Proposal: Mailing List owner policy

Albert Astals Cid aacid at kde.org
Tue Aug 25 22:28:28 BST 2020


El dijous, 23 de juliol de 2020, a les 0:31:29 CEST, Albert Astals Cid va escriure:
> Dear Community,
> 
> One important part of mailing lists being healthy is owners/moderators[1].
> 
> They moderate the lists, they help users that want to subscribe/unsubscribe but don't know how to, they enact emergency moderation in the very very seldom case that it is needed, etc.
> 
> So to keep our mailing lists healthy we need to be sure to have healthy list owners.
> 
> In plural, more than one, because from time to time, we go on vacation and the list duties still need taking care of.
> 
> For that I'd like to enact this policy:
> 	
>     Mailing lists should have at least 2 active owners, ideally 3 [Obviously exceptions apply, like if we just started a mailing list to coordinate translators for a language that has no translation in KDE yet, we'd probably have no way to get 2 list owners]
> 
> One keyword in that sentence is "active".
> 
> Mailing list ownership/moderation un-activity is hard to detect.
> 
> One way to potentially detect it, is by those summaries that sysadmin sends periodically for lists with lots of mails to moderate, but that doesn't cover all the cases.
> 
> For example, it's possible that a mailing list has 2 owners and only one of them is inactive, since the other one is keeping the list in working condition we don't see it as a problem, but if that person goes on holiday, then it suddenly is.
> 
> For that I'd like to enact this policy sub-point:
> 
>     Mailing list owners will be contacted every year asking if they are still active and if they want to continue being list owner or if they'd prefer we find a substitute.
> 
> If they say "please find a substitute" or fail to answer in a given time frame (I'd say a month is fair), they will be removed as owners and in case the "at least 2 active owners, ideally 3" policy is broken we'll find a new person.
> 
> Does that sound something like we could agree on?
> 
> Then the big question is "who will do this work?" Because it seems quite a bit of work (albeit only once a year). I would suggest the Community Working Group does this, as it's a way to keep our community healthy, but i understand it's quite some work, so i volunteer to do it if the CWG doesn't feel this is a task they want to take on. 
> 
> Things I'm missing?
> 
> Improvement suggestions?

So it seems there was some agreement that is something that could improve but we didn't 100% agree on what to do. I've scheduled an Akademy BoF, hopefully we can reach to a conclusion there.

https://community.kde.org/Akademy/2020/Tuesday#Room_02_-_8th_September

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> Cheers,
>   Albert
> 
> [1] yes, i know they are not the same, but since one is a subset of the other, let's pretend they are.
> 
> 
> 







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