XSF Discussion - 2020-04-30

!

Guus, MattJ, ralphm, Seve

Hello

0. Welcome + Agenda

Hi, who do we have?

o/

Beyond what's been added to Trello, any other topics to discuss?

Not from me

1. Minute taker

Not me this time

Sorry, I"m here!

I can do the minutes

thanks

No additional agenda items for me

2. Member opinion

pep.?

yep

Flow is asking in the context of "adopt-a-character". He would like to poll members and is thinking about using https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/. This requires email addresses though to be able to limit to one vote per person. He asks if he can get members' email addresses."

Flow was asking how to perform member opinion votes. He'd like to use https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/ (condorcet voting service) but that requires members' emails

I don't think we can do this.

Which, the xsf having no privacy policy..

I am personally keen on trying out this voting method, but I'm not exactly fond of giving away members' emails, yes

can we implement concordet in memberbot?

"not today"

But eventually that'd be ideal

well we can’t give away email addresses today either ;)

Doesn't mean we can in fact just give out member's e-mail addresses. Even without a policy, I'm pretty sure it violates, among others, the GDPR.

can we have memberbot collect votes and put the votes in an existing concordet tool?

without passing on PII

I think Alex can rig up memberbot, but I'm unsure what you still need concordet for afterwards

ralphm, if we had a privacy policy saying we use third-partyXX to do voting and they require email addresses for this specific reason (which is a very valid reason tbh), we wouldn't be violating GDPR

I feel strongly about not giving out members email addresses to a third party, unless they choose to supplied it themselves (like we do with the dinner signup form). ✏

ralphm, concordet is a voting scheme beyond a simple majority vote

Guus, well there we use google forms, it's not really better :P While I'm free not to answer that form, it's a requirement for me to go to the dinner ✏

pep., regarding dinner, nobody's raised issues around that before. If they had, we'd have accomodated.

at the very least, it's not the XSF supplying the mail addresses.

I've asked multiple times not to use gforms yes, ralphm

(and what he said)

let's not get into that right now.

Sure

but focus on the voting stuff.

is it feasible to create / adapt a bot for this?

It surely is

also: do we _need_ a fully fault tolerant / highly secure voting mechanism for something that's basically an advice on picking a pretty picture?

maybe we're overengineering this?

Guus, that's beyond the point

It's mostly to try out the method

Feels like scope creep to me :)

Some of us would like to change our voting system within the XSF and that's a perfect way to test it

I’m with pep that trying a voting method for a non-critical vote is better than trying it first in a membership/council/board vote ;)

Oh, I'm perfectly happy for using it as a testbed.

But this is indeed a low-priority issue as far as I'm concerned, so if it gets stuck behind a memberbot rewrite I'm not going to complain too much

Ok so, "stuck being a bot rewrite" is our answer?

At least we can clearly answer "no" to giving away members' emails

but, the issue at hand: will XSF give out its members email addresses.

exactly.

Either we adapt a bot, or we setup a voting service on our infra

Might be good to not require the bot rewrite for the membership advice (on the adopt-a-character thingy) to happen. ✏

I guess that's this sorted anyway.

3. member.json

Is this about https://xmpp.org/about/xsf/members.html? ✏

yes

Then you should raise this with Alex.

if not correct, provide PR? It seems to be maintained pretty regularly - but there's always a chance of an error slipping through.

Indeed

Ah I have an AOB from Flow regarding members.json (just remembered)

pep., different from this?

yes

If you want, we can do it here?

Ah ok, I was waiting for AOBs. Sure

Privacy concerns, fullname stays in git even after being removed.

I am personally not sure what to do about this or if it's a concern at all. GDPR-related

And other privacy laws

hm, I’d say the fullname stays in mailing list archives, too, as well as wiki. Of course, those can be redacted, while redacting the git would be ... painful

yeah

I don't really know if we can or should do something about this.

In the meantime, maybe we could have a privacy policy though to be explicit about this ✏

pep., didn't you start on one long time ago?

nope

https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/GDPR/Privacy_Policy_Template

There were some efforts re GDPR

But it's not for the membership

It's for XMPP services

Right

Which the XSF could also use fwiw ✏

I agree we should have one. It might be good to have some legal advice before we publish one, though.

I don't think I am the right person to do this tbh. Someday(tm) can surely list things that the XSF does re privacy, but then shouldn't we need legal advice

Yes :)

Anyone have access to someone?

Not off-hand. I can poke around but I don't expect much

Ok.

Winfried maybe?

Guus: good call

isn't that up his alley?

unsure if he's available for this, but we can ask/

4. Commitments

Somebody(tm)* (why "someday"..)

Guus, can you ask? Should I ask

could you?

I've sent out the e-mails, have gotten one response, who would revisit in a few months.

Guus, k

tx

re comms person, I'd like to clarify some bits

I haven't heard back about my contact for communications.

ok

Ok I was kinda feeling blocked about this. I got strong hints that we didn't want to bother with contracting as long as it wasn't "necessary". And at the same time you announced you might have someone. So I wasn't entirely sure what to do

I also haven't heard back from anyone, so I'll try to do another round of poking to different people.

same

As for not wanting to bother, setting up a contracting relationship is not my expertise, so I am not sure what would be involved. If someone were to offer services in kind as a form of sponsorship, that would indeed make things a bunch easier.

So it is not that I don't /want/ to.

I think that's a "skill" that we should acquire one way or another, as it will come in handy. It can also "just" be contracting a party that does contracting for us.

My contact would likely want to freelance

contact in? comms?

Yeah

cool :)

Someone I used to work who does marketing/comms is currently looking for more work

Do you think you can put me in contact? or maybe you're happy to handle it?

It would be great if someone else were able, I'm a little overloaded right now

But I can definitely put you in contact

thanks

Cool.

pep., and I agree that we should figure that out, but unsure how to start, and if us being incorporated in Delaware affects how this works.

I don't see why, I've done plenty of contracting for Delaware companies

maybe talk to Peter?

ralphm, I wasn't planning to talk about it until next week, but I've been poking SPI (https://spi-inc.org) and I see ways we could benefit from it

didn't the XSF hire laywers before?

should be a comparable process to hiring someone else.

https://spi-inc.org/projects/services/

(I'm referring to Peter as I think he initiated that, back then)

Guus: I asked Peter a while ago, but we haven't before.

ah, ok.

I think the lawyers either worked for Jabber, Inc. or were kind enough to consult without a formal relationship.

k

But that doesn't mean that Peter might not have some good direction.

So good idea to ask him.

nobody re SPI?

setting up a relationship with SPI would be something worth considering - but it'd take figuring out what that entails.

> nobody re SPI? I'm just reading it, didn't know them before

I can't open that website, it requires TLS <1.2

I currently don't have a clue what kind of responsibilities that adds to our plate, and what we'd get in return.

(i.e. Firefox complains)

(we're 15 minutes over time)

ralphm, they propose services for projects incl. "Accepting donations and holding funds", "Holding substantial assets", "Holding intangible assets", "Signing Contracts", "Legal assistance", "Technical services"

ralphm, yeah it complains here as well.

Ah, good to know.

Guus: good point, let's continue next week.

5. AOB

none

6. Date of Next

+1W

7. Close

Thanks all!

Thanks

Thanks

Thank you guys

Thanks

.

duplipep

:)

Testing that @id thing

Thanks Guus for the minutes

regarding mail addresses, voting and memberbot: there is potentially the option that we feed memberbot with the N voting URLs for our N members and then every member can draw an URL via memberbot

and regarding members.json: in germany you have to delete member/client data after a member/client leaves the society/club/company. so having members.json under VCS without explicitly pruning is a data protection violation

i would expect the same to be true for most of the EU

my suggestion would be to move members.json outside the git onto a special folder and consider pruning the git

now I wonder if that applies to a thing incorporated in delaware

question is, where would that folder be hosted?

we don’t have non-revisioned storage which can be accessed by non-admins

on our infrastrucutre?

probably, but that shouldn't be an issue

the wiki has revisions, all git has revisions. and I don’t know of any other systems where we could give individuals outside iteam +w

it currently *is* an issue

yes, currently

pruning that from git is gonna be fun

which brings me back to the question: "where would that folder be hosted?"

and "on our infrastructure" is not a satisfactory answer to t hat

kitchen, for real now

if I only knew why it isn't an satisfactory answer, then I would be glad to make it one

I guess because of "I don’t know of any other systems where we could give individuals outside iteam +w"

There could be an upload folder thingy created for the secretary to update

is it impossible to get the xsf secretary an account?

flow, then you still need to make the file available to the build process. and, no, I’m not happy with passing around even restricted shell accounts as long as we don’t even have a central user account management on the servers.

flow, so, SSH is out of the question for now, and then the question is: what service would host that folder, who would maintain that service, and how would we handle access control for people with +w to that folder as well as the build process which needs +r

sorry, much of this was obvious from my perspective, but I can see how it might not be for everyone

as much as I really like a central user management, i think I wouldn't block on that

and i do not see an issue giving the xsf secretary an account allowing ssh

What about.. storing encrypted members.json in git instead :x

same issue wrt build process i'd guess

hmm not so much different indeed.

xep50 § 3.5.1 "Responders SHOULD consider any <x type='cancel'/> to be <x type='submit'/>." what does is that supposed to mean? I appears that xep50 does not use form type 'cancel' anywhere (at least i could not find it)