Re: Overseers list should not be public

[Carlos O'Donell <carlos at redhat dot com>]

On 09/22/2017 08:39 AM, Joseph Myers wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Sep 2017, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> 
>> All-in-all I consider the public nature of the list to have only
>> negative consequences.
> 
> I think it's clearly positive for it to be public.  It means we don't need 
> to have a process for defining who from a project gets to be on overseers.  
> It means we can readily refer back to past discussions in the archives.  
> It means that when there are system problems we can refer to overseers 
> discussions of those problems on the mailing lists for individual 
> projects, and people who might not otherwise want to be on overseers can 
> follow the discussions there while the problems are affecting them.  It 
> means people can check the overseers archives to see if a problem they're 
> encountering has already been reported.

a) Although we lack a formalized processing for getting on overseers, the
   list isn't without an informal vetting process. First you have to realize
   it's a list you can subscribe to, and nothing on https://sourceware.org/lists.html
   says anything about it. Therefore I refute the claims that it's a public
   list with no process for acceptance. It's a public list in name only.
   It is a self-selecting process for getting on overseers which effectively
   makes it private. And the fact that robots.txt doesn't index it furthers
   my claims that it is in theory a list that most people assume is private.

b) I have never referred to an overseers mailing list thread ever because I 
   didn't know it was public, because it's not listed on lists.html. Because
   of that the culture I've seen has been one where I:
   * Email overseers on behalf of my community.
   * Gather consensus from overseers on a solution.
   * Summarize and condense the discussion and repost on the community list.
   Then I reference the community list discussion. Given the limited overseers
   resources this seems like a good way to minimize overloading overseers.
   And if we get the same questions from multiple people we should, as overseers
   keep a sourceware.org "Status" page with live status and just point people at
   that (and I volunteer to help keep that alive as a wiki page with status
   e.g. sourceware.org/wiki/Status with our own wiki with process information
   for how things are handled).

c) I don't have enough data to know if anyone actually does or does not follow
   overseers discussions. I *do* know that people follow my summarized discussions
   on the related community mailing lists.

d) Again, status of overseers should be relegated to a Status wiki page kept live
   by overseers volunteers with green light icons for infrastructure status.

In summary:

- If overseers is public and we see value in it being public, then we should
  do the following:

  (1) List overseers on https://sourceware.org/lists.html
  (2) Allow google to index it so others can receive the benefit of search
      results on it.

- Alternatively if overseers should be made private, to allow people to submit
  sensitive or vulnerable questions, then we should make the list private.

- Regardless of the fact we should have a sourceware.org wiki where a Status
  page gives a live status of the infrastructure. I don't know of anything
  like this (other than the news.html page, not updated since 2005 because
  it's hard to update the html).

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.