XMPP Council - 2018-01-19


  1. Kev

    So, where do we go from here?

  2. Ge0rG

    I suggest we defer anything related to 387 until after Summit, and you two go and drink some beers together.

  3. Ge0rG

    Or whatever respective beverage you prefer.

  4. SouL

    :D

  5. Kev

    Still water?

  6. Ge0rG

    Alternative proposal: we let Tobias send a back-dated email (between 2017-11-15 and 2017-11-20), containing a +1 for 387. Then we consider the vote from http://logs.xmpp.org/council/2017-11-15#16:12:08 as passed, advance 2018 and merge the PR into 2019.

  7. Kev

    That's certainly creative, but I'm not sure it's ideal.

  8. Kev

    I think the water idea might be safer :)

  9. Ge0rG

    While I'm studying our process: how long does a Council member have time to complete a pending on-list vote, and what's the default if that time has passed without a vote?

  10. Ge0rG

    https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0001.html#approval only maintains that the Council is responsible for defining those values

  11. Kev

    Current period is two weeks.

  12. Kev

    (From the meeting)

  13. Ge0rG

    Damn, so Tobias wasn't even late.

  14. Kev

    And not voting is an abstention/+0/whatever you want to call it.

  15. Dave

    BTW, in an attempt to help us with this, I've tracked down every set of minutes I can find, and put the voting into a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AZ-Sna6OiRG--b-mJMKv3XXfrn3Nehm0kAtlyJvImL0/edit?usp=sharing

  16. Dave

    Weirdly, I couldn't find Daniel's 2017-12-13 minutes directly; I could only find a copy of them in a mail Peter Waher sent. I suspect I'm not the only one because nobody at all voted on list afterward.

  17. SamWhited

    Dave: impressive! We were tracking them all on Trello for a while using check lists; I don't know if this is better or worse (looks nice though)

  18. Dave

    SamWhited, I think it's simpler to spot things you haven't voted on like this.

  19. SamWhited

    Yah, I agree

  20. Dave

    So by my count, we've managed to conclude only half the matters for vote so far. Not great.

  21. SamWhited

    Ahh, I thought I was missing at least one thing but when I went back I couldn't find it; it was the 2017-12-13 minutes, so I guess I didn't get those either

  22. SamWhited

    (although there are also others I wasn't aware of, so yah, not great)

  23. Kev

    I wonder if it'd be worth bringing back the old council bot, but better?

  24. Kev

    Have it remember people's votes against things, and the voting periods, and have it be able to spit out statuses?

  25. SamWhited

    I've got a start to a council bot somewhere that I never finished; didn't know there was an existing one.

  26. Kev

    I wrote one donkey's years ago, early in my Chair days.

  27. Kev

    During the week when something needed a vote, someone just said !agenda add Vote on XEP-0999, Advance to Draft. http..., and it went in the agenda.

  28. Kev

    Then in the meeting you'd say !agenda start, and it'd say <bot> 1) Roll call

  29. Kev

    !agenda next <bot> 2) Vote on ...

  30. Kev

    Then there was the static stuff at the end, so !agenda next <bot> 6) Date of next meeting? !agenda next <bot> 7) AOB?

  31. Kev

    It was not terribly sophisticated, but it made it easy to track upcoming agendas, because at any point you could ask the bot what the agenda for next meeting looked like at the moment.

  32. Ge0rG

    Dave, SamWhited: there are Council meeting minutes claiming to be for 2017-11-29, but sent right after meeting time on 2017-12-13

  33. Ge0rG

    and they seem to match http://logs.xmpp.org/council/2017-12-13#16:00:39

  34. Ge0rG

    Subject: [Council] Council meeting minutes 2017-11-29

  35. SamWhited

    Dave: how will the spreadsheet be kept up to date? Should we be voting on it directly or is that something you'll do?

  36. Kev

    Would it be easier if we had a bot like the old one, but you could !vote +1 etc., and have it track everything?

  37. Kev

    It could, in principle, even generate a minutes skeleton.

  38. Kev

    I think Dave gets to decide as Chair, but it sounds potentially useful to me.

  39. SamWhited

    Kev: I think that would be easier, but I'm concerned that we'd end up just losing votes/agendas the next time the server went down. We already operate too much of our own stuff IMO

  40. Kev

    Not adding more things to admin sounds sane. I wasn't thinking of an XSF service (although it could be), I was just thinking of running it myself.

  41. Kev

    And then generate appropriate output that could be stored in XSF places.

  42. Kev

    But I am low-F on this.

  43. Ge0rG

    That sounds like a lot of work.

  44. Ge0rG

    Especially writing the bot in a matter that it would become useful

  45. Kev

    You might well not be wrong.

  46. SamWhited

    I wonder if the bot could be used to drive the meeting, but just pull the agenda from Trello (they have a good API). Then again, at that level of complexity I kind of doubt any of us would have the bandwidth to write it.

  47. SamWhited

    s/Trello/Trello or Google Docs or <prefered service>/

  48. SamWhited

    s/prefered/preferred/ *sigh* one day I will learn to spell before sending it and thinking "that looks weird, what's wrong?"

  49. Ge0rG

    let's just re-implement trello on top of non-persistent pubsub

  50. Kev

    Yes, pulling from Trello would be lovely, but I certainly don't have the cycles.

  51. Ge0rG

    SamWhited: hopefully we'll have MUC LMC by then.

  52. Kev

    I did write a Trello notification bot at one point so in the M-Link dev MUC it'd notify about things happening on our Trello board.

  53. Dave

    I'm actually fine with keeping this spreadsheet up to date personally.

  54. Kev

    But we don't use Trello any more, so that's fallen by the waysade.

  55. Kev

    s/sad/sid/

  56. Kev

    If you want to maintain that, I'm far from complaining.

  57. SamWhited

    *nods* sounds good to me

  58. Ge0rG

    Dave: I've +1ed ISR on-list in https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/council/2017-December/004279.html

  59. Kev

    That suggests that there's a pending vote from me, which I'm fairly sure isn't true.

  60. SamWhited

    Yah, I think I voted on the most recent docs too; that's the danger with having one person keep it up I suppose

  61. Ge0rG

    Dave: great work on the vote table. May I suggest greying out the cancelled votes so it's directly visible when reading a column that there is no vote missing?

  62. Kev

    Indeed, looks like I voted on the 20th Dec on ISR.

  63. Ge0rG

    Kev: the ISR votes are probably missing because Dave lost the meeting minutes.

  64. Ge0rG

    Despite the name, they can be found in https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/council/2017-December/004275.html

  65. Dave

    Ge0rG, I'd like to do colours, yes. Ideally automatically. I wonder if that's possible?

  66. Kev

    Should be.

  67. SamWhited

    I wonder if we could do conditional formatting or something to automatically show votes that are expired or about to expire

  68. Ge0rG

    Dave: probably, but it's probably harder than coloring the two rows manually :D

  69. SamWhited

    Oh, I think that's what you just said…

  70. SamWhited

    https://support.google.com/docs/answer/78413?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

  71. Kev

    I'm torn between something that 'just works now' like a Google Sheet, and putting in the legwork so we've got something that'll keep us on top of things for the rest of time.

  72. Ge0rG

    Kev: let's settle on "barely good enough" for now, and improve when we actually have tons of free time.

  73. Kev

    I think that's my new tag line :p

  74. Dave

    Something like that? (looks at sheet)

  75. Kev

    Better still if the votes were clear who's missing.

  76. Kev

    But yes.

  77. Ge0rG

    for reasons beyond my understanding, the sheet alternates between red background lines for some votes and a kind of petrol for individual -1s

  78. Ge0rG

    I'd suggest grey lines for cancelled votes and some pinkish red for only the cells where a vote is missing

  79. Ge0rG

    okay, red for missing is good as well, with pink for urgent?

  80. Ge0rG

    we can also fill "-" into the cancelled ones.

  81. Dave

    So pink lines are outstanding votes, with red cells for missing votes.

  82. Dave

    Really hard, BTW, to make it only paint red for oustanding missing votes.

  83. Ge0rG

    I'm okay with red for everything missing

  84. Ge0rG

    Dave: can you make the pink line start at A column?

  85. Ge0rG

    Awesome, thanks

  86. Ge0rG

    Dave: missing votes from Sam in https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2018-January/034161.html

  87. Dave

    Ge0rG, Thanks. I did know about those and yet had forgotten to put them in.

  88. Dave

    Ge0rG, I'm pretty sure I voted on ISR at some point. Can't find that either.

  89. Ge0rG

    Dave: I'm not sure it's good to leave old missing votes white-on-white.

  90. Ge0rG

    It'd probably better to manually place "-" where no more vote is required.

  91. Ge0rG

    +be

  92. Dave

    Ge0rG, So I've put "0" where we cancelled votes manually, and made expired votes show orange.

  93. SamWhited

    looks good

  94. Ge0rG

    Dave: thanks, this is good to me :)

  95. Ge0rG

    What happens to expired votes?

  96. Dave

    SamWhited, Couldn't find a vote for you on ISR, or the Deprecation of '84 (though for that, it was already vetoed, so nothing was going to happen anyway).

  97. Ge0rG

    Looks like there are still some pending votes with daniel...

  98. SamWhited

    yah, I don't think I bothered on that one because it was already vetoed

  99. SamWhited

    I guess I missed ISR though, I thought I voted, but I don't see it either

  100. Kev

    I think I'd encourage people to vote even where something is vetod.

  101. Kev

    Because when people want to see who on Council is doing work, it's useful to only have gaps where people failed to vote.

  102. moparisthebest

    iirc the list does something incorrect with DKIM and whether everyone gets the messages is based on how lenient their servers are

  103. Kev

    I think the other way to look at that is that DKIM does something incorrect with email, and whether people get messages is based on how sensible their servers are :D

  104. moparisthebest

    like everything with email, you MUST do what the big players do, full stop.

  105. moparisthebest

    I think it's in the RFC, or it should be, "you MUST do whatever hotmail and google do"

  106. Kev

    Make up your mind - big players, or hotmail? :)

  107. SamWhited

    We don't have any domain experts (to my knowledge) so this feels like another place where we shouldn't be hosting our own stuff and should be relying on someone else

  108. moparisthebest

    see I'm on the other end of the spectrum, we should never rely on 3rd parties and always host our own stuff

  109. Kev

    I think we probably do have people who'd be offended to be called not-a-domain-expert on email :)

  110. Kev

    (Not me, thankfully)

  111. moparisthebest

    anyway this is built in, newish version of mailmain or whatever and flip the correct switch

  112. Ge0rG

    I'm not a domain expert, but I've been successfully running my own MTA for some years without problems. No MLs though.

  113. Dave

    Kev, But anyway. Yes, we *should* have voted on '84, if only to end the vote.

  114. Dave

    SamWhited, I don't think I have any RFCs in SMTP specifically, so I guess I'm not really a domain expert.

  115. Ge0rG

    Dave: having RFCs would make you a *certified* domain expert.

  116. SamWhited

    Yah, I dunno, pardon me if someone has worked in email for a while or something, I'm just not aware of any of us knowing as much as the Google Groups people or the Topicbox people, so it seems worth just letting them do it so that we don't wind up with weird issues like this and bearing the operational cost of running our own infrastructure.

  117. Kev

    Well, we've effectively farmed out git to github, at least, so that's something.

  118. Ge0rG

    I wouldn't like outsourcing our MLs to Google, though, as they tend to f*** up users' identities.

  119. SamWhited

    I don't know what that means, but I don't care where, I just don't think we should be running them personally.

  120. Ge0rG

    I started out with my personal email subscribed to some google list, then I created a separate google account for a project I run, and then somehow I ended up with both accounts merged into one and non-project contributions sent with the project identity.

  121. Ge0rG

    I'm sure it was a dumb idea to use my personal email as the verification email for that project account, but still the outcome was very surprising.

  122. Kev

    Would it be helpful on the spreadsheet for EXPIRED to be more nuanced?

  123. Kev

    EXPIRED/PASSED, EXPIRED/FAILED or whatever.