proposal for the board: planet fedora != fedora people

[Máirín Duffy]

On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 14:00 -0700, Robyn Bergeron wrote:
> I think it's overkill - but that's just my opinion, of course.  What
> is our percentage rate or rate of "incidents?"  If we were having one
> a day, or one a week, I think that would be one thing.  And despite
> any guidelines we have, or boxes people need to check - mistakes will
> be made, and I'd venture to guess those mistakes would occur at
> approximately the same rate that "incidents" currently do. 

Sure, but the problem with letting things be / the status quo is that we
have no system or procedure in place to handle the mistakes. And when
someone posts something to planet, it's up for all the world to see
pretty much in minutes. In some cases, say, the one where Ms. Liu's
assets were splayed for all to see.... you really want to get that
content down as soon as you can. 

- Personally writing the person (who may be in another timezone and
asleep by the time you write them) and pursuing the issue that way won't
necessarily resolve the problem in a timely manner.

- Taking it to the Board seems overkill, and a potential waste of their
time.

- Approaching one of our awesome sysadmins and asking them to take it
down is problematic as well, because they have no guidelines against
which to make a judgment call.

In the case of Ms. Liu and her bikini, that incident actually happened
during FUDcon Toronto so IIRC we talked to Smooge & Mike about taking it
down, and they said they didn't feel comfortable making the judgment
call and would rather a Board OK to do it, so I talked to Paul and some
other board members and got an okay. It took maybe 45 minutes from
spotting it to getting it delisted - in-person. It might take hours
remotely.

> Worse, the
> mistake would probably be made more often such that people would
> forget to tag really good content with the Fedora tag.  So what do we
> gain? We have a main page, per the original proposal, that has far
> less content, probably content missed because people aren't
> remembering to tag things, and a separate page highlighting non-Fedora
> things that community members are writing about - some of which are
> VERY interesting, and really, make us feel more like a community than
> a bunch of Fedora-writing-robots- which just winds up getting not read
> anywhere near as much as they would as if, say, things stayed as they
> are currently?

Honestly, I'd rather have a planet Fedora where I can read about planet
Fedora, and maintain my own blog roll of people I care about to read
their full feed in my RSS reader. Then I could read Nicu's full feed
more easily. Yes, we are people not robots, but how does having a feed
100% relevant to Fedora make us any less people or any more robots?
Especially if we offer an easy link to the full thing?

Can you see how being a new Fedora user and going to planet Fedora could
be overwhelming and confusing? IRC channels degrade to this level easily
as well. I remember when I first heard about the linuxchix IRC channels
I went in there to hang out, but I was completely turned off because it
seemed to be more of a social clique talking about people and
relationships and events I had no clue about rather than a bunch of
women talking about Linux and how to get more women involved in Linux.
In fact, bringing up the topic of Linux had seemed to irritate people. 

Obviously Planet Fedora hasn't gotten that bad but when things come off
like a clique it can also definitely turn people off.

~m