Re: no SPI meeting remainder ?

Dear SPI board,

It seems there have been a SPI IRC meeting last Tuesday but no remainder
was sent to spi-announce.

Am I correct ?

In that case, are the IRC logs available ?

Thanks in advance,
Bill.

Bill Allombert <allomber(at)math(dot)u-bordeaux(dot)fr> wrote:
> It seems there have been a SPI IRC meeting last Tuesday but no remainder
> was sent to spi-announce.
>
> Am I correct ?

It looks like there was. See
http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/agenda/2006/2006-11-21.html/

I notice that there was another proposal to transfer opensource.org to
OSI before they become accountable to free software developers. Is
that why there was no announcement?

Also, the logs and minutes for July 2005 seem to be missing. Where
are they?

Finally, what is the expected path from http://www.spi-inc.org/ for
members to find out about meetings? I resorted to playing 'guess the
URL' again.

> In that case, are the IRC logs available ?

--
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Somerset, England. Work/Laborejo: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
IRC/Jabber/SIP: on request/peteble

On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 12:01:38PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Bill Allombert <allomber(at)math(dot)u-bordeaux(dot)fr> wrote:
> > It seems there have been a SPI IRC meeting last Tuesday but no remainder
> > was sent to spi-announce.
> >
> > Am I correct ?
>
> It looks like there was. See
> http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/agenda/2006/2006-11-21.html/
>
Hi Bill / MJ,

This was sent out in Message-ID: <20061118230811(dot)GG11541(at)mx0(dot)halon(dot)org(dot)uk>

I'm not sure why this didn't get through to spi-announce. For info,
meetings are currently held on the third tuesday of each month, at
19:00UTC, on #spi on irc.oftc.net.

> I notice that there was another proposal to transfer opensource.org to
> OSI before they become accountable to free software developers. Is
> that why there was no announcement?
>

Really MJ, WHY do you keep coming up with this stuff? I see you're
managing to inject your personal prejudices into simple questions, and
turning them into accusations again.

Why would any resolution stop an announcement being sent out? You seem
to be implying that the board have a hidden agenda. I would suggest you
call a special meeting to withdraw the board. From our by-laws, you
require a request of one third of the membership. This means you need
126 members to agree with you.

> Also, the logs and minutes for July 2005 seem to be missing. Where
> are they?
>

You mean these minutes, which were published at 2006-06-20 23:46 ?
http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/meeting-minutes/2005/board-meeting-july-26th-2005.html

> Finally, what is the expected path from http://www.spi-inc.org/ for
> members to find out about meetings? I resorted to playing 'guess the
> URL' again.

http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary
Follow the links.
This hasn't changed since 2003.

Regards,
--
Neil McGovern
Secretary, Software in the Public Interest, Inc.

On Sun, Nov 26, 2006 at 02:45:07PM +0000, Neil McGovern wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 12:01:38PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > Bill Allombert <allomber(at)math(dot)u-bordeaux(dot)fr> wrote:
> > > It seems there have been a SPI IRC meeting last Tuesday but no remainder
> > > was sent to spi-announce.
> > >
> > > Am I correct ?
> >
> > It looks like there was. See
> > http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/agenda/2006/2006-11-21.html/
> >
> Hi Bill / MJ,
>
> This was sent out in Message-ID: <20061118230811(dot)GG11541(at)mx0(dot)halon(dot)org(dot)uk>
>
> I'm not sure why this didn't get through to spi-announce. For info,
> meetings are currently held on the third tuesday of each month, at
> 19:00UTC, on #spi on irc.oftc.net.

Sure but the email remainder has served me well for the last few years!

> > Finally, what is the expected path from http://www.spi-inc.org/ for
> > members to find out about meetings? I resorted to playing 'guess the
> > URL' again.
>
> http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary
> Follow the links.

How do you get there from http://www.spi-inc.org/ ?

Cheers,
Bill.

On Sun, Nov 26, 2006 at 04:42:30PM +0100, Bill Allombert wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 26, 2006 at 02:45:07PM +0000, Neil McGovern wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 12:01:38PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > > Finally, what is the expected path from http://www.spi-inc.org/ for
> > > members to find out about meetings? I resorted to playing 'guess the
> > > URL' again.
> >
> > http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary
> > Follow the links.
>
> How do you get there from http://www.spi-inc.org/ ?
>

Hi Bill,

This hasn't ever been linked in, so when I moved to the new web system,
I left it out. Do people think it would be useful to have a path to this
from the main page somewhere? I'll be happy to put some sort of link in
if so.

Cheers,
Neil
--
Neil McGovern
Secretary, Software in the Public Interest, Inc.

Neil McGovern <neilm(at)spi-inc(dot)org> wrote:
> meetings are currently held on the third tuesday of each month, at
> 19:00UTC, on #spi on irc.oftc.net.

I'm confused because I thought that each meeting set the date of the
next meeting, apart from the Annual. Has third Tuesday been agreed
for all meetings until some date, or are meetings are on the third
Tuesday except when they're not?

> On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 12:01:38PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > I notice that there was another proposal to transfer opensource.org to
> > OSI before they become accountable to free software developers. Is
> > that why there was no announcement?
>
> Really MJ, WHY do you keep coming up with this stuff?

Do not send personal messages to mailing lists.

Answer the question.

> I see you're
> managing to inject your personal prejudices into simple questions, and
> turning them into accusations again.

I hope most noticed it was a question, not an accusation.

If you mean the "accountable" comment, that's not prejudice, it's
*post*judice[sic] - my understanding from the comments made last time
SPI's board discussed OSI, which I feel are reflected in the draft
minutes:

Ian Jackson states the reason that he objects to this resolution is
that "SPI is a membership controlled organisation and OSI is a
self-perpetuating board. I don't think a self-perpetuating board is
an appropriate structure for this."

> Why would any resolution stop an announcement being sent out? You seem
> to be implying that the board have a hidden agenda.

Not at all. Don't jump to (wrong) conclusions. I thought it's
possible that this was controversial enough to mean that everything
got played exactly by the letter of the by-laws, rather than giving it
more publicity among the members.

What happened at the meeting? Did SPI give away the domain?

> I would suggest you
> call a special meeting to withdraw the board. From our by-laws, you
> require a request of one third of the membership. This means you need
> 126 members to agree with you.

Yeah, right(!) The last time 126 members attended a meeting was...?

I'm amazed that anyone is so willing to play with the nukes over
something like this, but if the only way to question SPI board strange
behaviour is that untouchable, that's quite bad.

> > Also, the logs and minutes for July 2005 seem to be missing. Where
> > are they?
>
> You mean these minutes, which were published at 2006-06-20 23:46 ?
> http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/meeting-minutes/2005/board-meeting-july-26th-2005.html

I mean the non-draft approved version of that. Also, note that:

1. those minutes are not linked from
http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/minutes
http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/meeting-minutes/2005
or
http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/meeting-minutes

2. http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/meeting-minutes
is not linked or even visible in the menu from
the section index http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate
- it seems to appear only if you are in the meeting-minutes section!

and
3. the July 2005 minute links on all agendas from August 2005 to
March 2006 are 404 Not Found, whereas the July 2006 meeting that
apparently approved it doesn't link to anything.

In short: the navigation to that page is screwy, so I can't see why
asking where it was got such a hostile answer.

> > Finally, what is the expected path from http://www.spi-inc.org/ for
> > members to find out about meetings? I resorted to playing 'guess the
> > URL' again.
>
> http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary
> Follow the links.
> This hasn't changed since 2003.

Does its survival make it not a bug?

Regards,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct

>
> What happened at the meeting? Did SPI give away the domain?
>

No it was decided it would be discussed at the next meeting IIRC.

> In short: the navigation to that page is screwy, so I can't see why
> asking where it was got such a hostile answer.
>
>>> Finally, what is the expected path from http://www.spi-inc.org/ for
>>> members to find out about meetings? I resorted to playing 'guess the
>>> URL' again.

I have to say, I didn't find getting information about the meetings
difficult:

http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/meetings

However... I will say that someone (I don't know if this is MJ or not)
who is not familiar with corporate structure is going to struggle to
find out where the meeting are.

Clicking Corporate->Meetings just won't make sense to most, regardless
of how accurate it is.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

Neil McGovern wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 26, 2006 at 04:42:30PM +0100, Bill Allombert wrote:
>> On Sun, Nov 26, 2006 at 02:45:07PM +0000, Neil McGovern wrote:
>>> On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 12:01:38PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
>>>> Finally, what is the expected path from http://www.spi-inc.org/ for
>>>> members to find out about meetings? I resorted to playing 'guess the
>>>> URL' again.
>>> http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary
>>> Follow the links.
>> How do you get there from http://www.spi-inc.org/ ?
>>
>
> Hi Bill,
>
> This hasn't ever been linked in, so when I moved to the new web system,
> I left it out. Do people think it would be useful to have a path to this
> from the main page somewhere? I'll be happy to put some sort of link in
> if so.

Neil,

If it were I, I would have a link directly under the left hand
navigation that said, *meetings*. My reasoning is that most members are
likely only to come to the website to find out where/when (or remind
themselves) the next meeting is.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

>
> Cheers,
> Neil
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Spi-general mailing list
> Spi-general(at)lists(dot)spi-inc(dot)org
> http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general

Neil McGovern wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 12:01:38PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
>> Bill Allombert <allomber(at)math(dot)u-bordeaux(dot)fr> wrote:
>>> It seems there have been a SPI IRC meeting last Tuesday but no remainder
>>> was sent to spi-announce.
>>>
>>> Am I correct ?
>> It looks like there was. See
>> http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/agenda/2006/2006-11-21.html/
>>
> Hi Bill / MJ,
>
> This was sent out in Message-ID: <20061118230811(dot)GG11541(at)mx0(dot)halon(dot)org(dot)uk>
>
> I'm not sure why this didn't get through to spi-announce. For info,
> meetings are currently held on the third tuesday of each month, at
> 19:00UTC, on #spi on irc.oftc.net.

If anyone else is reading this thread. It is documented, publicly on the
website where and when the meetings are held. You can find the
information here:

http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/meetings

However, it does say:

meetings are usually (but not always) held on the third Tuesday

>
>> I notice that there was another proposal to transfer opensource.org to
>> OSI before they become accountable to free software developers. Is
>> that why there was no announcement?
>>
>
> Really MJ, WHY do you keep coming up with this stuff? I see you're
> managing to inject your personal prejudices into simple questions, and
> turning them into accusations again.

Neil I think you might be jumping a little here. A simple, "No" would
have sufficed and kept the temperature down :)

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

Neil McGovern wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 12:01:38PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > Bill Allombert <allomber(at)math(dot)u-bordeaux(dot)fr> wrote:
> > > It seems there have been a SPI IRC meeting last Tuesday but no remainder
> > > was sent to spi-announce.
> > >
> > > Am I correct ?
> >
> > It looks like there was. See
> > http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/agenda/2006/2006-11-21.html/
> >
> Hi Bill / MJ,
>
> This was sent out in Message-ID: <20061118230811(dot)GG11541(at)mx0(dot)halon(dot)org(dot)uk>
>
> I'm not sure why this didn't get through to spi-announce. For info,
> meetings are currently held on the third tuesday of each month, at
> 19:00UTC, on #spi on irc.oftc.net.

The spi-announce list was configured to discard posts from
non-subscribed addresses. I've updated the list config so Neil's posts
to spi-announce aren't discarded in the future.

--
----------------------------
Michael Schultheiss
E-mail: schultmc(at)spi-inc(dot)org

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
> >>> Finally, what is the expected path from http://www.spi-inc.org/ for
> >>> members to find out about meetings? I resorted to playing 'guess the
> >>> URL' again.
>
> I have to say, I didn't find getting information about the meetings
> difficult:
>
> http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/meetings
>
> However... I will say that someone (I don't know if this is MJ or not)
> who is not familiar with corporate structure is going to struggle to
> find out where the meeting are.

Now try to find the meeting details from there by following links...
If it's not posted to spi-announce, it becomes rather indirect.

Regards,
--
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Somerset, England. Work/Laborejo: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
IRC/Jabber/SIP: on request/peteble

Michael Schultheiss <schultmc(at)spi-inc(dot)org> wrote:
> The spi-announce list was configured to discard posts from
> non-subscribed addresses. I've updated the list config so Neil's posts
> to spi-announce aren't discarded in the future.

I'm amazed. I apologise to Neil a little, as it seems this
communication problem isn't wholly his choice. How did that happen?
Blackholing board member messages to spi-announce seems crazy (but
then I think using RBLs to reject emails is nuts).

Please configure spi-announce to pass unapproved messages to a human
moderator, else next time someone substitutes for Neil, the same may
happen again.

Regards,
--
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Somerset, England. Work/Laborejo: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
IRC/Jabber/SIP: on request/peteble

MJ Ray writes ("Re: no SPI meeting remainder ?"):
> I notice that there was another proposal to transfer opensource.org to
> OSI before they become accountable to free software developers. Is
> that why there was no announcement?

?! There's no conspiracy, just an oversight.

If you're opposed to the transfer participate in the email discussion.
(I have a bunch of messages I need to reply to myself.)

Ian.

MJ Ray writes ("Re: no SPI meeting remainder ?"):
> Michael Schultheiss <schultmc(at)spi-inc(dot)org> wrote:
> > The spi-announce list was configured to discard posts from
> > non-subscribed addresses. I've updated the list config so Neil's posts
> > to spi-announce aren't discarded in the future.
>
> I'm amazed. [...]

You're amazed that mail occasionally falls by the wayside nowadays ?
Where have you been living the last decade ?

Spam levels on the public internet are running at _at least_ 90%. For
some recipients, it's much much higher. This means that to even a
small erroneous acceptance rate can render an email flow unuseable
because of the spam volume. This in turn means that not-optimal
antispam measures are deployed in desperation.

This situation is probably not going to improve until the people who
currently run the world are replaced with a new generation who have
suffered this problem personally.

Ian.

On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 12:10:26PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> If you're opposed to the transfer participate in the email discussion.
> (I have a bunch of messages I need to reply to myself.)

Since you mention it, I am interested to know where this email discussion
is held and/or who is involved, if it is possible.

Thanks in advance,
Bill

MJ Ray wrote:
> Please configure spi-announce to pass unapproved messages to a human
> moderator, else next time someone substitutes for Neil, the same may
> happen again.

The auto-discard has been disabled. spi-announce was configured for a
human moderator but with the auto-discard, Neil's post got dropped.
This won't happen in the future.

--
----------------------------
Michael Schultheiss
E-mail: schultmc(at)spi-inc(dot)org

Ian Jackson <ijackson(at)chiark(dot)greenend(dot)org(dot)uk> wrote:
> MJ Ray writes ("Re: no SPI meeting remainder ?"):
> > Michael Schultheiss <schultmc(at)spi-inc(dot)org> wrote:
> > > The spi-announce list was configured to discard posts from
> > > non-subscribed addresses. [...]
> > I'm amazed. [...]
>
> You're amazed that mail occasionally falls by the wayside nowadays ?

Amazed that anyone at SPI would set such a mind-bogglingly clumsy
"friendly fire" policy. Way to help kill off email.

Regards,
--
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Somerset, England. Work/Laborejo: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
IRC/Jabber/SIP: on request/peteble.
I've ~37 litres of packing chips for free locally - email me.

Bill,

> Since you mention it, I am interested to know where this email discussion
> is held and/or who is involved, if it is possible.

It's on board(at)spi-inc(dot)org right now, involving the whole board and the Debian
and PostgreSQL liasons. We haven't been eager to involve more people because
we have a number of contrasting, and quite vehement, opinions already. If
you think it's important that we should drag it onto spi-private, though, I
suppose we should.

--
Josh Berkus
Treasurer
Software in the Public Interest, Inc.
www.spi-inc.org