The Legal Stuff

[Nick Quaranto]

We've been dragging our collective feet on this since forever. NPM has blazed a trail with figuring out privacy policies and a code of conduct:

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/93540308465/legal-stuff

http://www.npmjs.com/policies/conduct

Please read both of these pages. The policies here sound exactly like how we have been operating RubyGems.org, we just haven't written them down, agreed to them, and started to enforce them.

I'm starting to see one of many reasons why NPM, Inc. exists: It's to provide the human face behind the service. Our support queue on http://help.rubygems.org is currently 30 issues deep. These issues are mostly requests to delete gems, and at least one that has threatened legal action against an all-volunteer run service.

I am out of steam, passion, and bandwidth to deal with these issues. I feel responsible to fix them, and I am one of the only people with access to the help site and servers that responds to people on the queue. Sometimes it's within minutes (rare), a week (maybe), or more (usually). I feel awful about it. It's not fun. Usually I see issues crop up over and over again, but by the time I work through the queue I am thoroughly exhausted from doing anything RubyGems related...until the guilt piles up again from more people asking from help.

I don't know what to do here. I personally cannot handle the issues queue by myself anymore. I wrote about getting more help on 3/28/13 but nothing really has changed since then: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rubygems-org/qB4O4mTbBtM/KP_xxXQlz7cJ  The outcome of that discussion was that working the support queue requires trusted access to the servers, and that approach has obviously failed. I have other projects and other things in my life that have changed since Gemcutter started in 2009, and the Help site was opened around early 2010.

Our community deserves better. A small part of me wishes someone had written the "next" Gemcutter by now. At the very least I'd like to help figure out:

1) Who can take over the help site, or if we should just close it.

2) Starting the process of getting a ToS, Privacy Policy, and CoC in place (maybe NPM would let us copy theirs as a starting point in good faith?)

3) How issues should be dealt with in the future regarding the new policies

As a final note, I'd like to say thanks to our infrastructure team for continuing to serve the Ruby community tirelessly and thanklessly. Please keep it up.

Nick

[Nicolas McCurdy]

npm has a GitHub repository for their policies. There's no license file, so according to GitHub, the repository should default to GitHub's terms of service which allow viewing and forking the repository..

[Mikel Lindsaar]

1) Who can take over the help site, or if we should just close it.

Hi there Nick,

Splitting this out to a separate thread from the legal stuff[1]

I'd be interested in finding out more of what is needed and wanted from my role as founder of reinteractive.  We have a dedicated ops team that looks after some pretty big Rails sites and are very good at keeping them online.

Are you (and Ruby Central) interested in getting help to run / manage the whole thing?  I guess if we took on managing / running the help site, then I'd want to also be responsible for the general up time of the whole rubygems.org, because as you said, handling one, without any access to the other would be a bit untenable.

Anyway, let me know your (and any one else's) thoughts.

Mikel Lindsaar

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rubygems-org/jixzTASyA6Q

[Nick Quaranto]

Hey Mikel,

Operations is a separate issue than support/help and already has a team of volunteers around this project: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems-aws

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[Sam Kottler]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Nick Quaranto <ni...@quaran.to> wrote:

Hey Mikel,

Operations is a separate issue than support/help and already has a team of volunteers around this project: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems-aws

It's actually all living here now - https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems-infrastructure.

In terms of operations we are actually in a pretty good place. I intend to write a longer response to Nick's original post, but Ruby Central recently sponsored a pretty decent amount of my time in to rebuild all the infrastructure and we relaunched the entire site ~3 weeks ago on that infrastructure [1] [2]. The rubygems-aws repo is no longer used for anything, rubygems-infrastructure is where all our systems management stuff is located.

-s

1. http://blog.rubygems.org/2014/06/30/maintenance.html

2. http://shk.io/2014/06/10/rubycentral-grant/

[James Rosen]

Zendesk have a volunteering program and a number of technical customer support agents who might be interested in working on these sorts of tickets. If Ruby Central are interested in having us help out, please let me know. I'll put the organization in touch with the volunteering manager.

-James

[Isaac Schlueter]

On Sunday, 3 August 2014 19:26:09 UTC-7, Nick Quaranto wrote:

We've been dragging our collective feet on this since forever. NPM has blazed a trail with figuring out privacy policies and a code of conduct:

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/93540308465/legal-stuff

http://www.npmjs.com/policies/conduct

Please read both of these pages. The policies here sound exactly like how we have been operating RubyGems.org, we just haven't written them down, agreed to them, and started to enforce them.

I'm starting to see one of many reasons why NPM, Inc. exists: It's to provide the human face behind the service. Our support queue on http://help.rubygems.org is currently 30 issues deep. These issues are mostly requests to delete gems, and at least one that has threatened legal action against an all-volunteer run service.

Wow, this is a really awesome reaction.  I could not agree more, and this is *exactly* the kind of effect that I'd hoped we might have on other services and communities in OSS.

We are overwhelmed as well, since we're still very small.  But, for what it's worth, incorporating, taking some funding, and heading for financial sustainability is a HUGE shift away from a volunteer-run service.  Everyone sleeps easier, much less stress.

I recommend brainstorming some ways that RubyGems could make some money without destroying your community.  Do the math to figure out how long it might take to get to profitability, talk to some venture capital folks, and hire employees who are smarter than you.  It changes the game entirely.  I would be happy to help out in any way I can, but given your place in the landscape, it probably wouldn't be hard to raise money.

It's not without trade-offs, of course, and VC isn't the only route.  You could also create a 501(c)6 foundation, and raise money that way, especially if you don't see a morally Good path to eventual profit.

Regarding the policies themselves, there isn't a single LICENSE file, because it doesn't quite make sense in this case.  However, most of the documents are shared under a CC-SA-Attribs license, which you'll see in one of the sections towards the bottom.  I got written permission from the Rust project to use bits of their language, and release under this license.

So, yes, please, take these policies, adapt them to your own use cases as needed.

https://github.com/npm/policies

Thanks!

[Evan Phoenix]

It's been discussed a few times internally about how Ruby Central could pay for the front level support that Nick is talking about. I also feel the guilt of not dealing with it very often and the guilt of having Nick feel like he's tethered to that responsibility.

Maybe RC could pay a support person per incident? Or just a contract that expects a very small number of hours per month? I'll talk with others at RC about if maybe we want to help provide this internally as well.

[James Cox]

I'd also be happy to help. If a few more trustable people got involved, i'm sure that would solve the current issues well enough so we could focus on the longer term issues.

best

james

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[Robert Fletcher]

It's really sad that so many people are getting burned out on their projects. Maybe it's just me becoming more aware of it, but it seems like the problem is getting worse. Nick, there's nothing to feel ashamed about. What's really a shame is that one of the major backbones of the ruby community is maintained primarily by a single, unpaid volunteer in their free time. Not at all to diminish the work of other people who have helped out, or the infrastructure team, but I really think there needs to be more than a single core maintainer on any project of a decent size, let alone one this big.

Maybe it's a topic for a separate thread somewhere, but it would be nice to talk about what needs to happen so that maintainers don't end up in this state of overwhelm and guilt, and projects don't fall behind because the person who is noble (or foolish) enough to take them on has to meet other more pressing responsibilities, such as paying the rent. I'd love to help as well, but I'm also vastly overbooked, and already have a variety of projects where people are asking me when this or that is going to be finished.

--

[Ryan Bigg]

I would absolutely love to volunteer some time to help out with the rubygems.org backlog, even if it's unpaid volunteering for a few hours a month. I've got a fairly light inbox load now in my new job, and so I reckon I could handle a couple of support issues. It sounds very much like the kind of work that I used to do at Spree, and similar to the stuff I do on Stack Overflow and #rubyonrails all the time.

Nick: you've done a fantastic job of maintaining this yourself for as long you've done. The dedication you've got to RubyGems.org is amazing. I think you're right that having a team dealing with support would help share the load. Let's get this set up ASAP so you can regain some sanity.

What needs doing first?

[David Radcliffe]

I’ve been working on the infrastructure for a couple years now and helping with the help queue when I have a chance too. One of the hard things about it (like Nick said) is almost every ticket requires both the knowledge and authority to make tough decisions AND the trusted access to act on those decisions.

To answer Nick’s questions:

1. Let’s not close it. There must be a way to handle issues that arise. As a community we need to “relieve” Nick of this duty though. Nick, thanks so much for all your hard work - it has not gone unnoticed!

2. Strong and clear policy documents should be started immediately. The NPM docs are a great place to start.

3. With strong policies, it should be much easier to make decisions about issues, without guilt or fear.

There are a few very common issues. Removal of gems is by far the most common issue. Others include problems installing, questions outside the scope of RubyGems.org that can be redirected, and networking problems.

What if we had a team of support people (I think plenty of people have offered over the years and even the past day) to review and make decisions on the tickets. Often a ticket will require a few messages back and forth to determine the proper action or resolution. Once a week they could shoot an email to the system admins with a list of gems to purge. Anything urgent could be passed on immediately of course.

This would allow support people to triage tickets and help people without needing access to the servers. Tickets would still be answered within a week and even if it takes a week or two to resolve, that’s better than months.

-David

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[Robert Fletcher]

Hey Nick,

I got in touch with an acquaintance of mine who is a lawyer with a particular focus on startups and issues such as these. He said he'd be up for helping out on a pro bono basis if you're interested. Let me know and I can put you in touch. He's given me personally some valuable advice on my own projects, as well as being an important resource to the company I work with.

- Robert

[Nick Quaranto]

I started brain dumping once again onto the Trello board for what needs to be done here. Would appreciate some more focused discussion here:

https://trello.com/b/vdSSFMOp/rubygems-org

There's several github repos at work here and I've tried to make Trello a bigger picture of "what's going on" for the site. Obviously has been neglected for a while, could use some love, and would benefit everyone.

[Amos King]

I'm currently looking for clients so I have some free time. I'm also planning on only working on client work for 4 days a week. I would be happy to spend part of the last day working on issues. Maybe a few hours a week or one day a month.

Amos

Amos King

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[Nick Quaranto]

Apparently you need to be added to a Trello board to edit things, and I was not aware of that. I added a new card to grab some attention, please leave a comment here if you'd like access.

https://trello.com/c/orrv5Cdg/47-welcome-start-here-want-access-to-edit-move-things-around-please-leave-a-comment

Re: Legal/lawyer advice, I don't think we have gotten to that point yet, but I'm hoping Ruby Central has someone on retainer or at least a referral if we do.

[Evan Phoenix]

Ruby Central doesn't have one on retainer but we can certainly sort something out.

[anuj dutta]

Hey,

I have been watching this discussion from the fence and had a quick look at the Trello board. 

Is there a priority to these issues/features? I wouldn't mind helping out a bit.

Thanks.

Anuj

[Evan Phoenix]

On our call today, Ruby Central discussed the support situation. What we're going to do is have Abby Phoenix and Shirley Bailes, the 2 Ruby Central employees that typically do work on the conferences, start monitoring the support account and responding to it. I'm going to be giving them training with the idea that they can be a first level of support initially. If it turns out to be more work than they feel they can handle, we'll go to our next idea: hiring a part time support person.

 - Evan

[Mikel Lindsaar]

On 6 Aug 2014, at 9:54 am, Evan Phoenix <ev...@phx.io> wrote:
> On our call today, Ruby Central discussed the support situation. What we're going to do is have Abby Phoenix and Shirley Bailes, the 2 Ruby Central employees that typically do work on the conferences, start monitoring the support account and responding to it. I'm going to be giving them training with the idea that they can be a first level of support initially. If it turns out to be more work than they feel they can handle, we'll go to our next idea: hiring a part time support person.

Sounds like a good plan.

[Jeb Coleman]

Hi Evan, I'm happy to dedicate a couple of hours a week to helping out, would just need a bit of direction.

My skills are that of an advanced beginner but I'd love to contribute in some way.

Feels like all I've been doing is taking advantage of all the goodness in the Ruby community since I got started programming.

Let me know if I can help.

m:347-244-5269

jebco...@gmail.com