[ogb-discuss] 2008 OGB Election

[Roy T. Fielding]

On Dec 12, 2007, at 1:43 PM, Glynn Foster wrote:
>> And we've actually been ignoring the requirements in Sections 7.10 &
>> 8.2 which require us to set up private mailing lists for each  
>> community
>> to have their Core Contributors debate the merits of each nominee  
>> before
>> the public vote.
>
> Strongly disagree about this, FWIW - having a set of available  
> mailing lists for
> core contributors encourages private discussion about things other  
> than who to
> vote in as core contributor. I'm glad we've been ignoring it :)

Real open source projects work by separating technical/working
discussion from interpersonal/private discussions.  If you don't
have a private list for the latter, then those discussions will still
happen but in a less regulated manner -- they will be limited to
hallway conversations and random subsets of private email addresses,
inevitably leaving outside contributors out of the discussion by
accident (if not on purpose).  This is a well-known solution to a
well-known problem regarding distributed work teams.

At the same time, a clear separation of purpose for lists allows
people to put an end to private discussion of public issues far
quicker than happens otherwise.

OpenSolaris would be a lot better off if it had "dev", "use", and
"private" lists for each community group (and no project-specific
or "discuss" lists).  Doing that forces communities to act like a
social community (and rearrange themselves when, in fact, they are
not socially matched at all).

....Roy