
59 - "Disappearing posts" aka censorship - when people post something and
60 moderators just delete it without trace. Could be dodge by creating a
61 dustbin/hydepark sub-forum where moderators would copy/move threads
62 and posts instead of deleting them so they don't disappear even if
63 they are considered garbage.
64 - No archives. Well, forum is an archive itself so no need to archive
65 it elsewhere.
66 - "Forum is down, council can't proceed" - it applies to mailing lists
67 and IRC as well and can be easily dodged by moving back to lists and
68 IRC once it happens. I don't think our forum goes down more often than
69 Freenode...
70 - "My issue with forums is that I don't use them" - reason why my idea
71 won't be implemented most probably, some people just won't use forums
72 and that's it. Just think about how much easier it would be to
73 organize your work on a forum compared to what happens now. Maybe it's
74 worth trying?
75
76 Opinions, counter-ideas and bashing most welcome.
77
78 Regards,
79
80 Lukasz Damentko

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-council] Meeting format Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@g.o>