SVG working group mailing lists

Hello all,

As the working group gets running again with different administration,
there seems to be confusion about all the different SVG-related W3C mailing
lists.

This is the purpose of the mailing lists as I understand them:

   - www-svg <https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/> is the public
   list for discussing anything related to SVG standardization; anyone can
   sign up, and anyone can post, but we now encourage most discussion of
   specific proposals/spec issues to happen via GitHub issues
   <https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues>, so this list is more for
   meta-discussion and planning.

   - public-svg-issues
   <https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-svg-issues/> is a mailing
   list that sends out notifications for all GitHub issue discussion, to
   create a permanent W3C-hosted archive of the GitHub discussion; I think
   anyone can subscribe to it (as an alternative to watching the GitHub repo),
   but it's not for posting.

   - public-svg-wg <https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-svg-wg/> is
   a publicly visible mailing list for discussing working group-specific
   business. It should be used for discussing scheduling and administrative
   details that wouldn't normally be of interest to people not active in the
   working group (but it's still publicly visible, because the SVG working
   group is supposed to work in public).  It should not be used for anything
   about SVG itself (use GitHub or www-svg), or for anything that is
   confidential.

   - team-svg is a new-to-me list; I think it goes to the chairs and staff
   contacts, but if anyone else sends a message to this address they get a
   bounce warning about not being subscribed & their sent email being held for
   moderation.  (I like the idea of having a single point of contact for the
   chair(s) and staff contacts, but it would be nice to suppress that warning
   email.)  I don't know if the archived list is available to other W3C
   members; it's certainly not visible to me.

   - Liam mentioned on the call last week that he was going to look into
   setting up a private mailing list that would be visible to all participants
   of the working group (including Invited Experts), for doing things like
   sending out WebEx passwords or other confidential contact information.

According to the charter
<https://www.w3.org/2017/04/svg-2017.html#communication>, www-svg and
GitHub should be the primary means of all group work.

Minutes for teleconferences should be made public, and following practice
that means that a notice with a link to the minutes is sent to www-svg.  In
past we've also copied the text-formatted minutes into the body of the
email, to make it easier to find in the mailing list archive. I don't know
if that's as important now.  I think we're set up to use the new GitHub bot
<https://github.com/dbaron/wgmeeting-github-ircbot/blob/master/README.md>
to copy relevant sections of minutes into GitHub issues, which provides a
more useful record than the email archive. (We'll need to test it out next
time we actually discuss a specific issue.)

I'd also recommend sending out announcements of future telcons and requests
for agenda items to www-svg, so members of the public can know when it's
important to get their comments in before a discussion.

More mundane scheduling discussion and "regrets" should probably be sent to
public-svg-wg.  This means that telcon announcements should probably be
sent to *both* lists, so that you can reply to either depending on whether
it is a substantive matter about the agenda (www-svg) or a scheduling and
logistics matter (public-svg-wg).

Private mailing lists should only be used when absolutely required.

Of course, I expect that we'll all mess this up from time to time, and send
things to the wrong list. But it helps if we start with agreed-upon
definitions of what each list is for!

Any concerns with the definitions and divisions I've given here?

~Amelia

Received on Wednesday, 13 December 2017 19:45:49 UTC