XMPP Council - 2018-01-19

So, where do we go from here?

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

Or whatever respective beverage you prefer.

:D

Still water?

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.

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

I think the water idea might be safer :)

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?

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

Current period is two weeks.

(From the meeting)

Damn, so Tobias wasn't even late.

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

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

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.

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)

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

Yah, I agree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

But I am low-F on this.

That sounds like a lot of work.

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

You might well not be wrong.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

s/sad/sid/

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

*nods* sounds good to me

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

Should be.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I think that's my new tag line :p

Something like that? (looks at sheet)

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

But yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm okay with red for everything missing

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

Awesome, thanks

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

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

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

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

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

+be

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

looks good

Dave: thanks, this is good to me :)

What happens to expired votes?

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Not me, thankfully)

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

EXPIRED/PASSED, EXPIRED/FAILED or whatever.