Summary of decision at today's FAmSCo meeting: Inactive Ambassadors

[David Nalley]

As you'll see in the forthcoming meeting minutes, FAmSCo voted on dealing with
inactive Ambassadors in this weeks meeting. There were other discussions that occurred at
the FAmSCo meeting, but not decision was made, this summary is limited to how FAmSCo voted
to handle inactive Ambassadors. 

You may recall that over the years that this discussion has regularly popped up on the
Fedora list. One of the problems that was consistently faced, in those discussions was a
means of determining whether an Ambassador was active or not. It was often hard to tell
what was going on in the regional or local space, and the large variety of ways of being
active within the scope of the Ambassadors subproject.. An arbitrary standard that could
be applied to all fairly was a missing piece. There have also been attempts in multiple
regions to confirm whether an Ambassador is active by sending them an email and asking
them to respond, these met with what can at best be described as marginal success. For
better or worse, that has left us with no good way to regularly maintain membership like
other subprojects such as Art and Package Maintainers have in place. 

Recently however Fedora's Infrastructure team forced a password reset to mitigate a
security vulnerability. This involved sending out numerous emails notifiying and reminding
people of the fact that this password reset was mandatory and failure to act would result
in their Fedora account being marked inactive and thus unusable unless a password reset
occurred. This effectively meant that all Fedora services (Talk, wiki edits, cvs,
fedorahosted, etc) were unavailable to people who chose to ignore the repeated directions.


This provided us with an ideal arbitrary, test that was easy to apply to everyone, and
provides something far more manageable than "I'm here" messages. 

To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, we asked Infrastructure to tell us how
many Ambassador accounts were marked inactive. Out of 772 Ambassadors 300 of them were
marked inactive. I was honestly shocked it was that high, but really given that we are 3
years into this project it doesn't surprise me that this is the case. It is natural in
any project for people to leave or become disinterested.

FAmSCo voted on the following proposal in its regularly scheduled meeting this week: 

That FAmSCo direct the Ambassador Membership Service to request from Infrastructure a list
of all users who are Ambassadors and whose account has remained inactive for a period of
greater than 30 days after a password reset, and further that FAmSCo direct the Membership
Service to purge said users from the Ambassadors list

At the time 5 members of FAmSCo were present, and 5 +1's were recorded, and thus the
proposal passed. 

FAmSCo realizes this is a topic that has and will likely continue to cause much
consternation. So I'll note a few points. This in no way stops a person from
re-applying to the Ambassadors should they find themselves purged under this policy. I
fully expect that no one who reads this will be hindered by this policy as it is still
possible to reset your password and thus change your account to an active state. (go here
to do that: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/login) 

In all honesty there was discussion that we should wait on Infrastructure and let them do
the purging. (Infrastructure has indicated to FAmSCo that in the coming months they will
be removing all groups from a Fedora Account that is inactive in order to truly mitigate
the security risk.) As easy as that would have been to do, global policy for the
Ambassadors project is the responsibility of FAmSCo and we won't shirk that duty. 

I am sure there will be a flurry of questions and comments about this policy. I encourage
you to post to this thread or another on the mailing list. That said please feel free to
contact me or any member of FAmSCo directly via email or find us on IRC. 



David Nalley

[Mathieu Bridon]

>  FAmSCo voted on the following proposal in its regularly scheduled
> meeting
>  this week:
>  That FAmSCo direct the Ambassador Membership Service to request from
>  Infrastructure a list of all users who are Ambassadors and whose account has
>  remained inactive for a period of greater than 30 days after a password
>  reset, and further that FAmSCo direct the Membership Service to purge said
>  users from the Ambassadors list 
Concretely, on what day will this 30 days grace period expire ?

Can we have the list of those 300 inactive ambassadors accounts ?

This might give us (active ones) a chance to contact the ones we know
for sure are active but missed the password reset request importance
(I know at least one person in this case).

Regards,


----------

Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)

[Rangeen Basu]

>  Concretely, on what day will this 30 days grace period expire ?
>  Can we have the list of those 300 inactive ambassadors accounts ?
>
>  This might give us (active ones) a chance to contact the ones we know
>  for sure are active but missed the password reset request importance
>  (I know at least one person in this case).
>  
I think I missed the mail too. I am sure I did not do any reset but
fortunately(or unfortunately) my account is still active.

Can someone point to the mail in the archive please. It would be of great help.

Regards
-- 
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury
Fedora Ambassador
sherry151(a)gmail.com

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Freitag, den 27.03.2009, 14:58 +0530 schrieb Rangeen Basu:

>  Can someone point to the mail in the archive please. It would be of
> great help. 
No we can't, because that mail was not sent to the list but to you in
private.

>  Regards 
Regards,
Christoph

[Ewan Luca]

>  > Can someone point to the mail in the archive please. It would be
> of great
>  help.
>
>  No we can't, because that mail was not sent to the list but to you in
>  private.
>  
So if I didn't receive a "reset your password" mail means that I wasn't
sent
one?

[David Nalley]

2009/3/27 Ewan Luca <ewanluca(a)gmail.com&gt;:
> > > Can someone point to the mail in the archive please. It would be of
> > > great help.
> >
> > No we can't, because that mail was not sent to the list but to you in
> > private.
>
>  So if I didn't receive a "reset your password" mail means that I wasn't
> sent
>  one?
>
>  --
>  Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
>  Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>
>  
I personally received three notifications of this issue.
To be safe, you should login to FAS and confirm it.
The only situation that I can imagine you not receiving a notification
is if you no longer had access to the email listed in your FAS
account.

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Freitag, den 27.03.2009, 12:05 +0200 schrieb Ewan Luca:
>  
>          > Can someone point to the mail in the archive please. It
>          would be of great help.
>          
>          
>          No we can't, because that mail was not sent to the list but to
>          you in
>          private.
>  
>  So if I didn't receive a "reset your password" mail means that I
>  wasn't sent one? 
It most likely means you are no longer checking the email you entered in
your FAS account.

Regards,
Christoph

[Kushal Das]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)
<bochecha(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
>  Concretely, on what day will this 30 days grace period expire ?
>
>  Can we have the list of those 300 inactive ambassadors accounts ?
>
>  This might give us (active ones) a chance to contact the ones we know
>  for sure are active but missed the password reset request importance
>  (I know at least one person in this case). 
Most of the time I found people reply in this situation and again they
forget about their responsibility.  But still we love to try :)

Kusha
-- 
http://fedoraproject.org
http://kushaldas.in

[David Nalley]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 5:20 AM, Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)
<bochecha(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
> > FAmSCo voted on the following proposal in its regularly scheduled
> meeting
> > this week:
> > That FAmSCo direct the Ambassador Membership Service to request from
> > Infrastructure a list of all users who are Ambassadors and whose account has
> > remained inactive for a period of greater than 30 days after a password
> > reset, and further that FAmSCo direct the Membership Service to purge said
> > users from the Ambassadors list
>
>  Concretely, on what day will this 30 days grace period expire ? 
Accounts were rendered inactive on March 6th, so by my count that
makes April 5th the deadline.


>  Can we have the list of those 300 inactive ambassadors accounts ? 
I'll ask infrastructure - there may be privacy policy issues
surrounding this request.

>  This might give us (active ones) a chance to contact the ones we know
>  for sure are active but missed the password reset request importance
>  (I know at least one person in this case). 

I'll try and get an answer on this shortly.