[H-GEN] My nomination for President

[Raymond Smith]

2009/8/13 Robert Brockway <robert at timetraveller.org>:
> On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Russell Stuart wrote:
>> The principle reason is I would like to see the club run a little more
>> openly than it has been in the past.  To achieve that I want to change a
>> few things:
>
> Overall I like your proposal.  Some comments follow.
>
>> 1.  Currently we have a number of private lists, such as the Exec list.
>> We also have some "secret" lists, such as the SysAdmin list.  These are
>> lists only a select few members know about, and even less are invited to
>> join. To me this seems a very odd way of running a club that champions
>> open source, as it is anything but open.  It also seems to be counter
>> productive, as in people who might like to help out in these tasks
>> aren't aware they can.
>
> Fair point.   I'm not sure the sysadmin list is really closed or secret. We
> just put the sysadmins and exec on it and left it at that.  It didn't really
> occur to me to advertise it.   I wouldn't object to the list being open.

I strongly agree on this point. sysadmin@ has existed for a very long time,
at least as long as I was on the executive committee and probably longer
than that. It has never been a "secret", although perhaps it has not been
sufficiently advertised over the years. It has certainly not been a "cabal" of
secret plots and decision making, it has been a way to get email out to all
of the system administrators and to provide an alias for tools like RT, etc.

In an effort to demystify these mailing lists, I have updated the Wiki to
included exec@ and sysadmin@ as email contacts for the club.

I have no objection to making exec@ and sysadmin@ viewable by the public.

I do think that the subscribers should be limited to the people voted in by the
club or appointed by the executive. This preserves the useful property of the
existing aliases: namely if I want to address all the sysadmins or all the
executive then I can do so by emailing that list and I know that all the
recipients are in fact elected members of the exec, or appointed system
administrators. Furthermore, I can reasonably hold these people to getting
me a response (after all they accepted being subscribed to the list did they
not?).

Cheers,

Raymond