[fedora-india] Fwd: [Ambassadors] Summary of decision at today's FAmSCo meeting: Inactive Ambassadors

[susmit shannigrahi]

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

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