On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 10:36 -0400, Jon Stanley wrote:
2008/3/10 Karsten 'quaid' Wade kwade@redhat.com:
Any objections to adding a bullet to step 4?
" * You must introduce yourself to the mailing list before you can be approved for the 'marketing' group."
Hmm, I guess that 'fedorabugs' (which I'm semi-in charge of) is used for the same stuff (as well as bugzilla access), and all that we require for a barrier to entry there is cla_done, manually checked by the sponsor (read: me) before approving the membership.
Then why bother? One cannot request group entry until one has cla_done, but once having it, why put a human in the step? Why not make 'fedorabugs' auto-approved at that point?
The reason for the human in the step, IMO, is to humanize the process of joining a group. Otherwise, we would get what group admins see all the time -- people create an account and join whatever group sounds interesting by name, without going to find out what that group is about, how to become part of it, etc.
It would be nice if various sub-groups of the project could agree on a sane barrier for entry, for exactly the reasons that you mention that I hadn't thought of before - namely voting.
Note that I'm not against the requirement to be "known" prior to being sponsored/approved, but I think that the requirement probably needs to extend to all groups if we're going to make it a requirement.
I'm not sure that all groups need the same requirement, although they should have _a_ specific requirement. There is a strong history for the self-introduction being the official "I'm joined" step. The practice is (or could be?) to check mailing list archives for a self-intro before approving someone to a group.
Now the big question - is FAS2 going to make all of this obsolete?
Doubtful, since it doesn't include an AI component. :D
Done!
Cool; I'm figuring we can grandfather anyone into the group who has been active on the list; we don't need to go back and ask for self-intros.