Of Mailing Lists and Transparency

[Eran Hammer-Lahav]

This is a quick update but important in order to keep our promise of
transparency and openness.

The initial group that came together to create the OWF used a private
list to brainstorm and get ready for the announcement at OSCON. There
is little of information in the archives of that initial list. We have
decided to keep it private because people posted messages there under
the assumption that it will remain private and a lot of the
discussions were personal in nature (such as who to invite and what
some people think of other individuals).

That initial list has been mostly inactive since the creation of this
public list and it is now archived and closed. The only meaningful
decisions made on that list were choosing a name, domain name, logo,
when to launch the initiative, the web site, and the creation of this
public list. If you have questions or ideas about any of these topics,
'open-web-discuss' is the place to discuss them.

The intention is for 'open-web-discuss' to function as the main
gathering place and decision making forum for the foundation. However,
as David noted in his post a few weeks back, we have published a set
of criteria for the seed members and posted a list of 9 names we feel
are a good place to start. That post is still open for discussion if
anyone has any feedback. This initial seem membership is meant to work
on the initial tasks of registration and bylaws as well as to elect
additional members and a board.

The membership needs a way to coordinate meetings and deal with other
logistics that are of no interest to this wider group. For actual
discussions, the membership will use this 'open-web-discuss' list. To
help with the logistics we have created another list called 'open-web-
members' which can be found here: http://groups.google.com/group/open-web-members.
The list is open for anyone to read but posting is only permitted to
the list of seed members.

If you are reading this post, you are in the right place for all OWF
matters. Please do not send emails asking to join the 'open-web-
members' list because it is not used for any discussions other than
setting meetings and tracing logistics. You are invited to monitor it
and if you see something that doesn't qualify for such narrow
objectives, raise a hand.

As always, this post itself is open for discussion and debate...

EHL