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@mozilla.org email addresses for Mozilla Reps

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Benjamin Kerensa

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Oct 25, 2013, 12:31:44 AM10/25/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
Hello Governance,

I'm writing today to put forward the following proposal for @mozilla.org
email addresses for Mozilla Reps as outlined here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mrz/mozilla-org

Additionally, I would like to highlight the following policy that the
ReMo Council has put together in regards to email addresses for ReMo:
https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/email-policy

These proposals and proposed policies have been the work of both
community contributors and staff and I think adding email addresses as a
tool for contributors would be beneficial and add authenticity to
discussions community contributors often have with third parties
including universities, media and developers they engage with in order
to further the goals of Mozilla.

Many other open source projects already have practices of doing this
(Ubuntu: @ubuntu.com, Debian: @debian.org, GNOME: @gnome.org and so on).

Let's start a discussion on this and see where it goes!

--
Sincerly,

Benjamin Kerensa
http://benjaminkerensa.com

Majken Connor

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Oct 25, 2013, 1:44:09 AM10/25/13
to Benjamin Kerensa, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
I am not comfortable with the idea that there would be a screening process
within the Reps program to get the address. Reps are already screened for
leadership and commitment.

"Any Mozilla Rep can request a @mozilla.org and each request must go
through a rigorous vouching process overseen by the Mozilla Reps Council,
based on the following criteria." - There is no criteria following this
statement, the criteria are listed in the etherpad linked further down
https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/email-attribution-criteria

I would personally like to see more meat in the section of why give people
email addresses. If it's just to give volunteers more credibility then
either we should give it to all volunteers, or we should determine which
volunteers will benefit from that increased credibility and especially how
Mozilla as an organization would benefit from giving volunteers more
credibility and what we would want volunteers to do with that credibility.


On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 12:31 AM, Benjamin Kerensa
<bker...@mozillausa.org>wrote:

> Hello Governance,
>
> I'm writing today to put forward the following proposal for @mozilla.orgemail addresses for Mozilla Reps as outlined here:
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:**Mrz/mozilla-org<https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mrz/mozilla-org>
>
> Additionally, I would like to highlight the following policy that the ReMo
> Council has put together in regards to email addresses for ReMo:
> https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.**org/email-policy<https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/email-policy>
>
> These proposals and proposed policies have been the work of both community
> contributors and staff and I think adding email addresses as a tool for
> contributors would be beneficial and add authenticity to discussions
> community contributors often have with third parties including
> universities, media and developers they engage with in order to further the
> goals of Mozilla.
>
> Many other open source projects already have practices of doing this
> (Ubuntu: @ubuntu.com, Debian: @debian.org, GNOME: @gnome.org and so on).
>
> Let's start a discussion on this and see where it goes!
>
> --
> Sincerly,
>
> Benjamin Kerensa
> http://benjaminkerensa.com
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/**listinfo/governance<https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance>
>

Axel Hecht

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Oct 25, 2013, 4:33:30 AM10/25/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I like the idea of revisiting what a @mozilla.org email address means
today, and I think that outstanding longtime leadership is probably best
matching what it is today, and what it could mean if we handed out new ones.

I'd not waive that requirements for paid contributors, though. I'd also
wouldn't restrict it to reps for non-paid contributors.

Technically, I'd ask for a revocation policy to be included. And we'd
probably need at least best-practices on what usernames to use. The
current list is very much nick-names, is that good? Do we need to care?

Axel

Gervase Markham

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Oct 25, 2013, 8:16:24 AM10/25/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Hi Ben,
On 25/10/13 05:31, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> I'm writing today to put forward the following proposal for @mozilla.org
> email addresses for Mozilla Reps as outlined here:
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mrz/mozilla-org

You specifically mention Mozilla Reps, but that document says:

"To best reflect Mozilla's purpose as a non-profit mission first,
paid-staff will also have @mozilla.org email addresses."

Is that still part of the plan?

I agree with Majken that if we are making people Reps who aren't capable
of representing Mozilla, at least at the level of having an email
address, then something has gone wrong. Can you explain more why you
feel that an additional vetting step is needed?

Also, not everyone can or wants to become a rep. Can you expand on why
you feel we should tie this to the Reps program particularly?

At the moment, a discussion is going on about how we can create a set of
trusted people who can take part in Mozilla-internal discussions on
topics that we don't yet want shared with the press. It seems like the
problem of who gets @mozilla.org email addresses is a similar problem.
Perhaps the two could be combined? We need to have a big effort to
figure out how to define this group, and then give them both the email
addresses and the internal forum access.

Gerv

Mike Hoye

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Oct 25, 2013, 10:16:41 AM10/25/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
On 2013-10-25 1:16 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> You specifically mention Mozilla Reps, but that document says: "To
> best reflect Mozilla's purpose as a non-profit mission first,
> paid-staff will also have @mozilla.org email addresses." Is that still
> part of the plan?
A casual survey of the last two hundred hires or so should answer that
for sure, but for what it's worth I - hired at the beginning of this
year - don't have a .org address.

- mhoye

:mrz

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Oct 25, 2013, 11:29:34 AM10/25/13
to
On Friday, October 25, 2013 7:16:41 AM UTC-7, Mike Hoye wrote:
> A casual survey of the last two hundred hires or so should answer that
> for sure, but for what it's worth I - hired at the beginning of this
> year - don't have a .org address.

To be expected - this proposed policy isn't in effect. The goal is to discuss and approve and then backfill addresses (or something - I specifically avoided implementation details).

:mrz

unread,
Oct 25, 2013, 11:40:10 AM10/25/13
to

> I agree with Majken that if we are making people Reps who aren't capable
> of representing Mozilla, at least at the level of having an email
> address, then something has gone wrong. Can you explain more why you
> feel that an additional vetting step is needed?

You know, it was discussed but I really can't recall the rationale anymore.

I think, however, the line comes more closely to whether or not an individual is an active contributor or not. I believe Reps - by definition of the program - are active contributors. Paid-staff too.

If I try to recall my own thinking from way back when, I think that's why I included Reps + paid-staff by default.

I also agree there's a revocation process but I'm less clear on how you determine someone's no longer active.

David Ascher

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Oct 25, 2013, 11:51:16 AM10/25/13
to :mrz, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
Email addresses that die are a lot less useful than email addresses that never die. I understand the desire to not have people misrepresent their level of affiliation with Mozilla, but I don’t believe technology or policy can solve that problem. Tying an address to “currently active” also means lots of headaches when dealing with contributors whose involvement is periodic, seasonal, or whatnot.

Was there consideration of a possible “once a mozillian, always a mozillian” attitude with respect to email addresses, modulo exceptions for egregious improper use? I for one would not begrudge previously-active mozillians who might still want to use their mozilla.org address if they’re proud that they earned one once upon a time.

—david

Sheeri Cabral

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Oct 25, 2013, 11:58:41 AM10/25/13
to David Ascher, :mrz, gover...@lists.mozilla.org

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ascher" <d...@mozilla.com>
Subject: Re: @mozilla.org email addresses for Mozilla Reps

Was there consideration of a possible “once a mozillian, always a mozillian” attitude with respect to email addresses, modulo exceptions for egregious improper use? I for one would not begrudge previously-active mozillians who might still want to use their mozilla.org address if they’re proud that they earned one once upon a time.

—david


I'm all for this, too, if there's a clear directive and support for this infrastructure. Giving out an e-mail address is a great badge of honor, but even uses that are "routine" like sending out a large attachment to many people, can end up affecting all Mozilla e-mail. Are we backing up community members' emails too? If so, that's more resources and time spent by IT; if not, and there's a problem, we end up with a lot of unhappy Mozillians.

The summit was 1/3 employees, 2/3 community members. If we give emails to everyone who made the cut for the summit, that would triple our current email infrastructure. Are we prepared to spend more time on the e-mail infrastructure to wrangle this influx?

-Sheeri Cabral
Manager, Systems DB Team
Senior DB Admin/Architect
Mozilla

David Ascher

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Oct 25, 2013, 11:59:39 AM10/25/13
to Sheeri Cabral, :mrz, gover...@lists.mozilla.org

On Oct 25, 2013, at 4:58 PM, Sheeri Cabral <sca...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> I'm all for this, too, if there's a clear directive and support for this infrastructure. Giving out an e-mail address is a great badge of honor, but even uses that are "routine" like sending out a large attachment to many people, can end up affecting all Mozilla e-mail. Are we backing up community members' emails too? If so, that's more resources and time spent by IT; if not, and there's a problem, we end up with a lot of unhappy Mozillians.

Sure. FYI, I’m thinking of the kinds of systems that e.g. US universities employ for alums. This stuff could easily be outsourced.

—da


Nikos Roussos

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Oct 25, 2013, 12:05:42 PM10/25/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
On Fri, 2013-10-25 at 08:40 -0700, :mrz wrote:
> I also agree there's a revocation process but I'm less clear on how you determine someone's no longer active.

I think David is right. Let's not try to over-complicate things. It's
better to have a well-defined policy on who gets a @mozilla.org alias
and keeps it forever (unless of course cases of abuse), than the other
way around.

Although I agree in principle with the "why only employees and reps?"
argument I think we should consider this as a try out phase. See how
that goes and how we can expand this to all active contributors.
Hopefully by that time we'll have a way to reliable determine if a
person is an active contributor.

~nikos
https://mozillians.org/u/comzeradd/


Myk Melez

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Oct 25, 2013, 12:20:28 PM10/25/13
to David Ascher, Sheeri Cabral, mrz, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
Note that @mozilla.org addresses are currently email aliases
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_alias>, which means Mozilla
transfers mail to and from them but doesn't store the mail. That still
costs resources and time, but much less than if it were to also store
the mail, as it does for @mozilla.com addresses.

-myk

William Quiviger

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Oct 25, 2013, 12:31:47 PM10/25/13
to Nikos Roussos, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
To Nikos' point:

Yes, the rationale was precisely to have a phased approach and start distributing @mozilla.org to staff and Reps only, see how that it went and then include everyone once we were confident about the process.

So the aim was always to eventually distribute @mozilla.org to *all* Mozillians.

- w

---
William Quiviger
Mozilla Reps Council Member
https://reps.mozilla.org/u/wquiviger/


On Oct 25, 2013, at 6:05 PM, Nikos Roussos <comz...@mozilla-community.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 2013-10-25 at 08:40 -0700, :mrz wrote:
>> I also agree there's a revocation process but I'm less clear on how you determine someone's no longer active.
>
> I think David is right. Let's not try to over-complicate things. It's
> better to have a well-defined policy on who gets a @mozilla.org alias
> and keeps it forever (unless of course cases of abuse), than the other
> way around.
>
> Although I agree in principle with the "why only employees and reps?"
> argument I think we should consider this as a try out phase. See how
> that goes and how we can expand this to all active contributors.
> Hopefully by that time we'll have a way to reliable determine if a
> person is an active contributor.
>
> ~nikos
> https://mozillians.org/u/comzeradd/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance

cshi...@mozilla.com

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Oct 25, 2013, 12:37:56 PM10/25/13
to
On Friday, October 25, 2013 11:59:39 AM UTC-4, David Ascher wrote:
> Sure. FYI, I’m thinking of the kinds of systems that e.g. US universities employ for alums. This stuff could easily be outsourced.

There is still a cost involved.. This discussion should include the "at what cost are we willing to provide this service?" question as well. We can work backward from there and figure out if there is a way to make it fit. Also whose budget that would come from.

Fred Wenzel

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Oct 25, 2013, 12:56:14 PM10/25/13
to Myk Melez, David Ascher, Sheeri Cabral, mrz, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
On 10/25/13 9:20 AM, Myk Melez wrote:
> Note that @mozilla.org addresses are currently email aliases

I actually think that's a plus. Neither employees nor other community
members really need another full blown IMAP account, I'd imagine. An
alias should suffice. Though sending outgoing mail with the right From:
can be challenging depending on what primary provider you work with.

Fred


Benjamin Kerensa

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Oct 25, 2013, 1:03:09 PM10/25/13
to Corey Shields, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
If we just did aliases the cost would be almost nothing. Most mail
providers support treating aliases like a new address.

cshi...@mozilla.com

unread,
Oct 25, 2013, 1:14:57 PM10/25/13
to
On Friday, October 25, 2013 1:03:09 PM UTC-4, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> If we just did aliases the cost would be almost nothing. Most mail
> providers support treating aliases like a new address.

In our current setup it actually is a bit more involved. We still have some one-off accounts going back to the early days that aren't just aliases, those that are aliases still go through a spam filter that we pay for (per account), and mail that comes in to be relayed to a forwarded destination still traverses infrastructure that has to scale to meet demand unless we were to point MX for all of @mozilla.org to some outsourced entity. Unfortunately, the cost is far from nothing.

I'm not trying to shoot this down, I want to make sure that we all are aware that this can quickly become a significant investment, and then how do we scale it to the vision that Mitchell gave us for our contributor base in the years to come?

:mrz

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Oct 25, 2013, 1:20:18 PM10/25/13
to
Yes, while I ignored the implementation in the original draft (co-drafted with Reps and finalized at the Madrid meeting... need to give credit where it's due), I did imagine simple email aliases vs. hosted mail accounts.

In fact, I imagined a system largely driven via mozillians.org that would generate /etc/aliases or trigger API calls to some mail provider. Whatever vouching process would be the trigger and users could self-manage destination addresses for their @mozilla.org address.

I do like the "once a Mozillian, always a Mozillian" - the current list of @mozilla.org addresses certainly reflects that.

Monica Chew

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Oct 25, 2013, 1:30:04 PM10/25/13
to Benjamin Kerensa, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
Hi Benjamin,

I think it's a wonderful idea to give Reps and other contributors email addresses. Can I suggest mozillians.org instead of mozilla.org, though? mozilla.org is not sufficiently distinguishable from mozilla.com to avoid confusing paid staff from not, and Mozillian has the benefit of sounding like a person-descriptor.

I should also point out that in the future, it may become very important to be able to distinguish official email from Mozilla as a project, versus someone who is affiliated with Mozilla (as paid staff or not). Anti-phishing standards such as DMARC are much easier to adopt when an organization can separate mail by function into different domains. Widening the mozilla.{org,com} namespace makes this problem worse.

Thanks,
Monica

----- Original Message -----
> Hello Governance,
>
> I'm writing today to put forward the following proposal for @mozilla.org
> email addresses for Mozilla Reps as outlined here:
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mrz/mozilla-org
>
> Additionally, I would like to highlight the following policy that the
> ReMo Council has put together in regards to email addresses for ReMo:
> https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/email-policy
>
> These proposals and proposed policies have been the work of both
> community contributors and staff and I think adding email addresses as a
> tool for contributors would be beneficial and add authenticity to
> discussions community contributors often have with third parties
> including universities, media and developers they engage with in order
> to further the goals of Mozilla.
>
> Many other open source projects already have practices of doing this
> (Ubuntu: @ubuntu.com, Debian: @debian.org, GNOME: @gnome.org and so on).
>
> Let's start a discussion on this and see where it goes!
>
> --
> Sincerly,
>
> Benjamin Kerensa
> http://benjaminkerensa.com
>

Rubén Martín

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Oct 25, 2013, 1:56:16 PM10/25/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
El 25/10/13 19:30, Monica Chew escribió:
> I think it's a wonderful idea to give Reps and other contributors email addresses. Can I suggest mozillians.org instead of mozilla.org, though? mozilla.org is not sufficiently distinguishable from mozilla.com to avoid confusing paid staff from not, and Mozillian has the benefit of sounding like a person-descriptor.
>
> I should also point out that in the future, it may become very important to be able to distinguish official email from Mozilla as a project, versus someone who is affiliated with Mozilla (as paid staff or not).
The thing is that there should be nearly no distinction between a paid
employee and a active contributor (except form being paid and some
NDAs), that's the point of this proposal, we are all mozilla and trusted
mozillians should have a way to get a @mozilla.org email.

My personal view is that, as Nikos said, right now it's easier to
identify trusted mozillians with the Reps program, but definetly the
idea is to expand this group over time as soon as we have the mechanisms
to check that trust easily outside that group.

Regards.

--
Rubén Martín [Nukeador]
Mozilla Reps Mentor
http://www.mozilla-hispano.org
http://twitter.com/mozilla_hispano
http://facebook.com/mozillahispano


signature.asc

Monica Chew

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Oct 25, 2013, 2:14:11 PM10/25/13
to Rubén Martín, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> > I should also point out that in the future, it may become very important to
> > be able to distinguish official email from Mozilla as a project, versus
> > someone who is affiliated with Mozilla (as paid staff or not).
> The thing is that there should be nearly no distinction between a paid
> employee and a active contributor (except form being paid and some
> NDAs), that's the point of this proposal, we are all mozilla and trusted
> mozillians should have a way to get a @mozilla.org email.

My bad, I took this requirement from the etherpad at https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/email-policy. My point was not to distinguish between paid staff and not, but to distinguish between mail from Mozilla the project and a Mozilla contributor. Thus, the recommendation to use mozillians.org or another domain that's easier to distinguish from mozilla.{com,org}.

Thanks,
Monica

Rubén Martín

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Oct 25, 2013, 4:37:44 PM10/25/13
to Monica Chew, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
El 25/10/13 20:14, Monica Chew escribió:
> My bad, I took this requirement from the etherpad at https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/email-policy. My point was not to distinguish between paid staff and not, but to distinguish between mail from Mozilla the project and a Mozilla contributor. Thus, the recommendation to use mozillians.org or another domain that's easier to distinguish from mozilla.{com,org}.
When you say "the project" you mean the Corporation?

Active Mozillians are part of the Mozilla Project, so the com vs org
difference should be enought to distinguish between paid and non-paid staff.

Apart from that, Mozilla Reps are already the official representatives
of Mozilla in their region, so I don't see any problem or misunderstandings.
signature.asc

Monica Chew

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Oct 25, 2013, 5:26:47 PM10/25/13
to Rubén Martín, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
----- Original Message -----
> El 25/10/13 20:14, Monica Chew escribió:
> > My bad, I took this requirement from the etherpad at
> > https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/email-policy. My point was not to
> > distinguish between paid staff and not, but to distinguish between mail
> > from Mozilla the project and a Mozilla contributor. Thus, the
> > recommendation to use mozillians.org or another domain that's easier to
> > distinguish from mozilla.{com,org}.
> When you say "the project" you mean the Corporation?

No, I don't. I mean there is a useful distinction between the follow 2 classes of mail:

1) Official email from Mozilla, the organization, for things like summit announcements, or service/product announcements.
2) Email from people affiliated with Mozilla.

It would be great announce to the world that all official Mozilla mail will authenticate from Mozilla, say, using DKIM, and that all unauthenticated mail claiming to be from Mozilla should be ignored. Because class 2) mail often goes through mailing lists, it has different characteristics and is very difficult to impose the same authentication requirements. See http://www.dmarc.org/overview.html for more information.

We already have these two classes conflated -- adding more addresses to a domain that typical users will find visually indistinguishable from mozilla.com, only makes this problem worse.

> Active Mozillians are part of the Mozilla Project, so the com vs org
> difference should be enought to distinguish between paid and non-paid staff.

Sorry, I'm confused. Are we supposed to distinguish between paid and non-paid staff, or not? If not, one should not have to remember whether someone is paid staff or not in order to reach them, nor should they have to change email addresses if their employment status changes. In a perfect world, I would suggest the following

1) Create aliases for all existing mozilla.com addresses to mozillians.org
2) Encourage existing mozilla.com users to use their mozillians.org address
3) Send only official mail from mozilla.com and authenticate it
4) Allocate addresses on mozillians.org at will, for whomever you want

In any case, I strongly discourage the decision to create addresses on mozilla.org, because typical users will not understand the difference between org and com and it will only lead to confusion (see, for example, going to http://mozilla.com redirects to mozilla.org).

Thanks,
Monica

David Weir

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Oct 25, 2013, 5:47:31 PM10/25/13
to Benjamin Kerensa, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
I think it should be all volunteers not just reps also


On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 5:31 AM, Benjamin Kerensa
<bker...@mozillausa.org>wrote:

> Hello Governance,
>
> I'm writing today to put forward the following proposal for @mozilla.orgemail addresses for Mozilla Reps as outlined here:
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:**Mrz/mozilla-org<https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mrz/mozilla-org>
>
> Additionally, I would like to highlight the following policy that the ReMo
> Council has put together in regards to email addresses for ReMo:
> https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.**org/email-policy<https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/email-policy>
>
> These proposals and proposed policies have been the work of both community
> contributors and staff and I think adding email addresses as a tool for
> contributors would be beneficial and add authenticity to discussions
> community contributors often have with third parties including
> universities, media and developers they engage with in order to further the
> goals of Mozilla.
>
> Many other open source projects already have practices of doing this
> (Ubuntu: @ubuntu.com, Debian: @debian.org, GNOME: @gnome.org and so on).
>
> Let's start a discussion on this and see where it goes!
>
> --
> Sincerly,
>
> Benjamin Kerensa
> http://benjaminkerensa.com
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/**listinfo/governance<https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance>
>

Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Oct 25, 2013, 6:44:28 PM10/25/13
to Corey Shields, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
I guess I would ask what the ROI is having hundreds of volunteers with a
more authentic communication channel.

I mean we have contributors right now using @gmail.com,
mozilla-peru.orgetc its fragmented.

Clearly other much smaller projects like GNOME saw value in such an
investment.

I think it brings us closer to "One Mozilla". Imagine that we have
contributors putting in part time hours on a volunteer basis and they do
not have an email address but a receptionist does?

David Ascher

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Oct 25, 2013, 7:23:51 PM10/25/13
to Corey Shields, gover...@lists.mozilla.org

On Oct 25, 2013, at 6:14 PM, cshi...@mozilla.com wrote:

> I'm not trying to shoot this down, I want to make sure that we all are aware that this can quickly become a significant investment, and then how do we scale it to the vision that Mitchell gave us for our contributor base in the years to come?

If we agree value in a @mozilla.org identity, I’m more than happy to build the business case for it. I had a board member suggest that he’d gladly cash pay as his contribution in exchange for an address that he could “wear proudly”.

I truly don’t believe that sourcing the money side should be a blocker to this conversation. US universities provide this service because it leads to donations that far outweigh the opex. We certainly shouldn’t be talking about whose budget it would come from at this point, although I understand your fear that you’d be expected to cover it.

—da

Rubén Martín

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Oct 25, 2013, 7:41:55 PM10/25/13
to Monica Chew, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
El 25/10/13 23:26, Monica Chew escribió:
> No, I don't. I mean there is a useful distinction between the follow 2 classes of mail:
>
> 1) Official email from Mozilla, the organization, for things like summit announcements, or service/product announcements.
> 2) Email from people affiliated with Mozilla.
>
> It would be great announce to the world that all official Mozilla mail will authenticate from Mozilla, say, using DKIM, and that all unauthenticated mail claiming to be from Mozilla should be ignored. Because class 2) mail often goes through mailing lists, it has different characteristics and is very difficult to impose the same authentication requirements. See http://www.dmarc.org/overview.html for more information.
>
> We already have these two classes conflated -- adding more addresses to a domain that typical users will find visually indistinguishable from mozilla.com, only makes this problem worse.
Sorry but I don't follow you.

I don't see the problem of having jd...@mozilla.org sending an email to a
mailing list. The email identifies the person which is contributing to
Mozilla, not Mozilla as a whole.

It's the same on every institution or organization, there is no
@gnome.org and @gnomers.org addresses, for me, it makes no sense.
signature.asc

Benjamin Kerensa

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Oct 25, 2013, 7:51:15 PM10/25/13
to Monica Chew, gover...@lists.mozilla.org

On 10/25/13, 10:30 AM, Monica Chew wrote:
> Hi Benjamin,
>
> I think it's a wonderful idea to give Reps and other contributors email addresses. Can I suggest mozillians.org instead of mozilla.org, though? mozilla.org is not sufficiently distinguishable from mozilla.com to avoid confusing paid staff from not, and Mozillian has the benefit of sounding like a person-descriptor.
>
> I should also point out that in the future, it may become very important to be able to distinguish official email from Mozilla as a project, versus someone who is affiliated with Mozilla (as paid staff or not). Anti-phishing standards such as DMARC are much easier to adopt when an organization can separate mail by function into different domains. Widening the mozilla.{org,com} namespace makes this problem worse.
>
> Thanks,
> Monica

Hello Monica,

So this discussion has been ongoing outside of Moz Gov for some time now
(a couple years) and the idea to have @mozillians.org addresses was
offered as a suggestion but generally the consensus among community and
even staff who were involved in those discussions seemed to lean towards
mozillians.org.

I do appreciate the concern of not adding confusion between staff and
community contributors but to be honest I think that confusion already
exists and probably would not be amplified by using the mozilla.org
namespace. I know I get asked quite frequently whether I work for
Mozilla (A staff member actually asked me today) and I know that
question is not unique and is common for community contributors.

mozilla.org historically has not been a namespace used by staff from
what I understand but instead was mostly for MoFo but now that has
expanded some?

>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> Hello Governance,
>>
>> I'm writing today to put forward the following proposal for @mozilla.org
>> email addresses for Mozilla Reps as outlined here:
>> https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mrz/mozilla-org
>>
>> Additionally, I would like to highlight the following policy that the
>> ReMo Council has put together in regards to email addresses for ReMo:

Axel Hecht

unread,
Oct 26, 2013, 4:06:14 AM10/26/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I don't think we've handed out @mozilla.org email addresses in the last
10-ish years. st...@mozilla.org was the operational group running the
mozilla project before the Foundation existed. In the short period when
the Foundation existed and the Corporation did not, hires at that time
probably got @mozilla.org addresses, too.

I joined shortly after the Corporation was incorporated, and at that
point, @mozilla.org addresses weren't given out anymore. Even for
functional stuff like l10n@.

Axel

Majken Connor

unread,
Oct 26, 2013, 11:25:33 AM10/26/13
to David Ascher, Corey Shields, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
No matter if budget is going to be a problem I do see the point in actually
budgeting for it and understanding the implementation costs. That might
inspire us to think of different implementations that work out better for
us, and at least uncover problems that need to be solved or decisions that
need to be made. The paid for spam filter is an interesting problem.


On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 7:23 PM, David Ascher <d...@mozilla.com> wrote:

>
> On Oct 25, 2013, at 6:14 PM, cshi...@mozilla.com wrote:
>
> > I'm not trying to shoot this down, I want to make sure that we all are
> aware that this can quickly become a significant investment, and then how
> do we scale it to the vision that Mitchell gave us for our contributor base
> in the years to come?
>
> If we agree value in a @mozilla.org identity, I’m more than happy to
> build the business case for it. I had a board member suggest that he’d
> gladly cash pay as his contribution in exchange for an address that he
> could “wear proudly”.
>
> I truly don’t believe that sourcing the money side should be a blocker to
> this conversation. US universities provide this service because it leads
> to donations that far outweigh the opex. We certainly shouldn’t be talking
> about whose budget it would come from at this point, although I understand
> your fear that you’d be expected to cover it.
>
> —da
>
> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>

Majken Connor

unread,
Oct 26, 2013, 11:36:29 AM10/26/13
to Axel Hecht, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I wanted to comment on the project vs people aspect.

I agree with Monica that there is a difference. I use countries as a
metaphor. There is Mozilla the organization which is some sort of entity,
then there are citizens of Mozilla (mozillians) who make up that
organization and contribute to it, but are individuals.

Thinking about government, just because a sitting politician says something
doesn't necessarily mean that is the position of the government as a whole
or even of the party the belong to. The laws and policies of the country
are how the country speaks for itself, and a politician communicating those
laws and policies is then speaking on behalf of the country. The politician
talking about how they would change the law or problems with the law is
speaking as a citizen.

We actually want this distinction in Mozilla. While we want to be all
recognized as parts of Mozilla, we want to be able to speak and give our
opinions and dissent and we want people to understand that we are speaking
as part of Mozilla, but not *for* Mozilla. Otherwise we would have a lot
more cases of PR pulling out their hair and people getting lots of emails
saying we can't say this and that on behalf of Mozilla because it
contradicts policy.

I think it would be kinda cool actually if staff got @mozillians.org by
default and we did keep @mozilla.x addresses for communication that
represents Mozilla. Though I also get that it would be less effective than
giving out @mozilla.org addresses to all.


On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 4:06 AM, Axel Hecht <l1...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On 10/26/13 1:51 AM, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
>
>>
> I don't think we've handed out @mozilla.org email addresses in the last
> 10-ish years. st...@mozilla.org was the operational group running the
> mozilla project before the Foundation existed. In the short period when the
> Foundation existed and the Corporation did not, hires at that time probably
> got @mozilla.org addresses, too.
>
> I joined shortly after the Corporation was incorporated, and at that
> point, @mozilla.org addresses weren't given out anymore. Even for
> functional stuff like l10n@.
>
> Axel
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>>>
>>>> Hello Governance,
>>>>
>>>> I'm writing today to put forward the following proposal for @
>>>> mozilla.org
>>>> email addresses for Mozilla Reps as outlined here:
>>>> https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:**Mrz/mozilla-org<https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mrz/mozilla-org>
>>>>
>>>> Additionally, I would like to highlight the following policy that the
>>>> ReMo Council has put together in regards to email addresses for ReMo:
>>>> https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.**org/email-policy<https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/email-policy>
>>>>
>>>> These proposals and proposed policies have been the work of both
>>>> community contributors and staff and I think adding email addresses as a
>>>> tool for contributors would be beneficial and add authenticity to
>>>> discussions community contributors often have with third parties
>>>> including universities, media and developers they engage with in order
>>>> to further the goals of Mozilla.
>>>>
>>>> Many other open source projects already have practices of doing this
>>>> (Ubuntu: @ubuntu.com, Debian: @debian.org, GNOME: @gnome.org and so
>>>> on).
>>>>
>>>> Let's start a discussion on this and see where it goes!
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Sincerly,
>>>>
>>>> Benjamin Kerensa
>>>> http://benjaminkerensa.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>
> ______________________________**_________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/**listinfo/governance<https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance>
>

Gervase Markham

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 10:01:26 AM10/29/13
to William Quiviger, Nikos Roussos
On 25/10/13 17:31, William Quiviger wrote:
> Yes, the rationale was precisely to have a phased approach and start
> distributing @mozilla.org to staff and Reps only, see how that it
> went and then include everyone once we were confident about the
> process.
>
> So the aim was always to eventually distribute @mozilla.org to *all*
> Mozillians.

Assuming we use the definition of Mozillian as someone who:

* believes in the mission
* does something to actively advance it
* interacts with the Mozilla community

then I think that would be a large mistake.

Having an email address @projectname.org implies, in the open source
world, that you have a trusted position inside that organization.
@debian.org is for Debian developers. @apache.org is for Apache
committers. And so on.

Giving an @mozilla.org email address to all Mozillians (by the above
definition) would make it a pretty easy thing to get - which would both
devalue it, and also come with some reputational risk to Mozilla.

Gerv

Gervase Markham

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 10:04:10 AM10/29/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 25/10/13 18:30, Monica Chew wrote:
> I think it's a wonderful idea to give Reps and other contributors
> email addresses. Can I suggest mozillians.org instead of mozilla.org,
> though? mozilla.org is not sufficiently distinguishable from
> mozilla.com to avoid confusing paid staff from not, and Mozillian has
> the benefit of sounding like a person-descriptor.

I think making the distinction between paid staff and volunteers more
clear is actively an anti-goal.

When this program happens, I would like to see paid staff who qualify
for @mozilla.org starting to use that email address as their primary
Mozilla identity. A few of us already do that.

> I should also point out that in the future, it may become very
> important to be able to distinguish official email from Mozilla as a
> project, versus someone who is affiliated with Mozilla (as paid staff
> or not).

Email always comes from a person, it never comes from an organization
(at least, I hope Mozilla will never even attempt to be that
impersonal!). I do not think there will be a problem distinguishing
summit announcements from e.g. IETF contributions (which are always
individual), even if both come from @mozilla.org email addresses.

Gerv

Gervase Markham

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 10:14:24 AM10/29/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 25/10/13 13:16, Gervase Markham wrote:
> At the moment, a discussion is going on about how we can create a set of
> trusted people who can take part in Mozilla-internal discussions on
> topics that we don't yet want shared with the press. It seems like the
> problem of who gets @mozilla.org email addresses is a similar problem.
> Perhaps the two could be combined? We need to have a big effort to
> figure out how to define this group, and then give them both the email
> addresses and the internal forum access.

At the Festival, I was encouraged to elaborate on this. I've talked
about my idea elsewhere, but here it is again:

There are now at least two reasons we need to define a subset of
Mozillians who are trusted by the community.

The first is that we want to have a discussion forum where we can talk
about sensitive subjects in a group larger than "employees" but smaller
than "public". We've needed this for ages, and we still need it. And we
need to define who's in and who's out, and how you decide.

The second is that we want to give out @mozilla.org email addresses to
people who we are confident will not use them to damage Mozilla's
reputation. This is also a trust issue. As we are finding out, we need
to define who's in and who's out, and how you decide.

My contention is that these two groups could be the same group.

In order to define this group well, we need to "encode" existing trust
relationships. Here is my proposal, which I call the 'Mafia' way of
building a trust network.

We seed the group with, say, twenty or so people whose status as
Mozillians is beyond doubt. We then say that anyone else can be admitted
to the group if they are endorsed (I won't say "vouched", as it's
confusing!) by two existing members. And if that person is found to have
broken a confidence or otherwise behaved in a way which leads to loss of
privileges or access, the two people who vouched for them also lose
those privileges, for a period of six months. (Hence, tongue-in-cheek,
'Mafia' - "if you cross us, we'll come after you _and_ your parents".)

This makes endorsing someone an action with real downsides, which is the
only way to ensure that endorsements will be carefully considered, and
people only endorse people they actively trust.

If I vouch for someone in mozillians.org and they later act highly
inappropriately, nothing bad happens to me. There's no downside to me
simply vouching for anyone who asks, which makes it very easy to get
vouched for. In order to build a real web of trust, we need to change that.

Gerv

Nikos Roussos

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 10:21:47 AM10/29/13
to Gervase Markham, William Quiviger, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Tue, 2013-10-29 at 14:01 +0000, Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 25/10/13 17:31, William Quiviger wrote:
> > Yes, the rationale was precisely to have a phased approach and start
> > distributing @mozilla.org to staff and Reps only, see how that it
> > went and then include everyone once we were confident about the
> > process.
> >
> > So the aim was always to eventually distribute @mozilla.org to *all*
> > Mozillians.
>
> Assuming we use the definition of Mozillian as someone who:
>
> * believes in the mission
> * does something to actively advance it
> * interacts with the Mozilla community
>
> then I think that would be a large mistake.
>
> Having an email address @projectname.org implies, in the open source
> world, that you have a trusted position inside that organization.
> @debian.org is for Debian developers. @apache.org is for Apache
> committers. And so on.

It usually means that you are a <random Open-Source project name>
contributor. For instance I have a mail address for Fedora Project and
FSFE since my very first contribution.

> Giving an @mozilla.org email address to all Mozillians (by the above
> definition) would make it a pretty easy thing to get - which would both
> devalue it, and also come with some reputational risk to Mozilla.

That's a valid concern, and that's why is better to take small steps
giving @mozilla.org aliases to paid stuff and reps for now.


~nikos

Dirkjan Ochtman

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 11:05:07 AM10/29/13
to Gervase Markham, mozilla-governance
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 3:14 PM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:
> At the Festival, I was encouraged to elaborate on this. I've talked
> about my idea elsewhere, but here it is again:
>
> There are now at least two reasons we need to define a subset of
> Mozillians who are trusted by the community.
>
> The first is that we want to have a discussion forum where we can talk
> about sensitive subjects in a group larger than "employees" but smaller
> than "public". We've needed this for ages, and we still need it. And we
> need to define who's in and who's out, and how you decide.
>
> The second is that we want to give out @mozilla.org email addresses to
> people who we are confident will not use them to damage Mozilla's
> reputation. This is also a trust issue. As we are finding out, we need
> to define who's in and who's out, and how you decide.
>
> My contention is that these two groups could be the same group.

So far, sounds great.

> In order to define this group well, we need to "encode" existing trust
> relationships. Here is my proposal, which I call the 'Mafia' way of
> building a trust network.
>
> We seed the group with, say, twenty or so people whose status as
> Mozillians is beyond doubt. We then say that anyone else can be admitted
> to the group if they are endorsed (I won't say "vouched", as it's
> confusing!) by two existing members. And if that person is found to have
> broken a confidence or otherwise behaved in a way which leads to loss of
> privileges or access, the two people who vouched for them also lose
> those privileges, for a period of six months. (Hence, tongue-in-cheek,
> 'Mafia' - "if you cross us, we'll come after you _and_ your parents".)

I understand the need to do downsides, but this seems like a very
harsh penalty. It would be easy to vouch for someone at some point,
and at some point 5 years in the future, that someone does something
bad and gets banned. Is it still fair for the original vouching person
to be penalized for that?

It seems like timeliness of the vouching must play a role here. The
scheme I just came up with is, once you get 2 people to vouch for you,
you get 4 points to vouch with for others (i.e. limiting the amount of
vouches you can give out, adding some cost to vouching). But, vouches
deteriorate over time, so after, say, a year, your 2 initial vouches
are worth less than 1.0, and your access gets revoked unless you find
some people to vouch for you again. Since people may migrate to
different areas of the community, it may make sense to have other
people vouch for you this time compared to last time.

(Yeah, this gets complex. And probably needs its own thread. But it's
a good discussion to have.)

Cheers,

Dirkjan

David Ascher

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 11:15:24 AM10/29/13
to Dirkjan Ochtman, mozilla-governance, Gervase Markham

On Oct 29, 2013, at 11:05 AM, Dirkjan Ochtman <dir...@ochtman.nl> wrote:

>> The first is that we want to have a discussion forum where we can talk
>> about sensitive subjects in a group larger than "employees" but smaller
>> than "public". We've needed this for ages, and we still need it. And we
>> need to define who's in and who's out, and how you decide.
>>
>> The second is that we want to give out @mozilla.org email addresses to
>> people who we are confident will not use them to damage Mozilla's
>> reputation. This is also a trust issue. As we are finding out, we need
>> to define who's in and who's out, and how you decide.
>>
>> My contention is that these two groups could be the same group.
>

The first is an ACL restriction among many. It’s not clear to me why we want to prioritize one permission (‘hear some kinds of news’) above ‘access to VPN’, ‘access to the t-shirt database’, ‘access to …’.

Mozilla.org email adresses has, I claim, interesting potential both for fundraising and to ‘make-people-feel-good’. (esp. if we make it easy for people to opt-in to a .sig that explains Mozilla, for example)

My counter-contention is we’re more agile and impactful if we’re willing to be generous w/ the latter while correct with the former.

As a thought experiment, I’d be +1 on giving jwz a mozilla.org email address, but I doubt he should be in the former ACL group (until such time as he chooses to get more involved).

—da

Mike Connor

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 11:18:43 AM10/29/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
On 2013-10-29 10:14 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> We seed the group with, say, twenty or so people whose status as
> Mozillians is beyond doubt. We then say that anyone else can be admitted
> to the group if they are endorsed (I won't say "vouched", as it's
> confusing!) by two existing members. And if that person is found to have
> broken a confidence or otherwise behaved in a way which leads to loss of
> privileges or access, the two people who vouched for them also lose
> those privileges, for a period of six months. (Hence, tongue-in-cheek,
> 'Mafia' - "if you cross us, we'll come after you _and_ your parents".)
>
> This makes endorsing someone an action with real downsides, which is the
> only way to ensure that endorsements will be carefully considered, and
> people only endorse people they actively trust.
>
> If I vouch for someone in mozillians.org and they later act highly
> inappropriately, nothing bad happens to me. There's no downside to me
> simply vouching for anyone who asks, which makes it very easy to get
> vouched for. In order to build a real web of trust, we need to change
> that.

I would support this proposal. It maps well to how we handle other
forms of trust (commit access, module ownership, etc), which has served
us well as a project. I share Dirkjan's concern that timeliness needs
to be considered, however I think that can be dealt with through a
probationary period (maybe a year) after which vouchers wouldn't pay a
penalty.

My primary concern here is that, unlike the majority of open projects,
Mozilla gets a lot of press attention and coverage. Anything we do that
implies (whether correctly or not) that an individual represents Mozilla
represents a risk we should balance against the benefit we believe we'll
get from providing @mozilla.org addresses.

-- Mike

L. David Baron

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 11:54:19 AM10/29/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
On Friday 2013-10-25 19:05 +0300, Nikos Roussos wrote:
> Although I agree in principle with the "why only employees and reps?"
> argument I think we should consider this as a try out phase. See how
> that goes and how we can expand this to all active contributors.
> Hopefully by that time we'll have a way to reliable determine if a
> person is an active contributor.

I'm pretty uncomfortable with the idea of starting with only
employees and reps; I'd like to be able to include non-employee
contributors in areas other than the areas covered by the reps
program (regional events and marketing, as I understand it), and I'm
concerned that temporary things tend to become permanent.

-David

--
𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
- Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)
signature.asc

Monica Chew

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 1:12:43 PM10/29/13
to Gervase Markham, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
> > I should also point out that in the future, it may become very
> > important to be able to distinguish official email from Mozilla as a
> > project, versus someone who is affiliated with Mozilla (as paid staff
> > or not).
>
> Email always comes from a person, it never comes from an organization
> (at least, I hope Mozilla will never even attempt to be that
> impersonal!). I do not think there will be a problem distinguishing
> summit announcements from e.g. IETF contributions (which are always
> individual), even if both come from @mozilla.org email addresses.

We have at least one product that requires email verification flow (Persona) and there's also a payments API (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Apps/ID_and_Payments, https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPayment). The email verification flow already involves mail that is from a service, not from a person. I could imagine that the payments API might involve email that's similar. That's not being impersonal -- that's using the communication model that everyone already understands from things like Paypal and bank email notifications.

Besides that issue, I still don't think that foo.com and foo.org addresses still make sense simultaneously for any protocol, including mail. Otherwise, many domains wouldn't redirect from one to the other (including ours), and resolv.conf wouldn't support search directives. We shouldn't try to create a distinction artificially and expect people to understand it.

Thanks,
Monica

Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 1:23:54 PM10/29/13
to Gervase Markham, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I wanted to add that I had an opportunity to talk to a few staff from the
Portland office who have been following this and they like the idea.

One suggested that all staff and contributors should use @mozilla.org

On Oct 29, 2013 7:05 AM, "Gervase Markham" <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:
>
> On 25/10/13 18:30, Monica Chew wrote:
> > I think it's a wonderful idea to give Reps and other contributors
> > email addresses. Can I suggest mozillians.org instead of mozilla.org,
> > though? mozilla.org is not sufficiently distinguishable from
> > mozilla.com to avoid confusing paid staff from not, and Mozillian has
> > the benefit of sounding like a person-descriptor.
>
> I think making the distinction between paid staff and volunteers more
> clear is actively an anti-goal.
>
> When this program happens, I would like to see paid staff who qualify
> for @mozilla.org starting to use that email address as their primary
> Mozilla identity. A few of us already do that.
>
> > I should also point out that in the future, it may become very
> > important to be able to distinguish official email from Mozilla as a
> > project, versus someone who is affiliated with Mozilla (as paid staff
> > or not).
>
> Email always comes from a person, it never comes from an organization
> (at least, I hope Mozilla will never even attempt to be that
> impersonal!). I do not think there will be a problem distinguishing
> summit announcements from e.g. IETF contributions (which are always
> individual), even if both come from @mozilla.org email addresses.
>
> Gerv

Rubén Martín

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 2:59:41 PM10/29/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
El 29/10/13 15:01, Gervase Markham escribió:
> Assuming we use the definition of Mozillian as someone who:
>
> * believes in the mission
> * does something to actively advance it
> * interacts with the Mozilla community
>
> then I think that would be a large mistake.
>
> Having an email address @projectname.org implies, in the open source
> world, that you have a trusted position inside that organization.
> @debian.org is for Debian developers. @apache.org is for Apache
> committers. And so on.
>
> Giving an @mozilla.org email address to all Mozillians (by the above
> definition) would make it a pretty easy thing to get - which would both
> devalue it, and also come with some reputational risk to Mozilla.
I agree because for me, right know at mozillians.org there is a lot of
people I don't consider an active mozillian, it's super easy to get
vouched by anyone.

@mozilla.org accounts should come with a fair use agreement, as commit
access or reps, and should be open to any mozillian (paid, non-paid,
rep, non-rep).

I like the endorse idea, but I think that if Reps Council approving a
double-endorsed mozillian to have an account should be enought. The fair
use agreement should take care of bad behaviors and remove this account
if violated.

So the SOP would be:

* I open a @mozilla.org email resquest and cc two already @mozilla.org
to endorse me.
* Reps Council IT Task force evaluates the request.
* If it's OK, they send me the agreements to sign (probably employees
and reps agreements already cover this fair use policy).
* I sign the agreement and attach it back.
* Reps Council gives the OK to IT to create the account and send me
the details.
signature.asc

Edmund Wong

unread,
Oct 29, 2013, 9:21:14 PM10/29/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Hi,

PMJI.

[short]
I've read this thread and I'm getting the impression that '@mozilla.org
for every Mozillian' is something that really shouldn't be happening
no matter how some feel it should. IOW, just give '@mozilla.org' to
Mozilla reps.
[/short]

[long]
There is an idea: '@mozilla.org' to every Mozillian.

Now 'we' need to add a bunch of obstacles and hoops in the way of
attaining that goal.

Rationales for doing the obstacles and hoops:

- (Not quoting anyone here.. just a feeling) "After all, we don't
want rapscallions and bad people ruining Mozilla's reputation."

- We should just limit it to Mozilla Reps and paid staff first.
- just to test the 'waters' and to ensure that there's
infrastructure to scale out (for the possibility of
adding every Mozillian)

"I have a bunch of candies for everyone. But first, you need
to sign a form, and get approval..etc.." Get the idea?
I mean if you have something that you'd like to give to people,
but then find a bunch of rationales for preventing it being
given to 'bad apples', you're just setting up yourself for
churning. I mean. As you increase the # of recipients of
an item, you're bound to give it to someone who really shouldn't
be having it.

My opinion? Just permit Mozilla Reps to have the 'mozilla.org'
email address and be done with it. Paid staff already have
the 'mozilla.com' address so having 'mozilla.org' for them
is just redundant. The infrastructure required isn't as
hefty as for the whole Mozillian group(of course, it also depends
on how the 'mozilla.org' email address works. Is it just an alias,
or a full fledged email address?).

I don't feel any less of being a Mozillian without the 'mozilla.org'
email address. Just as having one doesn't make me more Mozillian.
[/long]

Now as I write this, I wonder if I just made the cut for poster
boy for Mark Twain's quote:

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool
than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."

Edmund

Mike Hoye

unread,
Oct 30, 2013, 9:27:37 AM10/30/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
On 10/29/2013, 11:18 AM, Mike Connor wrote:
> On 2013-10-29 10:14 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>> We seed the group with, say, twenty or so people whose status as
>> Mozillians is beyond doubt. We then say that anyone else can be admitted
>> to the group if they are endorsed (I won't say "vouched", as it's
>> confusing!) by two existing members. And if that person is found to have
>> broken a confidence or otherwise behaved in a way which leads to loss of
>> privileges or access, the two people who vouched for them also lose
>> those privileges, for a period of six months. (Hence, tongue-in-cheek,
>> 'Mafia' - "if you cross us, we'll come after you _and_ your parents".)
[...]
> I would support this proposal. It maps well to how we handle other
> forms of trust (commit access, module ownership, etc), which has
> served us well as a project. I share Dirkjan's concern that
> timeliness needs to be considered, however I think that can be dealt
> with through a probationary period (maybe a year) after which vouchers
> wouldn't pay a penalty.

I support Gerv's proposal as well, for reasons that may be only
semantically different from Connor's that I'm going to elaborate anyway:
that it meets a minimalist expression of our immediate needs, that it's
built on people trusting people rather than on an elaborate policy, and
that by virtue of that we'll be able to ship a viable implementation
quickly without much administrative overhead.

Move quickly, trust our people, minimum viable everything.

- mhoye

Gervase Markham

unread,
Oct 30, 2013, 10:10:45 AM10/30/13
to David Ascher, Dirkjan Ochtman
On 29/10/13 15:15, David Ascher wrote:
>>> My contention is that these two groups could be the same group.
>
> The first is an ACL restriction among many. It’s not clear to me why
> we want to prioritize one permission (‘hear some kinds of news’)
> above ‘access to VPN’, ‘access to the t-shirt database’, ‘access to
> …’.

Working out a trusted set of people for a discussion is a _social_
problem. Yes, technically, it's a permissions bit somewhere, but the
difficult problem is deciding who gets it.

The other things you list are much more prosaic and there are more
obvious criteria for deciding who gets access to the t-shirt database
(people who need to know in order for t-shirts to be shipped, and no-one
else) than deciding who gets to take part in confidential discussions in
a project which strives for openness but sometimes has to be non-public
about some things.

> My counter-contention is we’re more agile and impactful if we’re
> willing to be generous w/ the latter while correct with the former.
>
> As a thought experiment, I’d be +1 on giving jwz a mozilla.org email
> address, but I doubt he should be in the former ACL group (until such
> time as he chooses to get more involved).

If we decide @mozilla.org email addresses are for life, then I'd be
happy with the exit criteria for the two groups being different. But it
still makes sense to me to unify the entry criteria.

However, that sense fundamentally rests on my belief that we should give
@mozilla.org email addresses to trusted people. If the consensus is we
should be more generous than that, then yes, the criteria will need to
be different.

Gerv

Majken Connor

unread,
Oct 30, 2013, 1:50:36 PM10/30/13
to Gervase Markham, Dirkjan Ochtman, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, David Ascher
I think something to keep in mind is that we don't have to find THE 20
people who are best for this group, we simply need to find A set of 20
people who fit the criteria and who are willing to plow through a whole
bunch of these requests. So we are definitely not saying that these 20
people are the most Mozillian of all Mozillians, but that they are
qualified to handle this task. They should be distributed between regions
and teams as much as possible to make sure the trust spreads as evenly as
possible through Mozilla and doesn't bias for eg North American developers.

I also want to suggest maybe there needs to be a time period before a
person can vouch for new members? I think this is also normal in this type
of trust system and it also minimizes the damage to the trust structure if
someone makes it through by mistake.

Maybe Gerv could start an etherpad to track the proposal and proposals for
the proposal? ;)

Or looping back we seem to be throwing out some of the work mrz and Reps
have done, should we ask those people who already did this work to alter
their proposal to reflect what's been discussed here?


On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 29/10/13 15:15, David Ascher wrote:
> >>> My contention is that these two groups could be the same group.
> >
> > The first is an ACL restriction among many. It’s not clear to me why
> > we want to prioritize one permission (‘hear some kinds of news’)
> > above ‘access to VPN’, ‘access to the t-shirt database’, ‘access to
> > …’.
>
> Working out a trusted set of people for a discussion is a _social_
> problem. Yes, technically, it's a permissions bit somewhere, but the
> difficult problem is deciding who gets it.
>
> The other things you list are much more prosaic and there are more
> obvious criteria for deciding who gets access to the t-shirt database
> (people who need to know in order for t-shirts to be shipped, and no-one
> else) than deciding who gets to take part in confidential discussions in
> a project which strives for openness but sometimes has to be non-public
> about some things.
>
> > My counter-contention is we’re more agile and impactful if we’re
> > willing to be generous w/ the latter while correct with the former.
> >
> > As a thought experiment, I’d be +1 on giving jwz a mozilla.org email
> > address, but I doubt he should be in the former ACL group (until such
> > time as he chooses to get more involved).
>
> If we decide @mozilla.org email addresses are for life, then I'd be
> happy with the exit criteria for the two groups being different. But it
> still makes sense to me to unify the entry criteria.
>
> However, that sense fundamentally rests on my belief that we should give
> @mozilla.org email addresses to trusted people. If the consensus is we
> should be more generous than that, then yes, the criteria will need to
> be different.
>
> Gerv
>

Dirkjan Ochtman

unread,
Oct 30, 2013, 3:08:02 PM10/30/13
to Majken Connor, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Gervase Markham, David Ascher
On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 6:50 PM, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I also want to suggest maybe there needs to be a time period before a person
> can vouch for new members? I think this is also normal in this type of trust
> system and it also minimizes the damage to the trust structure if someone
> makes it through by mistake.

Yes, though maybe not while the initial seeding is going on?

Cheers,

Dirkjan

Mike Connor

unread,
Oct 30, 2013, 3:18:40 PM10/30/13
to Dirkjan Ochtman, Majken Connor, Gervase Markham, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, David Ascher
I don't think it'd hurt us too much to have this roll out slowly, rather
than have hundreds of account requests pour in over the first week.

-- Mike

Gervase Markham

unread,
Nov 1, 2013, 12:49:32 PM11/1/13
to Dirkjan Ochtman
On 29/10/13 15:05, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> I understand the need to do downsides, but this seems like a very
> harsh penalty. It would be easy to vouch for someone at some point,
> and at some point 5 years in the future, that someone does something
> bad and gets banned. Is it still fair for the original vouching person
> to be penalized for that?

Good point. Perhaps the connection should expire after a year.

> It seems like timeliness of the vouching must play a role here. The
> scheme I just came up with is, once you get 2 people to vouch for you,
> you get 4 points to vouch with for others (i.e. limiting the amount of
> vouches you can give out, adding some cost to vouching). But, vouches
> deteriorate over time, so after, say, a year, your 2 initial vouches
> are worth less than 1.0, and your access gets revoked unless you find
> some people to vouch for you again. Since people may migrate to
> different areas of the community, it may make sense to have other
> people vouch for you this time compared to last time.

That seems more complex than the above suggestion. Do you think simply
disconnecting voucher and vouchee after a year (i.e. after that, you
stand on your own two feet) would work?

Gerv


Gervase Markham

unread,
Nov 1, 2013, 12:51:11 PM11/1/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 30/10/13 17:50, Majken Connor wrote:
> I think something to keep in mind is that we don't have to find THE 20
> people who are best for this group,

Right.

> I also want to suggest maybe there needs to be a time period before a
> person can vouch for new members? I think this is also normal in this type
> of trust system and it also minimizes the damage to the trust structure if
> someone makes it through by mistake.

Nice idea. Although that would slow down the initial seeding. What sort
of time period do you think would be appropriate?

> Maybe Gerv could start an etherpad to track the proposal and proposals for
> the proposal? ;)

Good idea. I will do that when I get to work on Monday.

> Or looping back we seem to be throwing out some of the work mrz and Reps
> have done, should we ask those people who already did this work to alter
> their proposal to reflect what's been discussed here?

I'm sure they are reading :-) I think it makes sense to come up with a
concrete counter-proposal, and then we can discuss its merits.

Gerv


Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Nov 1, 2013, 12:59:05 PM11/1/13
to Gervase Markham, Dirkjan Ochtman, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 29/10/13 15:05, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> > I understand the need to do downsides, but this seems like a very
> > harsh penalty. It would be easy to vouch for someone at some point,
> > and at some point 5 years in the future, that someone does something
> > bad and gets banned. Is it still fair for the original vouching person
> > to be penalized for that?
>
> Good point. Perhaps the connection should expire after a year.
>

My suggestion would be to follow Ubuntu's foot steps by expiring annually
but allowing people to renew in Mozillians.org. In Ubuntu we have
"Membership" and each year it expires but you can login to Launchpad and
tick to renew for another year. This should be easy to add as a feature to
Mozillians.org

Maybe add a e-mail group or something with auto-expiring membership heck it
might make sense to offer a auto-expiration feature for all groups on
Mozillians.org to ensure only active contributors are in groups?


>
> > It seems like timeliness of the vouching must play a role here. The
> > scheme I just came up with is, once you get 2 people to vouch for you,
> > you get 4 points to vouch with for others (i.e. limiting the amount of
> > vouches you can give out, adding some cost to vouching). But, vouches
> > deteriorate over time, so after, say, a year, your 2 initial vouches
> > are worth less than 1.0, and your access gets revoked unless you find
> > some people to vouch for you again. Since people may migrate to
> > different areas of the community, it may make sense to have other
> > people vouch for you this time compared to last time.
>
> That seems more complex than the above suggestion. Do you think simply
> disconnecting voucher and vouchee after a year (i.e. after that, you
> stand on your own two feet) would work?
>
> Gerv
>
>
>
All this vouching seems simply like adding trivial work for others. I
suggest we create a group on Mozillians.org and add a auto-expire feature
and renew membership feature to the platform that all group admins can
choose to enable.

People wanting a e-mail can join the group and it will be administered by
the POC for adding email accounts. In order to join the group a Mozillian
much have been vouched.



--
Benjamin Kerensa
Mozilla Rep
http://mozillausa.org

Gervase Markham

unread,
Nov 1, 2013, 1:07:02 PM11/1/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 01/11/13 16:59, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> All this vouching seems simply like adding trivial work for others. I
> suggest we create a group on Mozillians.org and add a auto-expire feature
> and renew membership feature to the platform that all group admins can
> choose to enable.
>
> People wanting a e-mail can join the group and it will be administered by
> the POC for adding email accounts. In order to join the group a Mozillian
> much have been vouched.

This last sentence is precisely what we are all discussing :-)

There is a body of opinion which feels that "being vouched" in the
current mozillians.org is too low a bar for getting an @mozilla.org
email address, given the reputational risk that giving them out
represents to Mozilla. If you think otherwise, then make your case - but
at the moment, you seem to be treating "who can get one" as a minor
detail to be tacked on to the end of a detailed exposition of how to
administer it. Whereas, who can get one is actually the big question :-)
The technical implementation is the trivial bit.

Gerv

Majken Connor

unread,
Nov 1, 2013, 1:34:26 PM11/1/13
to Gervase Markham, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Benjamin,

I agree it's a sort of busy-work, but I'm sure it will happen faster than
adding a feature into Mozillians.

I don't think we should be worried about initial seeding being slow. Slow
is good, it lets us see if our plan had blind spots. Things take a LOT more
time to get into motion than it seems. Think about how long we've been
talking about giving out email addresses to community. If doing it right
means it'll take another 6 months before it's properly seeded and accounts
are getting into people's hands I think that's a much better outcome than
doing it quick and dirty and it being a failure.

Case in point, Mozillians was supposed to have this trust structure and it
was too easy to establish trust (one vouch, you can vouch right away). Now
we have to reinvent the wheel. Not necessarily a bad thing, I think it's ok
that Mozillians has turned out this way, but I don't think that was the
original intent.


On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 01/11/13 16:59, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> > All this vouching seems simply like adding trivial work for others. I
> > suggest we create a group on Mozillians.org and add a auto-expire feature
> > and renew membership feature to the platform that all group admins can
> > choose to enable.
> >
> > People wanting a e-mail can join the group and it will be administered by
> > the POC for adding email accounts. In order to join the group a Mozillian
> > much have been vouched.
>
> This last sentence is precisely what we are all discussing :-)
>
> There is a body of opinion which feels that "being vouched" in the
> current mozillians.org is too low a bar for getting an @mozilla.org
> email address, given the reputational risk that giving them out
> represents to Mozilla. If you think otherwise, then make your case - but
> at the moment, you seem to be treating "who can get one" as a minor
> detail to be tacked on to the end of a detailed exposition of how to
> administer it. Whereas, who can get one is actually the big question :-)
> The technical implementation is the trivial bit.
>
> Gerv

Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Nov 1, 2013, 6:39:49 PM11/1/13
to Gervase Markham, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 01/11/13 16:59, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> > All this vouching seems simply like adding trivial work for others. I
> > suggest we create a group on Mozillians.org and add a auto-expire feature
> > and renew membership feature to the platform that all group admins can
> > choose to enable.
> >
> > People wanting a e-mail can join the group and it will be administered by
> > the POC for adding email accounts. In order to join the group a Mozillian
> > much have been vouched.
>
> This last sentence is precisely what we are all discussing :-)
>
> There is a body of opinion which feels that "being vouched" in the
> current mozillians.org is too low a bar for getting an @mozilla.org
> email address, given the reputational risk that giving them out
> represents to Mozilla. If you think otherwise, then make your case - but
> at the moment, you seem to be treating "who can get one" as a minor
> detail to be tacked on to the end of a detailed exposition of how to
> administer it. Whereas, who can get one is actually the big question :-)
> The technical implementation is the trivial bit.
>
> Gerv
>
>

I do think otherwise and although I'm not sure if my case is convincing but
in my honest opinion if folks think vouching being enough is the bar being
set to low well then perhaps we set the bar to low for people being
deserving of a vouch.

To me vouching is more than just signaling someone has made a contribution
to Mozilla but that they have made a sustaining contributions and deserve
the trust of the community and project.

Vouch
*v.* *vouched*, *vouch·ing*, *vouch·es*
*1. * To give personal assurances; give a guarantee: vouch for an old
friend's trustworthiness.

When people vouch someone they are guaranteeing that the person is
trustworthy and a sustained good contributor IMHO.

:mrz

unread,
Nov 2, 2013, 1:33:55 AM11/2/13
to

> Or looping back we seem to be throwing out some of the work mrz and Reps
> have done, should we ask those people who already did this work to alter
> their proposal to reflect what's been discussed here?

The entire intent of the draft proposal was to start this very conversation! Without any draft we'd have no starting point.

That the draft lives in wiki.mozilla.org under my User:Mzeier is just an artifact of the fact that I started the draft. The existing draft (https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mrz/mozilla-org) is open for edits.

Gervase Markham

unread,
Nov 4, 2013, 1:40:30 PM11/4/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 01/11/13 22:39, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> To me vouching is more than just signaling someone has made a contribution
> to Mozilla but that they have made a sustaining contributions and deserve
> the trust of the community and project.

But that's the thing - you say "to me". I would assert that it's obvious
that not many people share this view (although I do), and that because
what it means to vouch for someone was not clearly defined early on, the
bar has historically been very low. And even if we raise it now, we have
a big grandfathering problem.

> When people vouch someone they are guaranteeing that the person is
> trustworthy and a sustained good contributor IMHO.

Do you really think that all or most existing mozillians.org vouches had
that level of trust associated with them?

Gerv

Majken Connor

unread,
Nov 4, 2013, 1:54:25 PM11/4/13
to Gervase Markham, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I feel confident in asserting that many of the vouches on
mozillians.orgwere just "I know this person!"

But I also think simply adding the responsibility aspect of vouching, ie "I
know this person!" + "I agree to be held responsible for their actions for
x period of time" would have made a giant impact on who was vouched by
whom.

I think we don't necessarily need to worry about moving the bar for the
first half because that is built in to the second half. I'm not going to
agree to put my contributions to Mozilla on the line for someone who I've
seen posting on a newsgroup once or twice. To know someone well enough to
vouch for them will mean I've had to have worked with them, which means
they would have had to be contributing to Mozilla in a significant enough
way for me to feel confident enough in them.

The outlier is someone who is bringing a friend into Mozilla, they will
already have personal trust. I think another time limit might be useful
here. Must have had a Mozillians account for at least x amount of time.
Sometimes a timeline is artificial, but I think it's ok in this case
because ideally we are granting emails to people who will continue to use
them for Mozilla contributions. A timeline will help show if the person has
come in to contribute to one project then move on, ie if they are just
visiting town or if they've decided to move here ;)


On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 01/11/13 22:39, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> > To me vouching is more than just signaling someone has made a
> contribution
> > to Mozilla but that they have made a sustaining contributions and deserve
> > the trust of the community and project.
>
> But that's the thing - you say "to me". I would assert that it's obvious
> that not many people share this view (although I do), and that because
> what it means to vouch for someone was not clearly defined early on, the
> bar has historically been very low. And even if we raise it now, we have
> a big grandfathering problem.
>
> > When people vouch someone they are guaranteeing that the person is
> > trustworthy and a sustained good contributor IMHO.
>
> Do you really think that all or most existing mozillians.org vouches had
> that level of trust associated with them?
>
> Gerv
>

Mike Hoye

unread,
Nov 4, 2013, 2:02:23 PM11/4/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
On 11/4/2013, 1:40 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Do you really think that all or most existing mozillians.org vouches
> had that level of trust associated with them?

For what it's worth, we've had at least one occurrence - the Thunderbird
announcement - where an email sent only to the "vouched mozillians" list
found its way to the usual valley-rag techblogs within hours. So
treating "vouched mozillians" as some sort of LDAP security group is not
a plan that can be made to work without leaving a lot of scorched earth
in its wake.

- mhoye

Rubén Martín

unread,
Nov 4, 2013, 4:40:48 PM11/4/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
El 04/11/13 20:02, Mike Hoye escribió:
> For what it's worth, we've had at least one occurrence - the
> Thunderbird announcement - where an email sent only to the "vouched
> mozillians" list found its way to the usual valley-rag techblogs
> within hours.
Well, I think the case you are referring to is not clear the the leak
came from a vouched mozillian that wasn't "trusted".

For that reason everyone should pass this "trusted" filter, even
employees. The employee status doesn't give you the trusted status
automatically.
signature.asc

Rubén Martín

unread,
Nov 4, 2013, 4:42:47 PM11/4/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
El 04/11/13 19:54, Majken Connor escribió:
> I think we don't necessarily need to worry about moving the bar for the
> first half because that is built in to the second half. I'm not going to
> agree to put my contributions to Mozilla on the line for someone who I've
> seen posting on a newsgroup once or twice. To know someone well enough to
> vouch for them will mean I've had to have worked with them, which means
> they would have had to be contributing to Mozilla in a significant enough
> way for me to feel confident enough in them.
At Mozilla Hispano we are going to stablish a policy where new people
are not encouraged to create a mozillian profile till they get
"graduated", which means they have been working for some time in the
community and they have finished their mentorship process.
signature.asc

Leo McArdle

unread,
Nov 5, 2013, 9:19:35 AM11/5/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
On 04/11/13 18:54, Majken Connor wrote:
> The outlier is someone who is bringing a friend into Mozilla, they will
> already have personal trust. I think another time limit might be useful
> here. Must have had a Mozillians account for at least x amount of time.
> Sometimes a timeline is artificial, but I think it's ok in this case
> because ideally we are granting emails to people who will continue to use
> them for Mozilla contributions. A timeline will help show if the person has
> come in to contribute to one project then move on, ie if they are just
> visiting town or if they've decided to move here ;)

Might that already be covered by the Mafia proposal? While I might trust
my friend with my wallet, for example, does that necessarily mean I
trust them to know what Mozilla is, and trust them to contribute? I'm
not sure.

I see here a possible case whereby Mozillians have trust in a potential
contributor, but that potential contributor hasn't actually contributed
yet. Do we need to include in the Mafia system some requirement for
evidence of prior contribution, or 'punishment' for a voucher who
vouches for someone who hasn't contributed yet? (Or does the timeline
solve this problem?)

~Leo

signature.asc

Majken Connor

unread,
Nov 7, 2013, 11:52:09 AM11/7/13
to Leo McArdle, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
Getting back to emails, because I don't think you need to opt in to this
inner circle to be able to speak for mozilla or deserve an email - what
would be the abuse of the email that could get it revoked? Does the
vouching system still work for emails if there isn't some responsibility
attached?

davidweld...@gmail.com

unread,
Nov 8, 2013, 3:55:21 PM11/8/13
to
The why of this email proposal isn't clear to me and I'd like to think through how it supports the million Mozillians goal. There seems to be two different thoughts:

* Is it to recognize an active and/or trusted group of people for their contribution? (The badge of honor model)

* Is it something to give out more generously so we reach new people who believe in what we're doing but haven't gotten deeply involved yet? (Ascher's university email addresses that lead to donations model)

Those same options are showing up in the discussions about 'What does Mozillian mean?'. Is that name for a small group that meet certain criteria or is it for a larger group that self-identifies with our mission?

If we think the word 'Mozillians' should be applied broadly because we need to be inclusive to grow bigger and this helps bring future contributors to us, that seems relevant to this email discussion.

If we think 'Mozillians' should be applied to the active and core group of people that believe in the mission, take action today to advance it and interact with other community members, that seems relevant too.

I would encourage everyone on this thread to help answer the 'What does Mozillian mean?' question and then revisit how the answer informs this. To help with that, here are three recent blog posts to read and comment on:

http://blog.gerv.net/2013/10/what-does-mozillian-mean/

http://hoosteeno.com/2013/10/22/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-mozillian/

http://davidwboswell.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/what-does-mozillian-mean/

Having clearer definitions will also help us implement this regardless of where the line is drawn. As someone said earlier, we don't have a reliable way to determine who active contributors are right now and that's largely to do with having an unclear definition.

Thanks,
David

William Quiviger

unread,
Nov 12, 2013, 7:29:17 AM11/12/13
to davidweld...@gmail.com, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
From a Mozilla Reps perspective, the rationale of having a @mozilla.org email is primarily a practical one, in that as official representatives of Mozilla in their region, having an official mozilla email makes outreach and communication easier with local insitutions, potential partners, etc... The primary aim is therefore not to recognise/reward the Rep's efforts with a mozilla email, but to support them.

- w

---
William Quiviger
Mozilla Reps Council Member
https://reps.mozilla.org/u/wquiviger/

Robert Sayles

unread,
Nov 20, 2013, 2:39:58 PM11/20/13
to
Hello,

I agree with William Quiviger on his last email regarding outreach and communications for Mozilla Reps. Since, Mozilla Reps are official representatives, why not have such email address? I understand, you want to make it clear for no misunderstandings regarding staff/volunteers. I believe it would better support the reps regarding communications out in the community.


Robert T. Sayles
Mozilla Rep | Mozilla
rtsa...@gmail.com email | https://reps.mozilla.org/u/rtsayles/ website


Notice: This message is intended for the addressee only and may
contain privileged and/or confidential information. Use or
dissemination by anyone other than the intended recipient is
prohibited.



br...@lassey.us

unread,
Nov 25, 2013, 11:10:52 AM11/25/13
to
I wanted to call out that a similar discussion has been happening on the compatibility mailing list.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.compatibility/tfH3ndokti4

To summarize, some sort of "official" email address would benefit our Web Openers in making contact with web properties to help resolve web compatibility issues.

Now, my own points. Would @mozilla-reps.org or @reps.mozilla.org addresses sit better with people?

-Brad

Rubén Martín

unread,
Nov 25, 2013, 1:57:18 PM11/25/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
El 25/11/13 17:10, br...@lassey.us escribió:
> To summarize, some sort of "official" email address would benefit our Web Openers in making contact with web properties to help resolve web compatibility issues.
>
> Now, my own points. Would @mozilla-reps.org or @reps.mozilla.org addresses sit better with people?
We have been using community email addresses (@mozilla-hispano.org) for
doing official contacts with third parties or partners and we never had
any issue, but I understand that this can differ from country to country.

What I mean is that some situations can be solved without the need of a
@mozilla.org email address, in other cases it would be nice to have.
signature.asc

Majken Connor

unread,
Dec 3, 2013, 2:11:12 PM12/3/13
to Benjamin Kerensa, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Gervase Markham
The peers of the Reps module discussed this, and whatever mechanism is used
to hand out these email addresses, we feel like it falls under our mandate
as a need we should be filling - that is to say, not that we want to be the
ones to control it, but that it doesn't make sense to create *another*
group to handle this. Reps were already created to cover this type of thing.

We want to propose that we do a first wave of giving out these email
addresses to Reps, after the program does a review of the current
membership. Then we would commit to a timeline to create the process to
give the email addresses to volunteers who deserve them but don't fit under
the current Reps umbrella.

In theory the Reps program also helps non-reps with budget and swag for
events, currently the process is to ask a Rep to submit the request for you
(basically a vouching process) and I think distributing the email addresses
is a pretty similar use case.

Obviously we would continue sharing any proposals with Governance just like
the original suggestion has done, and of course we could use the ideas
already proposed - 2 vouches, renew yearly etc. Does this sound like the
right solution?


On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Benjamin Kerensa
<bker...@mozillausa.org>wrote:

> I wanted to add that I had an opportunity to talk to a few staff from the
> Portland office who have been following this and they like the idea.
>
> One suggested that all staff and contributors should use @mozilla.org
>
> On Oct 29, 2013 7:05 AM, "Gervase Markham" <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 25/10/13 18:30, Monica Chew wrote:
> > > I think it's a wonderful idea to give Reps and other contributors
> > > email addresses. Can I suggest mozillians.org instead of mozilla.org,
> > > though? mozilla.org is not sufficiently distinguishable from
> > > mozilla.com to avoid confusing paid staff from not, and Mozillian has
> > > the benefit of sounding like a person-descriptor.
> >
> > I think making the distinction between paid staff and volunteers more
> > clear is actively an anti-goal.
> >
> > When this program happens, I would like to see paid staff who qualify
> > for @mozilla.org starting to use that email address as their primary
> > Mozilla identity. A few of us already do that.
> >
> > > I should also point out that in the future, it may become very
> > > important to be able to distinguish official email from Mozilla as a
> > > project, versus someone who is affiliated with Mozilla (as paid staff
> > > or not).
> >
> > Email always comes from a person, it never comes from an organization
> > (at least, I hope Mozilla will never even attempt to be that
> > impersonal!). I do not think there will be a problem distinguishing
> > summit announcements from e.g. IETF contributions (which are always
> > individual), even if both come from @mozilla.org email addresses.
> >
> > Gerv

Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Dec 3, 2013, 2:48:12 PM12/3/13
to Majken Connor, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Gervase Markham
This sounds like it could be the right solution or even the best one we
currently have available to us. We already have a similar process with
Community IT Requests and I think we could just expand to triage those
requests through that Task Force.

I would love to move forward with this and would love to see our volunteers
have this early in the new year when representing the Mozilla project.

William Quiviger

unread,
Dec 5, 2013, 5:48:48 AM12/5/13
to Benjamin Kerensa, Majken Connor, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Gervase Markham
+1 for this proposed solution.

If we move forward with this approach, what are the "concrete" next steps to make this happen before year's end?

- William

---
William Quiviger
Mozilla Reps Council Member
https://reps.mozilla.org/u/wquiviger/


Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Dec 5, 2013, 6:02:47 AM12/5/13
to William Quiviger, Majken Connor, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Gervase Markham
Ideally the next steps could be:

1. Determine what budget the cost of offering the addresses will come from.
2. Determine who POC will be (Staff) for creation of addresses.
3. Community IT Requests Task Force will begin triaging requests for
addresses within the approved scope and will notify POC via Bugzilla of
approved Mozillians.
4. Re-Evaluate the roll out in Q1 or Q2 of 2014 to ensure the process is
working and consider scaling out to Mozillians outside of ReMo.

Thoughts?

Nikos Roussos

unread,
Dec 5, 2013, 6:33:32 AM12/5/13
to Benjamin Kerensa, William Quiviger, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Gervase Markham, Majken Connor
On Thu, 2013-12-05 at 03:02 -0800, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> Ideally the next steps could be:
>
> 1. Determine what budget the cost of offering the addresses will come from.
> 2. Determine who POC will be (Staff) for creation of addresses.
> 3. Community IT Requests Task Force will begin triaging requests for
> addresses within the approved scope and will notify POC via Bugzilla of
> approved Mozillians.
> 4. Re-Evaluate the roll out in Q1 or Q2 of 2014 to ensure the process is
> working and consider scaling out to Mozillians outside of ReMo.
>
> Thoughts?

Seems solid.

I think the cost is not significant, since we're talking about aliases
and not real mailboxes.

Majken Connor

unread,
Dec 5, 2013, 12:27:34 PM12/5/13
to Nikos Roussos, William Quiviger, Benjamin Kerensa, Gervase Markham, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
If this is going to live under Reps then it wouldn't be the Community IT
taskforce triaging the requests.

William by "make this happen" before year's end, do you mean the initial
roll-out to current Reps, or do you mean to start giving out email
addresses to those not currently under Reps?

Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Dec 5, 2013, 1:38:56 PM12/5/13
to Majken Connor, comz...@mozilla-community.org, wqui...@mozilla.com, Gervase Markham, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Why would Community IT not handle it? That's the rep taskforce that handles
all IT requests?

William Quiviger

unread,
Dec 5, 2013, 1:57:56 PM12/5/13
to Majken Connor, Nikos Roussos, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Benjamin Kerensa, Gervase Markham
Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:
>If this is going to live under Reps then it wouldn't be the Community
>IT
>taskforce triaging the requests.
>
>William by "make this happen" before year's end, do you mean the
>initial
>roll-out to current Reps, or do you mean to start giving out email
>addresses to those not currently under Reps?

I meant the initial roll-out to current Reps.

- w

Majken Connor

unread,
Dec 5, 2013, 5:14:38 PM12/5/13
to William Quiviger, Nikos Roussos, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Benjamin Kerensa, Gervase Markham
Benjamin,

There are two community IT groups. Community IT itself is an IT project. IT
asked the Reps Council to help screen the people requesting resources
because we're in a better position to know all the regional communities.
The resources given through the Community IT project are not Reps specific
resources. There is a Community
IT task force within Reps to help screen the requests, but our mandate is
simply to screen those who are making the requests to make sure they are
community members who are active enough with Mozilla to be trusted with the
resource. Community IT (the IT group, not the Reps group) handles deciding
what resources are appropriate for the request.

It's a bit confusing because the names are the same as it's two different
groups working on the same thing. Actually I think Community IT (the IT
group) might be big enough now to start handling their own screening if
they wanted to.

Having the task force handle these requests could make sense, or it might
be a different task force, but it also makes sense to have mentors handle
them. We'll have to see how it evolves.

William,

So on the Reps side,
- we (Reps peers and council) should establish some criteria for a first
wave that can be given email addresses without having to wait for a more
general program review.
- We need a mechanism for handling the requests, obviously bugzilla, but we
probably need a new form
- We need to know from IT what they need to be included in the form

I think IT is ready to start handling the requests, this is something they
already do, but someone from that side should chime in!

:mrz

unread,
Dec 6, 2013, 11:12:29 PM12/6/13
to

> Actually I think Community IT (the IT
> group) might be big enough now to start handling their own screening if
> they wanted to.

We are not and even if that weren't true I'd still advocate for the existing Reps task force to continue this since they have a much closer relationship with Communities (and have a governance structure and some processes already in place).

Gervase Markham

unread,
Dec 9, 2013, 9:24:41 AM12/9/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 03/12/13 19:11, Majken Connor wrote:
> Obviously we would continue sharing any proposals with Governance just like
> the original suggestion has done, and of course we could use the ideas
> already proposed - 2 vouches, renew yearly etc. Does this sound like the
> right solution?

I'm not sure there was consensus on "renew yearly". ]

But I would welcome a discussable proposal which started with Reps as an
easier case, as long as it was clear that having such an address was not
a "Reps privilege" and so there could be no opposition later to others
having them.

Gerv

gokop...@gmail.com

unread,
Dec 9, 2013, 2:56:01 PM12/9/13
to
I am probably late to this thread, but as a former intern I and quite a few others have suggested this this summer about opening up @mozillians.org email address to verified contributors, if @mozilla.org and @mozilla.com shall be reserved.

I personally like to keep @mozilla.org for MoFo and of course @mozilla.com will continue to be for MoCo. The distinction allows outsiders to know the role of the owner of this email alias.

Mind you that as an ACM member I get @acm.org alias (anyone can be an ACM member).

Gervase Markham

unread,
Dec 10, 2013, 8:12:34 PM12/10/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 09/12/13 11:56, gokop...@gmail.com wrote:
> I personally like to keep @mozilla.org for MoFo

MoFo currently use @mozillafoundation.org.

> and of course
> @mozilla.com will continue to be for MoCo. The distinction allows
> outsiders to know the role of the owner of this email alias.

I guess it depends whether you think that distinction is important :-)

Gerv


Robert Kaiser

unread,
Dec 11, 2013, 4:30:19 PM12/11/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
gokop...@gmail.com schrieb:
> I personally like to keep @mozilla.org for MoFo and of course @mozilla.com will continue to be for MoCo. The distinction allows outsiders to know the role of the owner of this email alias.

I do not think that's a distinction that matters at all (I personally
never liked that I did get a mozilla.com address instead of a
mozilla.org one when I started getting paid by Mozilla, as I think it's
important to show people we confer with that we are a non-profit .org
and not a for-profit .com).
I'll even go as far as to say it should not matter at all if people are
paid by the organization or not if they have enough merit in the community.

KaiRo

gokop...@gmail.com

unread,
Dec 15, 2013, 6:02:20 AM12/15/13
to
I think there is always a distinction. I

gokop...@gmail.com

unread,
Dec 15, 2013, 6:21:31 AM12/15/13
to
On Wednesday, December 11, 2013 4:30:19 PM UTC-5, Robert Kaiser wrote:
Sorry I hit the reply button too early.
True we probably have a few community members who happen to have @mozilla.com email address, most likely because it was easier to manage the LDAP permission that way (not sure if we do allow non @mozilla.com to be in the LDAP primary account name).

I am just a bit old school that I like telling someone's identity from an email address. In a way I probably can assume people using chromium.org are either core chromium developer or Google employee who prefer to be using chromium outside of work. While Google is not a non-profit organization, the same way that Python Foundation does not really have a business entity for handling business contracts either. It may not be all that important. Right now we redirect public facing mozilla.com to mozilla.org. Some of the internal facing are split between mozilla.org and mozilla.com. Anyway, I don't want to dilute the discussion.

While I truly believe and value community member;s effort (being a community member right now I am), I am just a bit old school and if either won't work I am just happy with something like @mozillians.org :)

Alina Mierlus

unread,
Dec 15, 2013, 6:52:37 AM12/15/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org, gokop...@gmail.com
+1 for the same reason. I’m very happy with @mozillians.org (and I’d use it proudly when needed).

Also, Mozilla is not Debian, Apache or Python. Mozilla is a set of organisations with millions of dollars revenue, a business development team and offices in some of the most expensive cities in the world. So...

-Alina 

> While I truly believe and value community member;s effort (being
> a community member right now I am), I am just a bit old school and
> if either won't work I am just happy with something like @mozillians.org
> :)
>

Rubén Martín

unread,
Dec 15, 2013, 11:18:30 AM12/15/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
El 15/12/13 12:21, gokop...@gmail.com escribió:
> While I truly believe and value community member;s effort (being a community member right now I am), I am just a bit old school and if either won't work I am just happy with something like @mozillians.org :)
The point here is there is a big consensus among the community about the
fact that we want external people to make no distinction between a
mozilla employee and a trusted mozilla volunteer, both are mozilla
community members.

That's the reason to make no distinctions when communicating and that's
the reason for a common @mozilla.org email for both.

This specific thread is about the initial phase where already identified
as trusted contributors (Mozilla Reps) get this @mozilla.org address to
later expand to a larger group.
signature.asc

Alina Mierlus

unread,
Dec 15, 2013, 8:34:49 PM12/15/13
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org, Rubén Martín
Hi, 

 Just for reference, I think this blog wasn’t mentioned: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2005/02/24/email-addresses-mozillaorg-and-the-mozilla-foundation/ 
  
 In my personal opinion, I think that, right now, the structure of the organisation and the situation is more complex than it was back in 2005. And, just think about Mozilla growing in both number of paid staff and contributors in the next years…

--
Alina Mierlus
similis.cc
@alina_mierlus

Activat 15 Dec 2013 at 17:18:51, Rubén Martín (nuke...@mozilla-hispano.org) escrit:
>
> El 15/12/13 12:21, gokop...@gmail.com escribió:
> > While I truly believe and value community member;s effort (being
> a community member right now I am), I am just a bit old school and
> if either won't work I am just happy with something like @mozillians.org
> :)
> The point here is there is a big consensus among the community
> about the
> fact that we want external people to make no distinction between
> a
> mozilla employee and a trusted mozilla volunteer, both are mozilla
> community members.
>
> That's the reason to make no distinctions when communicating
> and that's
> the reason for a common @mozilla.org email for both.
>
> This specific thread is about the initial phase where already
> identified
> as trusted contributors (Mozilla Reps) get this @mozilla.org
> address to
> later expand to a larger group.
>
> Regards.
>
> --
> Rubén Martín [Nukeador]
> Mozilla Reps Mentor
> http://www.mozilla-hispano.org
> http://twitter.com/mozilla_hispano
> http://facebook.com/mozillahispano
>
>
> - signature.asc, 271 bytes _______________________________________________

Mitchell Baker

unread,
Dec 17, 2013, 1:06:50 AM12/17/13
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Alina,
Wow, it is kind of awesome to have this stuff in the public and
available. I had forgotten I had written this post (thought not the
history, which i remember well.)

mozilla.org addresses have been tricky for a while now. We could do one
of three things.
1. not use mozilla.org addresses.
2. give mozilla.org address to a select group of people for some
reason, either:
(a) badge of honor; or
(b) support their authority and legitimacy
3. give mozilla.org address to *lots* of people, along the lines
dasher suggested earlier in this thread.

Figuring this out is related to figuring out how what we mean by
"Mozillian," how to support existing mozillians and develop more.

I connected with Mary, who noted her view that the first, critical steps
are to define Mozillians and establish common understanding of the
levels of "contribution" within this group, and to develop and
access/privileges that are associated with these levels.

I think Mary may be away from her computer for a few days, so I can't
provide a lot more detail, but I know she's eager to figure these things
out. I suspect we'll want an option for each of (2) and (3) above.

mitchell

:mrz

unread,
Dec 17, 2013, 9:56:47 AM12/17/13
to
On Monday, December 16, 2013 10:06:50 PM UTC-8, Mitchell Baker wrote:
> Alina,
>
> Wow, it is kind of awesome to have this stuff in the public and
> available. I had forgotten I had written this post (thought not the
> history, which i remember well.)

When researching the history around this, I actually used both of these as points of reference:

* https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2005/02/24/email-addresses-mozillaorg-and-the-mozilla-foundation/
* https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2005/02/07/mozillaorg-staff-and-mozilla-foundation-employees/

rje...@mozilla.com

unread,
Dec 9, 2014, 4:57:17 AM12/9/14
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
hi All - Having just joined this discussion I can see there hasn't been a final resolution posted?

I'm working with a volunteer who has been supporting my team quite a lot, and I would like to give access to a resource source (appannie) for them to be more integrated in our work.
(NB: Mozilla has free access to as many seats as we want but users need a @mozilla address of some sort to identify them, i.e. I can't add them as @gmail or other public available address.)

Is there a resolution here on this question?
Thanks!
Rina

Gervase Markham

unread,
Dec 9, 2014, 5:23:50 AM12/9/14
to rje...@mozilla.com
On 08/12/14 12:04, rje...@mozilla.com wrote:
> I'm working with a volunteer who has been supporting my team quite a
> lot, and I would like to give access to a resource source (appannie)
> for them to be more integrated in our work. (NB: Mozilla has free
> access to as many seats as we want but users need a @mozilla address
> of some sort to identify them, i.e. I can't add them as @gmail or
> other public available address.)

That seems broken. An email address is a universal identifier. Why
should the fact that other people can get addresses at the same domain
be a problem for appannie?

Mozilla is moving to use Google infrastructure for all its email, so
it's even entirely the same back end!

If the issue is that the access control is domain-based only, then there
are various Mozilla community domains (e.g. @mozilla-community.org, and
many regional ones) which may be able to provide the volunteer with an
identifier to use.

> Is there a resolution here on this question?

No.

Gerv


Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Dec 10, 2014, 5:20:07 PM12/10/14
to Gervase Markham, rje...@mozilla.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 2:22 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 08/12/14 12:04, rje...@mozilla.com wrote:
> > I'm working with a volunteer who has been supporting my team quite a
> > lot, and I would like to give access to a resource source (appannie)
> > for them to be more integrated in our work. (NB: Mozilla has free
> > access to as many seats as we want but users need a @mozilla address
> > of some sort to identify them, i.e. I can't add them as @gmail or
> > other public available address.)
>
> That seems broken. An email address is a universal identifier. Why
> should the fact that other people can get addresses at the same domain
> be a problem for appannie?
>
> Mozilla is moving to use Google infrastructure for all its email, so
> it's even entirely the same back end!
>
> If the issue is that the access control is domain-based only, then there
> are various Mozilla community domains (e.g. @mozilla-community.org, and
> many regional ones) which may be able to provide the volunteer with an
> identifier to use.
>
> > Is there a resolution here on this question?
>
> No.
>

It is a shame there is not despite how much support for such was shown in
the last round of discussions. It seems like we just got into bikeshedding
over the topic.

Gervase Markham

unread,
Dec 15, 2014, 9:02:20 AM12/15/14
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 10/12/14 22:19, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> It is a shame there is not despite how much support for such was shown in
> the last round of discussions. It seems like we just got into bikeshedding
> over the topic.

I really don't think that issues about who should get one, what the
criteria should be, whether it's for life or not, and how we make sure
we don't exclude parts of the community count as "bikeshedding"... they
seem pretty fundamental.

Gerv

Mike Hoye

unread,
Dec 16, 2014, 11:35:51 AM12/16/14
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
On 2014-12-15 9:01 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 10/12/14 22:19, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
>> It is a shame there is not despite how much support for such was shown in
>> the last round of discussions. It seems like we just got into bikeshedding
>> over the topic.
> I really don't think that issues about who should get one, what the
> criteria should be, whether it's for life or not, and how we make sure
> we don't exclude parts of the community count as "bikeshedding"... they
> seem pretty fundamental.

It's been a while, but let's see if we can settle this. [1]

I think that the case the Reps make - broadly speaking that enabling
community leadership is a thing we want and that a mozilla.org email
address can lend weight and legitimacy to those efforts - is compelling.
I think a better question than "should the Reps have m.o addresses" is
"do the Reps have an effective governance model".

As I understand it:

- We have a Reps Council, whose members are nominated & elected annually.
- There is a Reps module, owned by Pierros and peered by several others.

My understanding is that the reps council members are elected annually,
and the generally-acquiescent module peers are in the
benevolent-dictator seats with the module owner - Pierros - being the
place the buck stops. If we believe that this is an effective governance
model that results in responsible people advancing Mozilla's goals
responsibly - and I think it is and does, respectively - I propose that:

- Reps Council be empowered to nominate people to have an appropriate
Mozilla.org email addresses.
- With the module peers' assent those addresses be granted for the
duration of that person's active participation in the Reps, and that
- Council and module peers be responsible for usage guidelines,
policing, etc, with final approval resting with the module owner.

And we proceed with confident they'll do right by Mozilla with their
newfound superpowers.


- mhoye




[1] - The town square is suddenly empty. The noonday sun beats down as
the townsfolk shutter their windows. A tumbleweed rolls by. In the
distance, a train whistle.

Majken Connor

unread,
Dec 16, 2014, 7:39:32 PM12/16/14
to Mike Hoye, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
I think we were in agreement on Reps getting email addresses. Two parts
stalled:

1. How to actually give out the mailboxes
2. When we expand to allow non-Reps contributors to have the addresses (as
we agreed that contributors besides Reps have earned them) how do we have a
clear definition for non-Reps contributors that being a member of the Reps
program automatically provides Reps.

I don't remember which parts we agreed on, but there were some discussions
about whether or not the email address be revoked. I *believe* we agreed
that the address only be revoked in the case of abuse, ie, if you earned
it, even if you stopped being a contributor, you could keep it.

The beauty of starting out with granting email addresses to Reps, is that
we could work out the policy on abuse and if you get to keep the address
before expanding. Reps would be the pilot.

Council and module peers will not be able to police use of email addresses
in the sense of doing any sort of monitoring to watch for abuses. They
would be able though to respond to complaints. I don't believe Council
should be solely responsible for setting policy around this either. I
assume there are usage guidelines for employees? Perhaps Council could be
consulted to see if any changes in that policy would be needed to make the
email use suitable for volunteers.

Remember that council is only 9 people, 7 of whom are volunteers and all
are already doing plenty to manage the Reps program.

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Mike Hoye <mh...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> On 2014-12-15 9:01 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>
>> On 10/12/14 22:19, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
>>
>>> It is a shame there is not despite how much support for such was shown in
>>> the last round of discussions. It seems like we just got into
>>> bikeshedding
>>> over the topic.
>>>

Gervase Markham

unread,
Dec 17, 2014, 5:59:25 AM12/17/14
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 16/12/14 16:34, Mike Hoye wrote:
> I think that the case the Reps make - broadly speaking that enabling
> community leadership is a thing we want and that a mozilla.org email
> address can lend weight and legitimacy to those efforts - is compelling.
> I think a better question than "should the Reps have m.o addresses" is
> "do the Reps have an effective governance model".

I think they do; that's not a question for me. In one sense, Reps is the
easy part.

> - Reps Council be empowered to nominate people to have an appropriate
> Mozilla.org email addresses.

Does that scale? (I think Majken basically asked this question too.)

> - With the module peers' assent those addresses be granted for the
> duration of that person's active participation in the Reps, and that

An ephemeral email address is far less useful. I'm sure people step down
from being reps for reasons other than no longer being involved with
Mozilla. If we have the ability to remove in case of abuse,

> - Council and module peers be responsible for usage guidelines,
> policing, etc, with final approval resting with the module owner.

Thing is, this makes it seem like @mozilla.org email addresses will
remain a reps-only thing. Is that what you are saying? How do we expand
past reps? Not every core volunteer Mozillian can be or wants to be a rep.

Gerv

Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Dec 17, 2014, 7:16:25 AM12/17/14
to Majken Connor, Mike Hoye, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 4:39 PM, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think we were in agreement on Reps getting email addresses. Two parts
> stalled:
>
> 1. How to actually give out the mailboxes
> 2. When we expand to allow non-Reps contributors to have the addresses (as
> we agreed that contributors besides Reps have earned them) how do we have a
> clear definition for non-Reps contributors that being a member of the Reps
> program automatically provides Reps.
>

So I think the second issue could be something that could be decided later
and brought back to MozGov or even defined through normal ReMo Governance
later. I think getting to the point that Reps can get an address through a
process alone is a great step forward.

The first issue is simple because once we have consensus that were going to
move forward with this the request is really as simple as ReMo Governance
having a process and then once someone is approved a bug can be filed with
the appropriate component and IT can create an aliases.

I think looking back at the discussions there was overwhelmingly more
support for then against but the issue seems to be that because this is not
an asset controlled by ReMo that a decision maker like Mitchell or someone
further up the Mozilla ecosystem needs to sign off on this "Hey look we
have a consensus and so yes were going to do this" and give a blessing
officially here in the discussion.


>
> I don't remember which parts we agreed on, but there were some discussions
> about whether or not the email address be revoked. I *believe* we agreed
> that the address only be revoked in the case of abuse, ie, if you earned
> it, even if you stopped being a contributor, you could keep it.
>
> The beauty of starting out with granting email addresses to Reps, is that
> we could work out the policy on abuse and if you get to keep the address
> before expanding. Reps would be the pilot.
>
>
+1

Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Dec 17, 2014, 7:21:34 AM12/17/14
to Gervase Markham, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 2:58 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 16/12/14 16:34, Mike Hoye wrote:
> > I think that the case the Reps make - broadly speaking that enabling
> > community leadership is a thing we want and that a mozilla.org email
> > address can lend weight and legitimacy to those efforts - is compelling.
> > I think a better question than "should the Reps have m.o addresses" is
> > "do the Reps have an effective governance model".
>
> I think they do; that's not a question for me. In one sense, Reps is the
> easy part.
>
> > - Reps Council be empowered to nominate people to have an appropriate
> > Mozilla.org email addresses.
>
> Does that scale? (I think Majken basically asked this question too.)
>
>
I think it does are requests going to be handled overnight? No but will the
council scale to handling them I think so. I think also there could be a
feedback process from mentors making it easier for requests to be handled.


>
> > - With the module peers' assent those addresses be granted for the
> > duration of that person's active participation in the Reps, and that
>
> An ephemeral email address is far less useful. I'm sure people step down
> from being reps for reasons other than no longer being involved with
> Mozilla. If we have the ability to remove in case of abuse,
>
> I agree but I would say this gets the foot in the door and after the pilot
is done and as policy is expanded to other contributors the expiration
based on rep participation could be removed.



>
> > - Council and module peers be responsible for usage guidelines,
> > policing, etc, with final approval resting with the module owner.
>
> Thing is, this makes it seem like @mozilla.org email addresses will
> remain a reps-only thing. Is that what you are saying? How do we expand
> past reps? Not every core volunteer Mozillian can be or wants to be a rep.
>

I think that would be negative as I am already concerned that we tie some
many resources to reps that contributors in other areas of the project
cannot access. So it is an equity of resources issue.

If we move forward I would suggest having the pilot have an end date by
which point council could propose a broader framework.

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

unread,
Dec 17, 2014, 7:29:34 AM12/17/14
to gover...@lists.mozilla.org
-1 on the idea of using Reps as a pilot program.

If we decide that giving @mozilla.org addresses to some volunteers is
the right thing to do, we need to be able to manage requests from non
reps as well.
Otherwise we will create yet another tension between volunteers, and we
don't need any more of that.

Putting my volunteer's hat on, I'm not convinced that giving a
@mozilla.org address to volunteers is the right thing to do, but I have
the feeling that the boat for that discussion has already shipped.

Francesco

Larissa Shapiro

unread,
Dec 17, 2014, 8:12:41 AM12/17/14
to Benjamin Kerensa, Majken Connor, Mike Hoye, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
My tl;dr comment is that if this is clearly marketed as a "pilot" then I
fully, 100% support it, though I will echo the concern that this overloads
the Reps Council - in the long run it might make sense for another group of
people to be delegated this authority.


On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 4:15 AM, Benjamin Kerensa <bker...@mozillausa.org>
wrote:

Benjamin Kerensa

unread,
Jan 13, 2015, 10:04:43 PM1/13/15
to Larissa Shapiro, Majken Connor, Mike Hoye, gover...@lists.mozilla.org
I suppose this proposal is no go too? I think the issue is despite how much
support there is to move this forward by staff we need someone higher level
to support the proposal.
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