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Re: Infrastructure, was: Proposal: New web site maintainers

Hi,


There are a couple questions I'd like to discuss with the other core
team members a little more before offering some concrete steps
forward.  Historically, the core committee has been in charge of
infrastructure for the most part, but this hasn't really worked as
well as I'd like.  We've seen issues like the recent problems with the
domain name expiring (my fault) but also difficulties in other areas
too.  I get the impression that changes have generally been cumbersome
because we all have so  much else on our plates.

However there is also a  basic question to the community:

What can we do to facilitate cooperation and contribution from the community?
I think this is the right direction -- letting other people contribute in ways other than code. And the web site can/should be a big part of that. 


I have a few basic ideas, still very poorly formed, but worth
discussing openly in the spirit of peer review:

1)  Would it be helpful to have a list for moderators of the web site?
  (Actual moderator status would, I think, need to be invite-only, but
it would give people a chance to get involved and show themselves
before we make such a decision.)
2)  Would it be helpful to have a list for people interested and able
to contribute to the management of the infrastructure?  Actual ability
to contribute in this way would still require invitation from the core
committee, of course.
I really don't think we need more lists. The traffic on both current lists is light -- but I would probably suggest having most of the web site discussions on the user list, since many of the people who might contribute most to this effort may not sign up for devel. 


Part of what I'm wondering is if it wouldn't be better to try to push
the role of the core committee closer to that of pure governance
matters and try to open up some of the infrastructure management to a
wider community.  Maybe we could have other committees for managing
the web site and other pieces of infrastructure on a day-to-day level
and free us up a bit.


+1 on freeing the core team up to do development.

-1 on lots of formal committees to do so.
Down the road, when the noise starts to exceed the signal for large numbers of users, it might be appropriate to set up additional groups/lists/whatever. Right now the problem is lack of participation outside the core team, and people who swing by, ask a question, then leave and we never hear from them again.
I think it's appropriate to have the core team approve/invite all moderators. I think doing so might get more people watching/participating on the users list -- and this could be a place where a lot of the web discussions take place. Meanwhile, keep the devel list more devoted to core contributors and code issues.
The community is small enough as it is -- but I think there's room for allowing more of us to participate in a more meaningful way, without making more groups to deal with... 



Cheers,
--
John Locke
Manager, Freelock Computing
http://www.freelock.com