[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Egbert Eich]

Hi Alan!

Alan Coopersmith writes:
 > Beyond Dave's questions, here's an even simpler one to illustrate how
 > far disconnected the board is:
 > 
 >    How is a community member/developer supposed to contact the board
 >    if they have a concern or want travel sponsorship?
 > 
 > There is no mention of the Board at all on www.x.org, and if you search
 > wiki.x.org you can find the Board meeting attendance lists in the meeting
 > summaries, but other than googling each board member's name and hoping you
 > can find their e-mails, how would they contact the board?   No contact
 > information is given anywhere that I could find.   (We struggled with this
 > a few months ago when trying to give one of the SoC students the board
 > contact to get funding for him to travel to DDC to meet the X development
 > community and had a very hard time doing so.)

The list of Board Members is available on the XorgFoundation page.
However I've now created a separate page on the BordOfDirectors and 
included links to the BoardMeetingsSummary page (which I have renamed 
from BoardMinutes as the term 'minutes' may have some legal implication 
according to our secretary).

Please check:
       http://wiki.x.org/BoardOfDirectors

I cannot include the email address of the board in this page
without the consent of the remaining Board Members. So you will
have to wait.

Some board members may not want to publish their email address
on the net these days. I personally don't care as mine is easy
to find and every spammer of this world knows it already.

On the other hand the board needs to be approachable. The address
needs to be published and the list needs to allow posting.

Currently it's moderated so if you send a message you will get
an auto reply saying that the message is held for moderation.

Sending a receipt on messages posted by non-subscribers may not
be a wrong thing to do, however the wording should be less confusing.
Moderation requires manual intervention and may hold off urgent
messages when the moderator is not available.
I myself would trust good spam filtering - which we already do.

 > 
 > > 4) These seems to be a major disconnect between the X.org and
 > > freedesktop.org organisations (particularly around security
 > > releases...), at times it seems like the board forgets that we have
 > > freedesktop.org hosting a lot of our services and goes and does things
 > > itself which usually would be much quicker done with fd.o support,
 > 
 > Why is it we have separate sets of mailman lists on lists.x.org and on
 > www.x.org?   Can't the board even use existing services run by our own
 > community members on machines with X.org domain names?
 > 

lists.x.org was created at a time when x.org was still hosted by 
The Open Group. On TOG's system it was difficult for community
members to set up a mailing list as there was only a single point 
of contact to TOG.
Since last November the Foundation handles all its services
which include hosting - but also banking and accounting - itself.

expo.x.org only handles the Foundation mailing lists. At some point
the Board felt that these lists should be held on a system that's
owned and under the control of the Foundation.

Cheers,
	Egbert.