Roles and project phase 3, execution 25.02.2013

Time: 20-21:20 CET, Monday 25 February 2013

Where IRC qt-devnet-moderators at freenode

Participants:

Tomasz Siekierda <sierdzio> Tobias Hunger <hunger> Knut Yrvin <knuty> Samu Voutilainen <Smar>

Discussed

Agree that Stage 3 is ok to talk about, since we mostly have done 2 (which needs some more writing on the charter, which I'm working on, and help are appreciated)

Stage 3 are compassing serveral steps. Let me do bullets:

Getting the license chema more clear. It seems that everyone signs an gittorius license, and the content also gets a CC-license

Single Sign On is absolutely a really asked for feature

Yeah for single sign on. I don't know how often I have been told that people did not want to file a bug report since that requires another account.

Expression Engine is not popular due to lack of merging capabilities when co-wroting

We need a mekanism (maybe some technical) for getting Moderators some sys.admin rights

Revisting the point and badge system, looking at the badges we got. E.g the Troll badge might be replaced, since it's unmaintained in a way. We might need some added badges for new rights and responsibilites as sys.admins with some rights.

Actions to make Open Governance work 11.02.2013

Who:

Giuseppe D'Angelo <peppe> Tobias Hunger <hunger> Knut Yrvin <knuty> Mark Long <mlong>

Date: Monday 11.02.2013

Time: 20:00- 21:41

Relevant documents:

Moderators roles

<hunger> Just to recap: ordinary user everybody, intemediate moderators current moderators, moderators troubalex-level, sys admins Gurudutt-level?

Licensing today might hinder Open Gov

<knuty> 1. Licensing preventing that we can take comments on parts of the documentation, making it upstream as a part of the Qt project. It's fixable, but we need a license workflow similar to Qt Project <knuty> 2. Some group admin stuff, doing what hunger recapped <knuty> 3. Allowing user of Qt Project Web to add new features and so on, with the deployment and maintainence scheme of today (or something re-tailored)

<knuty summarising peppe> about # 1: by fixing the license terms, documenting roles, and having some work fair and transparent processes on banning users (read: spammers) and moderators rights and responsibilities (and all the other 4-5 roles). we got the open gov. setup working

<peppe> about #2: I would suggest starting researching/implementing/outsourcing the required modifications to EE, if any, to get the 4 levels we need, but not enabling them (or not giving the permissions to anyone yet).

<peppe> about #3: it's more complicated because it depends on what the EE license allows us to do and I have no idea about that. if it allows to put the website on gerrit, we should do that

Apoiting roles

<hunger> knuty: My proposal to get started: Moderator can become anyone by an existing moderator proposing the person on the web ML. That proposal needs to get at least one other moderators ACK and no NAKs in 2 weeks (or whatever the timeframe for reviewers is).

Chief maintainer

<hunger> knuty: I propose you to act as chief maintainer for the web, making final decisions in case of disagreement.

<hunger> knuty: Super admin can be modeled based on maintainership in Qt… plus mail a confidentiality note if that is necessary.

Summary of the actions

By fixing the license terms, documenting roles, and having some work fair and transparent processes on banning users (read: spammers) and moderators rights and responsibilities (and all the other 4-5 roles). we got the open gov. setup working

Legal issues 14.01.2013.

Participants and time

Samu Voutilainen <Smar> Gurudutt Verma <Gurudutt1> Knut Yrvin <knuty> Mark Long <mlong> Denis Kormalev <blacktass> Giuseppe D'Angelo <peppe>

20:03 - 21:23 CET

Different licenses

Licensing for content contributors, moderators and web developers
Privacy concerns

Compared with Qt code contributions, Qt Web Project are a bit different. This because workflows are different, and also licenses are different compared with systems and methods used in the Qt code contribution project.

Qt Project Web got system admin with web development which are fully governed by Digia. The Project Web got moderators with really restricted access. There are several suggestions to widen the access in the spirit of open governance.

We got a lot of content which are licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.5 which might be incompatible with GPL. We're using Expression Engine (EE) which got restrictions on whom can make changes (it's a proprietary license, allowing Digia governed contributions. More abstract. The organisation which got a license can do changes :P )

At last, there will be account info where some Qt Project web site users are not happy that un-approved people can see their account info.

Overall, this ends up with having different licenses:

The 'as is' today: Contribution License (aka CC-BY-SA 2.5 and GFDL 1.3)
Moderator+ contributors license when extending rights in the spirit of open governance
system admin license

2 and 3 might have same privacy clause due to similar access to user account data.

What this numbered items are not addressing are exit clauses handling grace or ungraceful exits form the project.

Discussion:

Any comments?

What you mean with "moderator/sysadmin licence"?

Today moderators got really little access on the web kind of agreement of handling privacy data and such. The suggestions is to introduce open governance. This gives wider privileges and responsibilities.

How moderator access is connected with licence?

Moderator access, given that all or some of the suggestions on the moderator suggestions on previous meetings are agreed on, moderators can get all site privileges (with exception of super user, maintenance, development rights). This implies different and wider access than today, implied in the changes in workflow (with follows by extended rights). Then responsibilities increases, and should be reflected back in the agreement for moderators / sysadmins.

How about existing content?

One suggestion is to keep it as is. But it's not that simple because of BY-SA and GPL incompatibility, which prevents upstream contributions of doc and code snips upstream to Qt code/doc project. We need to sort out how make better license compatibility for upstream Qt development. Maybe make use of the CLA for everything?

Meeting 17.12.2012 on Internationalization

From 20:00 CET to 21:15

Mark Long <mlong> Gurudutt Verma <Gurudutt_home> Samu Voutilainen <Smar> Denis Kormalev <blacktass> Gerolf Reinwardt <Gerolf>

Next meeting will be about legal issues January 14.

Status

EE license check. EE seems to got a site only licens allowing developers being av part of the Qt Project web developer team able to fix issues and contribute new solutions.

Then following has to be posponed to January/February due to Qt 5 release got precedence:

Action 1: Gurudutt makes an e-mail on +/- on EE and MW on the ML (web project mailinglist) Action 2: Knut Yrvin asks Digia legal on alowing image and screenshot uploads onto the Qt Project Web. Action 3: Action: Knut Yrvin know Lasse Andresen who runs Forgerock. He asks Forerock on SSO, what's possible etc. (Gurudutt needs to make a short list of services which should have SSO integration)

Key topic internationalization

Forums are internationalized, implying that the rest of the web are. But it's not.

Need for translated content: What would be nice for the wiki is that the main is englisch and the pages can be translated. There are people in gemrany that are not that fluent in Enligsh being happy to have content in German.

Internationalization is not possible with the EE. It's possible to write artikles in different languages. The categorising for every language is manual work we have to take care from the start.

Let's say, fr.wiki.qt.io would leave to french-only wiki, and nothing else present, is what we want to see. Mediawiki (Wikipedia) handles country specific wikis nicelly.

In addition to listing all pages in language-wikis that exists, so someone who rather sees localized page could just click it?

Gerolf summarizes: The translation feature for the wiki was requested long ago I think. And it was requested more then once. What would be nice is like flags on the top of the page to switch to translations :-) page to page translation would not be possible …

Gurudutt writes: We could be using different url for qpo/wiki/fr, then same page can be created and we can create a link. I just need a table in database whick will link pages. best way of doing it would be if EllisLab can do it since we don't want to modify EE sourcecode ourself but of course we can create a third party addons that should help us. I can create a table in database which will keep record of related pages in other languages and display flag will link to those related pages

Next meeting will be about action points summary and legal issues. Time is 20:00 CET, Date: January 14.

Meeting on Technical isses 10.12.2012

Active attendies

Giuseppe <peppe>: Moderator Denis Kormalev <blacktass> Mark Long <mlong> Gerolf Reinwardt <Gerolf> Sean Harme <ZapB> Vasiliy Sorokin <vass> Knut Yrvin <knuty>: Summary Liang Qi <lqi> Samu Voutilainen <Smar> Gurudutt Verma <Gurudutt_home> Volker Götz <pholcer>

Technical

Being an open project, the technical stack should be run in the open too. People should be eligible through an open process to run positions such as maintainer of the Qt Project Web software and so on; to develop the software that it's then put in production; to solve bugs and push the fixes; etc.

Unify Jira, codereview and Qt Project Web accounts
Get rid of Expression Engine if it blocks our capabilities to develop and expand (as it has been pointed out in the past), in favour of Drupal + Mediawiki or any other combination of standard, open software that we can bend as we like
Don't be shy on relying on 3rd party services if they do the job better than what we could possibly do => WE ARE NOT GOOGLE (and we'll never be)

Key point

Expression Engine (EE) vs Media Wiki (MW)

EE lack of openness might hinder further development
Issues which makes EE less usable, where MW superseeds
Issues where EE might be keept as is?
Integrating MW with EE will cost some hours.
Action: Gurudutt makes an e-mail on +/- on EE and MW on the ML (web project mailinglist)

About tailoring and making extentions to EE

We have to ask ElisLab if we can make sandbox and can allow other to access it
If you need to read the EE code to figure out how to do a certain thing, and you can't without a license, we're not going to get much contributions…

Imange and video uploads

Using 3'rd party video service
Action: Knut Yrvin asks Digia legal on alowing image and screenshot uploads onto the Qt Project Web.

SSO on the different services

Having N accounts for N services is sooooo unprofessional :P
Action: Knut Yrvin know Lasse Andresen who runs Forgerock. He asks Forerock on SSO, what's possible etc. (Gurudutt needs to make a short list of services which should have SSO integration)

Sysadmins

There are only Digia sysadmins today. We should include non Digia employees as sys.admins later given it's a part of the Open Governance structure.

channels qt-devnet-moderators -> qt-project-moderators

Action: Giuseppe <peppe> presuades an IRCOP to change Operator to some of us, making things easier for redirecting

03.12.2012 topic: Social issues: roles, maintainership, etc.

Active Participants: Giuseppe (peppe) Mark Long (mlong) Knut Yrvin (knuty) André Somers (AndreSomers) Denis Kormalev (blacktass) Samu Voutilainen (Smar) Vasiliy Sorokin (vass) Gurudutt Verma (Gurudutt)

Meeting starts 20:00 CET 03.12.2012

Key toppic: Social issues: roles, maintainership, etc.

Three roles which we are looking at :)

Ordinary user
Moderator (can remove posts, split threads, and less more)
Administrator (can ban users, lock wiki pages, modify the static content parts of the website, etc.); has historically been a Nokian

(This isn't 100% accurate as the ordinary user can or can't do certain things based on his/her own point score, but as I've already said, that's broken by design and should be removed.)

This doesn't fit well with an "open", meritocratic/doocratic model.
We need to rethink privileges and redefine roles accordingly

Discussion

<peppe> so far, there hasn't been a proper procedure to nominate someone as moderator. more or less Alexandra or Marius nominated people with a certain amount of points

<peppe> there has never been non-Nokian access to any other kind of position, f.i. running the website software itself, doing administrative tasks, etc.

<peppe> of course great power, great responsability etc. ; but myself and pholcer had to create firefox/chrome extensions just to implement a minor feature which instead could be embedded inside the forums software. we totally lack a way to make that possible

<peppe> so, let's probably start from 1, althought as I said is more general than "moderators"; we need a meritocratic process to give (and revoke) privileges to trustworthy people

Quantity vs. Quality

<blacktass> I think that if some N moderators/admins think that man is good enough it is no matter of quantity (as it is in gerrit now)

<peppe> I don't think that it's going to be much of a problem to be honest… if someone can show some work to be done I'm pretty sure he/she will find two people to nominate and ack

Removing moderator rights

<blacktass> mlong: M votes needed for removal should definitely be greater than N (that is needed for nominaning), but I think -M votes will work here too. <mlong> I feel like that is a more severe situation which may need more of a majority from the other moderators. <mlong> blacktass: Agreed,. <AndreSomers> I'm not sure. How is this handled for approver/maintainer status? <peppe> for Qt, it needs a 2/3 majority of those who express an opinion <blacktass> never heard about removal of approver status. Maintaers just step out from there posistion

It seems be following suggestions:

Sub-forum moderators make little sens
Moderators with all site priveliges are ok
It's a suggestion on having moderator for N forums, without banning priveleges.
Web ingeneer, website admin is something else
A web dev. engineer role is neede
A chief is neede to reslove conflict (aka Lars Knoll)
A conflict board might be neede when moderators can't find a solution
A process of suggesting and making web features and development tasks might be neede.
the critical point right now is, that we don't have any team of website admins

Trust

<AndreSomers> peppe: isn't the fact that we nominate, and therefore implicitly trust moderators/admins more important than rules? <pholcer> AndreSomers: it is! <mlong> AndreSomers: Indeed.

Levels

<pholcer> Dinosaur Breeder: can become moderator of a subforum <pholcer> Gene Splicer: can become moderator of the whole forum <pholcer> Area 51 Engineer: can become admin of the forum

<peppe> ok, wait, what's the third? 1) subforums moderator (can act in those subforums) 2) website moderator (ban, create groups, etc.) 3) ? <AndreSomers> peppe: Queen of FOrums, basically. <peppe> heh, we miss our queen :) <pholcer> peppe: 3 would be the "lars of qt webiste" :)

26/11: What is Qt Project Web?

Monday 20-22 CET (on IRC #qt-devnet-moderators on freenode network)

Tests with meeting on Google Hangout and Skype will be performed after the IRC meeting.

Single SignOn might be #1 priority
There is a discussion on who are served with Qt Projecet Web (Dev.Net): those who developers Qt or those developers who uses Qt for making apps. Ration is 1/1000
There is suggestions on new best-of-breed services, requiering single sign on
QnA are suggested (which has taken long time to make, if I understood the discussion right).
We'll put up a wiki for all the ideas
There are other discussions on roles and responsibilities going forward (soscial moderators, technical, agreements, privacy and so on).
Digia means to have the site as the main public site for suppor to Qt developers (outside of direct commercial support)
Making the Mailing List public

Audio/Video conference testing:

— Skype worked without video for 8/8. Windows users got video. Not for Linux. — Google Hangout worked with video for 7/8 Tobias didn't make it yet ;)

Regarding video Google Hangout is the best option. Regarding audio Skype is the best option.

Participants in the testing:

[kl. 21:48:22] André Somers: atsomers@gmail.com [kl. 21:48:31] Denis Kormalev: kormalev.denis@gmail.com [kl. 21:48:36] Knut Yrvin: knut.yrvin@gmail.com [kl. 21:48:37] Vasiliy Sorokin: sorokin.vasiliy@gmail.com [kl. 21:48:45] Tobias Hunger: tobias.hunger@gmail.com [kl. 21:49:47] Mark Long: markdavidlong@gmail.com [kl. 21:50:01] Giuseppe D'Angelo: dangelog@gmail.com [kl. 21:50:02] Gerolf Reinwardt (Geoff): giesbert@scoutnet.de

Tuesday 20.11.2012: Planning the meetings

Time: , 15:00-16:20 CET Active participants (not sorted): AndreSomers, mlong, pholcer, Gerolf, Gurudutt, knuty, Smart, lqi, peppe, Mohsen, blacktass,

Meeting agenda: Planning the topics and dates on Open Governance for Qt Project Web

The decisions:

Meeting each Monday at 20:00 CET

Meeting dates

26/11: What is Qt Project Web? (on IRC #qt-devnet-moderators on freenode network). After the meeting testing with meeting on Google Hangout and Skype will be performed after the IRC meeting.
3/12: Social issues: roles, maintainership, etc.
10/12: Technical issues: must have/need to have features, technical options
17/12: Internationalization issues
TBD: Legal issues

Actions decided:

Making mailinglist: web@qt.io for more complex discussions Asking mariusg on changing IRC moderator

Qt Project Web Meeting Summary