[Ambassadors] Poll ?? No!!

[Patrick W. Barnes]

On Saturday 17 February 2007, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Patrick W. Barnes wrote:
> > I believe his point is that, at present, anyone on this mailing list is
> > supposed to have completed the CLA.
>
> Supposed to, yes. In reality, there are many people who have not.
>

If we follow through with our initial plans, those people would be removed.

> > The marketing list doesn't have that
> > requirement, so merging them would make it more difficult to keep track
> > of what list members have what privileges and status.
>
> It is pretty trivial to query the cla_done group via
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/AccountSystem/QueryAccount
> if you are uploading or redistribution content but members should always
>   upload it themselves and all redistribution should have proper
> licensing  anyway.

Trivial, sure, but it's already hard enough to get people to pay attention to 
the CLA.  It would be only a matter of time before someone would use content 
without checking for a completed CLA.

> > Sometimes there will be
> > discussions where the subject matter applies only to contributors that
> > have completed the CLA.   Those discussions would become considerably
> > more complex, and any measure of propriety would be lost.
>
> It seems we are just speculating here. I doubt any *discussions* should
> be based on CLA requirements. Content is the only that matter for the CLA.
>

Discussions based on specific content, or through which content is produced, 
would make the CLA a concern.  Also, we still limit certain process, like 
FAmSCo voting, to people who have completed the CLA - and for good reasons.  
Related discussion or processes carried out through the mailing list would be 
complicated without a CLA requirement on the list.

We're also facing even more confusion over some of our requirements when 
people start joining the list without completing the CLA.  We'll spend a lot 
more time telling people when they do or do not need to complete the CLA, and 
we'll most likely see complaints over some of the requirements when they 
leave people feeling offended or like we're asking too much.  We faced a bit 
of that early on with this project.

> > Also, anything delivered through
> > the mailing list that we would want to use elsewhere would have to be
> > checked for an applicable CLA.
>
>   .. which is one of the reasons we always encourage people to upload
> content themselves. Since if they have edit access to the wiki, they
> already signed the CLA.
>

Of course.  I'm not saying that this is a big problem, but what Chitlesh is 
trying to say is accurate.  This is another factor to consider before 
combining the lists.

> We should avoid the club mentality. Ambassadors was born as a sub
> project for marketing and came out from the idea of community marketing
> contacts. "Marketing" is not a dirty word even in the world of Free
> software and has considerable effects as already proven by groups like
> http://www.spreadfirefox.com/. Going direct is pretty important for us.
> Increasing and concentrating the efforts as a group is a first step for
> that.

I don't think that increasing or concentrating efforts should be our focus 
right now.  Instead, focus is what we need more of.  We have a lot of idle 
potential sitting here.  What do we really accomplish by combining the lists?  
We get a big hassle, we aren't drawing in new contributors, we aren't 
dramatically increasing traffic on this list, we're reducing the focus of the 
marketing list, and for what?

> We already have many discussions copied into both lists because 
> folks dont know whether they need to limit it one list among these two.
> That is a pretty good sign that we need to converge. Lets stop the
> proliferations of projects and mailing lists.
>

The purposes of the lists are different.  As Karsten and I have pointed out, 
there are two, very different needs that are addressed by these lists.  We do 
need to make it absolutely clear what types of discussion belong to each 
list, and that people are subscribed to the correct lists for their 
interests.  Ambassadors should generally watch the Marketing list, even 
though they may not need to participate, but people on the Marketing list may 
have absolutely no interest in the Ambassadors project, and merging the lists 
would effectively force those people out.

-- 
Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes
nman64 at n-man.com

http://n-man.com/

LinkedIn:
http://linkedin.com/in/nman64

Have I been helpful?  Rate my assistance!
http://rate.affero.net/nman64/
-- 

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-ambassadors-list/attachments/20070217/184ee83b/attachment.sig>