14.6.4.6 GOP-PROP 6 - private mailing list
Potentially sensitive or private matters will be referred to Graham. He will then decide who should discuss the matter on an ad-hoc basis, and forward or CC them on future emails.
For emphasis, the project administrators are Han-Wen, Jan, and Graham; those three will always be CC’d on any important discussions.
The lilypond-hackers mailing list will be removed.
History
There is some unhappy history about this idea in our development community:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2010-09/msg00178.html http://news.lilynet.net/spip.php?article121 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2010-11/msg00076.html
Other projects
The idea of private mailing lists is hardly uncommon in open-source software. For example,
http://lwn.net/Articles/394660/ about debian-private http://subversion.apache.org/mailing-lists.html private@ http://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-core http://foundation.gnome.org/legal/ board members pledge to keep certain matters confidential every security team of every GNU/Linux distribution and OS
In fact, Karl Fogel’s “Producing Open Source Software” explicitly suggests a private mailing list for some circumstances:
[on granting commit/push access to a contributor] But here is one of the rare instances where secrecy is appropriate. You can't have votes about potential committers posted to a public mailing list, because the candidate's feelings (and reputation) could be hurt. http://producingoss.com/en/consensus-democracy.html#electorate
Board of governers, voting, etc?
Many projects have an official board of directors, or a list of “core developers”, with set term limits and elections and stuff.
I don’t think that we’re that big. I think we’re still small enough, and there’s enough trust and consensus decisions, that we can avoid that. I would rather that we kept on going with trust+consensus for at least the next 2-3 years, and spent more time+energy on bug fixes and new features instead of administrative stuff.
Project administrators are Han-Wen, Jan, and Graham.