[pydotorg-www] [PSF-Members] Valuing Volunteers (was Re: A new membership model for the PSF (long))

[Chris Withers]

On 04/04/2013 19:59, Jesse Noller wrote:
>
>
> You're perfectly right - I should have pushed out the announcement to more lists. As it is, I got overloaded and failed to do so due to pycon, public relations issues, board work, changing jobs, work, and a raft of other things.
>
> I'll take full responsibility for not emailing the lists, and thank you for the work you have done.

I'll prefix this with: I don't believe there was any malicious intent in 
this, I hope the process was purely an attempt at preventing bike 
shedding...

That said, I remember finding the initial process extremely frustrating, 
whereby we (current site maintainers) would ask a question or make a 
comment on the proposed new design (in fact, I believe this may have 
been the tendering process) and get nothing back but a blank "thankyou 
for your feedback" from Jesse.

I'll again say that I hope that was with the best of intentions, but it 
was pretty infuriating that the time; nothing says "f*&( you" quite like 
feeling totally excluded from a process, when you've put a fair amount 
of work into maintaining a site. I can only give my perspective here, 
but I suspect that is the start of where Aahz is coming from...

...wind on to implementation. Again, I will prefix this with: I trust 
Jacob wholeheartedly and believe he will likely go way beyond what he's 
being paid to do. But...

I only found out about the progress when I noticed a mail referring to 
preview.python.org and mailed Jacob directly to ask about the interface 
for the job board, by then it felt like a bit of a done deal...
(for the job board, it turns out its not, for which feel very relieved :-)

What might have left the maintainers feeling more engaged would have 
been some combination of 'svn log', 'grep -v chrisw', 'sort -u' to see 
who the most common maintainers were and reaching out to them directly. 
Likewise, maybe a grep of the archives of the pydotorg-www list (I'm 
thinking of all the work Michael Foord does for planet.python.org, dunno 
if that's affected by the site rebuild, and Aahz did with the job board 
pre-screening).

That said, I don't know how much effort would be perceived in engaging 
with the guys who do the current work, and I don't know where to look to 
see if that was considered. (Transparency is tough with Foundations and 
the like, I know...)

Anyway, this is all water under the bridge, we are where we are and I'll 
be sorry to see Aahz go. Aahz, what could happen to change your mind?

cheers,

Chris

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