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