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On 8/9/21 4:40 PM, Adrien Glauser wrote:
Hey again,
I think you have read something into my announcement regarding the Board. I am not seeking permission or approval or help from the Board. The only reason for me to put forth the plan there is: - to be transparent (and yes, there will be a post on news-o-o soon) - to allow for the opposition -- if any -- to contest us there, if they so desire - to listen to good pieces of advice of people there *in a dispassionate and a decent atmosphere* because this ML has a tendency to spiral into unrestrained lashes of negative emotion too rapidly for me to be able to pull the nose up before hitting the trees (sorry for all those who have shown appreciation for our initiative and have made constructive criticisms, https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Documentation_migration owes you). In other words, because of this sorry experience I think I will be avoiding non-live communication channels of communication in the future, for I suspect that the vocal minority which is so keen to make accusations and turn to grotesque hyperbolas here would never dare to behave like that in a live setting.
Also I apologize to everyone for whom my original message didn't make it clear enough that the migration was part of a three-pronged plan where care and scrutiny prevailed over carpet-bombing.
That said, I think that there is a belief, ingrained in the mind of a few participants to this ML, that this ML acts in the capacity of a committee or a body of representatives, when in fact subscribers represent no one but themselves. So when I said we wanted to secure broad consent, a few people inferred that we were seeking their consent or approval when in fact the consent and approval we are interested in came in different priorities. (This mistaken inference was spotted earlier by Stefan Seyfried, when he said our initiative was just do-ocracy at play). Primarily, we were interested in the positive opinion of people who: - themselves maintain wiki pages, and - are ready to work in person with us to improve the situation of the documentation platforms for all users.
The more pages one maintains, and the more willing to work one is, the more important one's consent and approval are. The converse is true as well.
Sorry but its for this reason that presenting to the "Board" doesn't make much sense, while some of us do contribute to the wiki we are by no means a large representative sample of the people doing such work, as such while we may be able to offer some advice asking us wont provide a complete picture. Beyond that we are a global community and as such getting everyone interested in a topic into a live meeting at the same time is practical impossible, its almost impossible to find a time that suites the whole board and we know that for significant portions of the community making the board meeting at its current time is impossible but the time is what it is because its the one time in the fortnight that works for all members of the board. I know for a fact that we have wiki contributors from European, US and Asia Pacific timezones as such expecting everyone with interest to attend a live meeting is unrealistic a reality of being a Global project is that we need to live with "non-live" communication methods for discussion and making project wide decisions. It should also be noted that most if not all contributors to this thread have been contributors to the wiki at some point in time. At the same time I think a fresh start for this topic with a clearer description of the WHY which you have now written would be beneficial. That doesn't mean that you need unanimous support of everyone involved in the thread and as always there is the expectation that anyone who participates in the thread abides by our code of conduct. So while yes the board meeting could be a source for feedback it can't be the main source and as you'll find if board members have questions / feedback we are just as likely to provide it via the list. Cheers Simon
I'll put forth my plan before the Board next week, and there we will be able to converse at more leisure. The position I will be defending is that removing certain pages -- covering critically important aspects but outdated and factually off -- is the best possible course of action in view of the risk that, during a certain time window, the pages will be picked up by search engines and ranked as high as their superior counterparts offered by the "revamped docs". (If it was only for me I would have edited out these pages, but I feel more comfortable doing once a substitute is available).
Sorry but this isn't the best way forward here, the board can't make any decisions on this topic with exception of two minor points that i'll cover in a minute, we are not a technical decision body.
Rather then putting forward your plan to the board you need to put it to the greater community, probably via this list and maybe also an article to news.o.o In my opinion the wiki page you have written and referenced above is a great starting point for this. Then based off the discussion we can see if there is a reasonable consensus among most of the community.
Really its only the boards role to act if we end up in a state were wiki pages are being removed by one group and reinstated by another group, (or if this looks likely) then the board will have to come to some form of agreement on how to go forward as it will clearly be a conflict between contributors.
The second is if people have concerns around licensing which could clearly become a issue for the board if not done right.
Rather then a second email, each page has a history [1] as an example, from here you can get access to a list of authors, common practice in many software projects is to ship one or multiple AUTHORS files that list all the contributors and reference that file in the license header. It would likely be minimal or less effort to create such a file for each page that's migrated in its own namespace. As you mentioned above you are not migrating the whole wiki and there is a large amount of areas such as board info, packaging guidelines etc so if you were to just take the most significant wiki contributors or something like that there is a chance you could end up with a list of people that didn't contribute to any page in question while not listing the people that did
Cheers
Simon
1. https://en.opensuse.org/index.php?title=Additional_package_repositories&action=history
Le 09/08/2021 à 02:41, Simon Lees a écrit :
On 8/8/21 8:17 PM, Adrien Glauser wrote:
It's simple, Richard: - you want to question, contest or otherwise undermine presuppositions that will require to (re) build part of the context behind the initiative and trigger further arguments? awesome! start new topic on the docs ML or on GitHub, so that other volunteers working with me can have their voices heard too (I am not their speakperson outside of the scope of the request at the origin of this thread and they are not subscribed to this ML let alone follow this topic) - you want to help in a way that complies with the request at the origin of the topic? nice, that's the right topic!
Have a nice week!
Given that a large part of this topic is not just limited to docs but also the wiki I believe that this project list is a perfectly reasonable place for such discussions.
As the docs team you are more then entitled to take content from the wiki and use it within new docs, how ever without broader project consent you can't remove content from the wiki.
While I know you have presented some justification for this at the openSUSE conference not everyone has seen that, the best place for you to present your case for removing content from the wiki and moving to a new docs system is this list (but probably not this thread). Really it is up to the docs team to justify to the rest of the project why they think it is the best way forward and to sell the move.
Yes if you don't get broader project consent to remove content from the wiki it will be a bit more work for you but at the end of the day I don't think it has to lead to a significantly worse user experience. After all the docs team is well within its rights to add a link in a banner at the top of any page saying this topic is also covered in the docs with a link to the page. I am sure people also don't have a problem with removing information that is so out of date that it is no longer useful. Or with adding banners that indicate that info on a page is likely out of date and may not be reliable (There has been a number of times where out of date wiki pages have still provided me with useful info on resolving a problem).
Beyond that it shouldn't be hard for the docs team to either write a tool or manually watch certain pages for changes and integrate them into the new docs, from the sound of this thread such an approach seems like it would appeal to members of the project that have had a significant history of contributing to our docs. Yes fragmentation isn't always good but if it leads to more contributions from more people maybe it also isn't bad. At the end of the day though the decision around whether we have fragmentation or not here is one for the broader community in this area not just the current docs team, as its the broader community that has spent the last 10+ years putting the wiki together.
Cheers
-- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B