Hi All, as of suggestion of @heather I republish here my Issue on http://drupal.org/node/336185
as to gain some feedback that might help my understanding of the goals and rules that
exist in written or not written form for the Drupal.org Community.
________________________________________________________________________________
In the English version of the "Statutes and Internal Regulations" for the "Drupal Association Statutes" of December 4, 2006 in the paragraph 1: Statutes in the Chapter 1.1 Chapter I: Denomination, Registered Office, Term and Goals, Article 1.1.4 Article 4: Goals is written:
- Section 1: Description
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The purposes of the Association shall be for providing support in developing, communicating, promoting, distributing the Drupal project and in deploying an infrastructure in support of the Drupal project.
The scope of the “Drupal project” shall include the following specific issues:
the Drupal open-source software system (http://drupal.org), the community of developers and users of this software and all associated activities and all infrastructures in their broadest sense considered to be required to further develop this project.
- Section 2: Authority
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The community of Drupal developers decides independently on the functionality on the one hand and on planning the development of the Drupal software on the other. The Association shall not have casting vote in such matters.
- Section 3: Tasks
- In order to achieve the objective, the Association shall be entitled to complete the following tasks:
- Accepting donations and grants
- Organizing and/or sponsoring Drupal project-specific events
- Representing the Drupal project at conferences and/or fairs, events, venues, such as by sending representatives
- Engaging in partnerships with both for-profit entities and non-forprofit entities
- Acquiring, sponsoring and/or managing infrastructures supporting the Drupal project
- Supporting projects and developments through awarding grants and/or by paying wages and/or by acquiring services from a third party whether for payment or not.
- Producing promotional materials and/or educational documents relating to the Drupal project
- Soliciting suitable fiscal, accounting or legal advice
- Preparing and releasing press releases
- Performing tasks appropriate to the goals, to the extent they are not contradictory to the law or terms and provisions as set forth by the Association
The above enumeration of items are examples only and not intended to be exhaustive.
- Section 4: Means
- The Association shall be empowered to adopt all necessary and proper, direct or indirect means to accomplish this goal which includes real estate acquisition and management.
1.1.4 Article 4: Goals
- The Key sentence what I want to put your attention on is:
-
The community of Drupal developers decides independently on the functionality on the one hand and on planning the development of the Drupal software on the other.
The Association shall not have casting vote in such matters.
- 1. As a Member paying contribution to the Drupal Association I have to subordinate to this statutes regulators.
- 2. As a registered Member on Drupal.org Community I am part of the developers community and participate on planning the development of the Drupal software and the "Drupal project" which is represented in fact by the site Drupal.org and all his Subdomains.
- 3. The Drupal Software include also the related documentation that is written, reviewed and published on Drupal.org by the Book Contributors.
That means that all the documentation content written in the Drupal release and in the Drupal Contributed Modules and all the content in the Drupal.org Handbooks are parts of the Drupal Software
- the Creative Commons License, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
-
All Drupal handbook pages are © copyright 2000-2008 by the individual contributors and can be used in accordance with the Creative Commons License, Attribution-ShareAlike2.0. This copyleft license (very similar to the GPL) allows anyone to copy, modify, and redistribute modifications of all or part of the Drupal handbook as long as
- the license is included with all copies or redistributions.
- the Drupal handbook is attributed as the originating document.
These conditions can be waived only if permission is obtained from the copyright holder(s). By posting comments to the pages in the Drupal handbook, Drupal site members agree that the comments can be revised and/or incorporated wholesale into the Drupal handbook pages under the licensing terms given above.
Contributors to the Drupal handbook are listed on the book contributors page.
- This is stated and published in the top of the Drupal handbooks page on Drupal.org:
-
The Drupal handbooks offer a reference for those interested in Drupal whether novice or experienced, users or developers. Source code documentation can be found on api.drupal.org. All content is supplied by volunteers, please contribute where you see a need through the convenient 'add a child page' link on each page (e.g. missing module documentation). If you are interested in editing existing content then sign up to help.
- Who are the individual contributors?
- and under what kind of authority they have to subordinate on Drupal.org as registered Members?
Drupal.org Site define the content of the Drupal Book Contributions with the publication in a Block that you see on the left always in the Drupal.org Handbooks with a Handbook license:
None !
- Nobody at all
-
Yes my dear Visitors, Members, Volunteers, Book Contributors, Code Developer and all the people belonging to the different Drupal.org Teams Members
-
The only way to grant a future of the Dupal.org Community is that we all together develop a Drupal.org regulators as for giving ourselves a kind of authority structure that can preserve the existence on the Drupal.org site.
-
That is what I understood so far reading and trying to focus where and to whom I can refer if I need to solve a problem or a task on Drupal.org.
-
Of course the main group of People that take care on that are Code developers that in the time are being supported by Dries Buytaert who grant them special site-role and more power access to the Drupal.org Site but till today we do not have really a defined and clear Authority on Drupal.org Site.
-
So far I have understand Dries Buytaert self wants one Day relay to the Drupal Association the power to defend and preserve the Drupal copyrights and all related activities that have directly to do with the Drupal Association so as also the administration of the open-source Drupal CMS project.
Reference: excerpt of an Article/post on www.angrydonuts.com by Earl MilesThe term Drupal is currently trademarked by Dries Buytaert (and an invalid trademark exists by some US company that is still being dealt with). This trademark existed prior to the formation of the Drupal Association. It has been agreed that, at some point, if Dries believes the Association has matured into a vibrant, trustworthy organization, he will transfer this trademark to the Association itself. But, and I totally agree with this, not until the Association has proven itself. At this time, it has not yet done that.
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But this will only happen if all the Members of the community are able to build clear policies and also the needed Authority organs that will take the management and the control of all what is happaning on the Drupal.org Site and with the registered Members.
Therefor I started Getting Involved: It's Time to make "Drupal Org Teams - Best Practice" Section
Please forgive my bad English that may lead to misunderstandings and unclear statements. My contribution in this regard is truly and only motivated by following means:
- 1. My registered membership on Drupal.org
- My first partecipation act was with registering on Drupal.org 2 years and 24 weeks ago as a regular User on Drupal.org.
- 2. My commandation as a Doc Team member
- This happen August 17, 2008 - 04:45 when I submit a formal permission to join the Doc-Team and by wechick, reviewed with following Issue and answered with following comment: "Looks like this was already taken care of by someone. Welcome, wolfflow! :) Thanks for all that you do!"
- 3. With my nomination and commend to Site Mainatiner
- The September 14, 2008 - 03:15, Michelle proposed me, Wolf Zirbs, ( alias Wolfflow) to be nominated "Site Maintainer" with this Issue. The Issue was aknoledged by: lut4rp - September 14, 2008 - 16:09, by Gerhard Killesreiter - September 14, 2008 - 16:11, by add1sun - September 14, 2008 - 16:38 and taken in action by granting me "Site Maintainer" role by Gerhard Killesreiter - September 14, 2008 - 16:42.
- 4. My subscribtion to the Drupal Association
- The 5, August 2008 - 1:43 PM I got the answer for my contribution request by Kieran Lal and join the Drupal Association as Individual Member.
Thanks for your Attention. I'm always willing to answer and clear out those points.
Kind Regards
Wolfflow
Comments
Left me a bit confused
wolfflow: I have no doubt that your intentions are well and good. I encourage your efforts.
but..
After reading this entire post, your post in the issues queue and your other posts on groups.drupal.org I'm left a bit confused as to what you're asking.
I saw the following 3 main ideas in your posts
"Who are the individual contributors?"
"There is no clear authoritative structure to drupal.org maintainers"
"The community needs to organize itself in order to take over control of drupal.org"
Am I understanding this correctly?
Could you please write a very concise, less than 3 sentence summary of what you see as the problem and/or the solution(s) you want to see.
We all applaud your efforts but you've left quite a number of the people confused.
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
@jredding, first thank for
@jredding,
first thank for your comment. Yes you are right it is a bit difficult for me to figure out in simple words what I'm trying to focus on.
Maybe this simple sentence may help to clear out my preoccupations.
Newbies and beginners needs often simple reference on to whom they can report they problems with their accounts on Drupal.org.
Even if it is a great honor ton be consider as a special contributor, like being accepted as a Member of the Documentation Team or even nominated as Site maintainers this implicate that you got many more responsibility and also risk to make error in acting with the more granted role access and relative powerful tools.
Not every one wnats to test it without having before an Idea of what the actions could cause so the newbies and beginners in those role will try to ask.
But he also would wish to have gotten the right reference from the right Team Member. see Proposal: As to improve identification on Issue and Comment for every Member
My efforts are simply directed to build an information reference for all team Members as to know where to refer their questions and proposal, and not only have to deal AFAIK with 3 to 4 different queues where you very often will be advised by very different experienced and qualified members that sometime really frustrate oneselfs.
I'm not 100% certain I understand, but
It seems like this is about how drupal.org content/workflow is managed. That is outside of what the Drupal Association focuses on. Among other things, the Association makes sure the servers are online and that the code hosted on the servers is in good legal shape, but beyond that the Association doesn't intend to directly control or organize the site itself.
Many of the people in the Association are also active in maintaining the site as active participants in the infrastructure queue and webmasters queue. That is not something they do as Association members - they did it before joining the DA and are not encouraged or required to continue doing it as members of the DA.
Separately from the Association piece, one note in general: the Drupal project doesn't have a particularly hierarchical or codified system of "teams" nor roles. Yes, there is a Docs team and a Security team, but beyond that the groups of people working on different issues are constantly in flux. My sense is that this organizational system has served the community well and that few people are interested in working towards building a more rigid and hierarchical structure (which seems to be part of your goal, but maybe I misunderstood).
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
ok. I pretty sure I understand now
First I have to say the Greggles is right. The Drupal Association can't help you here because it does not manage Drupal.org. The Association only ensures that the servers are running, bandwidth is flowing and the power is on.
I would say though that this seemed to be inline what was you are asking. You want a nice simple hierarchy of who is in charge of what and where can a newbie go for help. You're correct it can be a little unclear at times and well there maybe a need for some new documentation to document how exactly to document on drupal.org (sorry couldn't resist).
You really do have to take this up with the documentation team though. You are already a member of that team though, so I must ask if you found it difficult to communicate with them or if there are reasons why you are not utilizing those channels.
You're work is appreciated, lets try to get to the bottom of what you need and see if there is a solution for you.
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
@greggles, @jredding. First
@greggles, @jredding.
First thank you very much for your answers. Thank You that you get and toke the time to answer me. I really appreciate and it helped me to get more clear about many aspects. I also get a lot of feedback from other issue I made and I wish to have the time to answer. Please give me a little break to summaries and organize the many comments I got in the last Days. I got also on http://drupal.org/node/336185 many feedback and I'm really happy and wish to build a much clear summary and report on what may be useful to me to express my ideas quite a bit more clear. Thanks meanwhile. I will be back! ;-)
Some more information and example
Hi, Allow me to introduce this comment with a metaphor:
Beside this I just toke the time to make a simple example on my test site. If you take a brief look on this page
you may see that I have reconstruct almost all the original Issue I made before coming here to try to get clear about some aspects of copyrights issue on the Drupal.org Sites.
I just want to know if this action of cloning Drupal.org content considering the fact that I my self am on the same time,
is legal under the current copyright regulations valid for Drupal.org at the moment.
Thank You for your feedback
Kind Regards
still not sure
I'm still not sure I understand your questions, but...
Regarding the boat analogy - the only solution is to clean up the waste you feel is no longer necessary. Of course, do that within the community review process or you may find that your "waste" is another person's treasure.
Regarding the appropriateness and permission to copy/paste content out of drupal.org, I believe it has been decided that the handbooks are cc-by-sa. Forum posts and issues - http://drupal.org/node/221876 - are somewhat undecided. It is appropriate to copy content from drupal.org as allowed (under cc-by-sa OR under "fair use") but it is not appropriate to simply copy all of drupal.org as a "scraper." If someone is seen to be a scraper then they are likely to have their IP blocked and account(s) suspended.
In General: the Association was built to take care of things that the "community" either couldn't or wouldn't. The community as a whole can't easily accept donations and handle money due to tax laws, so the association handles a lot of that. The community hasn't placed a priority on some legal issues, so the Drupal Association is slowly working on some of them. So, when you see an area that is not handled (at all) by the community but does need to get done, that is a likely place for the Drupal Association to do some work. Of course, whether or not the volunteers on the association decide to work in that area is another question...that is up to their personal priorities.
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Growing Venture Solutions | Drupal Dashboard | Learn more about Drupal - buy a Drupal Book
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Hi greg, first I hope you
Hi greg,
first I hope you and all do understand and believe me that my is only an example and I really want to clarify that I'm definitely not a Scraper.
As you self wrote:
I have post this issue just to formalize my awareness to this special matter. It is also somehow very unclear how to deal with request coming from registered user that may wish to upgrade their "showcase" posted in past or at the beginning their learning curve on drupal.org as to show their achievements and have now the wish to somehow remove or at list avoid their old "showcases" be accessible from everywhere, (A kind of hidden Archive for Registered Members?)
I'm sorry if I trying to posting here maybe I would find a Higher Authority that have somehow influence on the Community Working groups, it's my fault if I misunderstood the real role of the Drupal Association.
Of course I will delete the example page, just allow me to wait a while until others can express their feedback.
Thanks You for your Comment.
Kind Regards
Just to reiterate
The Association simply can not help you in this manner. The administration and content on drupal.org is left to the infrastructure and management teams. This separation is purposeful in order to let the community to have control.
I have to encourage you to work through the proper channels on getting your request served and your questions answered. If you have tried working through those channels and have run into a brick wall then we can attempt to step in but, again, this isn't the Association area of expertise. We keep things legal and the lights on and we do not manage the community.
Also nobody believes you are a scraper of that you have bad intentions. In fact we all think you are working to enhance and strengthen the community. We want to hear your ideas and see your efforts put to good use but they must go through the proper channels.
Thank you,
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
hhm... that might have..
That might have come across as a little crass. I want to make it clear that you're doing good work and we appreciate this but you're simply in the wrong place at the moment. The documentation team is who you need to discuss these items with.
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
Hi Jacob, Thank you for
Hi Jacob, Thank you for underline what I almost have understood from the previously feedback of @greg. Maybe my writing did not express this clear enough and I'm again sorry that my English is still poor. I' Site maintainer just fro about 4 month and I followed , evidently mistakenly the suggestion of a member of the doc Team, as mentioned in the opening by me, of this issue. I'm sorry if my sentence above wasn't understand as a bit sarcastic but real not wanting to offend the Drupal Association whom I'm also representing as contributor in the very base part (meaning "one of the last wheels of the wagon" ( an Italian proverbial expression)).
I also take care to try as good as I can to express my self in legal term, and even if I'm not quite expert to do this, I'm pitting all my efforts to try to discuss this matter and to find the right audience on Drupal.org. But unfortunately at the moment it does not seem to exist.
Allow me last, to wish to all interested and direct involved people to find one day the time and a good mood and inspiration to find
a clear position.
I thank You for your contribution
Kind Regards
The right audience
The right audience appears to be the documentation team from what I see here.
Why do you believe that this is not the right team?
A note: We all want to help you and I'm very sincere about this fact. Please, however, refrain from analogies and stories in your responses as they are making it difficult to understand what you are referring to. Try to keep your response short and simple so that we can help you in a quick manner. Language barriers are difficult so lets try to keep things simple.
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
Hi, Jacob, Hi to all
Hi, Jacob, Hi to all Association Members, Sorry if I answer just now to your request to be more clear. Allow me to inform you what happened during this last period. First I have resign from my responsibilities as Doc-Team and Site Maintainer roles. I am surely not happy about, but I see that at the moment there is no necessity for someone like me in those working groups. I really wanted to port in this community some clarifications about many aspects that IMO could, should care registered Members.
I know You may again ask me to be more precise and for that I'm going to list the points that mostly I was involved in.
Glossary of common used words, terms and expressions used by the members on D.O. in posts, comments and Issues (further abbreviated with: PCI).
Scope & Target: Help no-native English to understand better what sometimes is explained and written in PCIs.
Design a kind of map of references for individuate the different Members Roles on D.O. their field of competence, their default communication lines and discussions platform.
Scope & Target: Help reader of PCIs to identify level of competence, authority and organization on D.O., and also to get used to the overall "feedback" system on D.O.
Build a Handbook Section where document the TOU for Members and Higher Members Roles
Scope & Target: Give to anybody members the possibility to inform themselves to "By Design" applied policies, that until know you have to excerpt after reading long PCIs and are mostly very contradictory and in many cases subjectively and informal.
You may understand that it is no more my intention to insist on this "Scope & Targets" because I get the clear impression that there is no intention and interest at the moment, to add this IMO essential community management items from part of the component of the different Working Teams and Leaders.
I have almost spent 3 to 4 months of intensive diving in D.O. to workout that this personal ideas would lead to a better administration of the communication flow and clearance between members on D.O. and make this Community much more different of any I have frequented since my 15 Year of Internet surfing experience.
I'm a independent IT consultant and I know that most of the IT administration and configurations commissions stacks by misunderstanding of policies and roles application. My Idea was just to help out and support the very broad numbers of Members that do not orient and subordinate well in a world dominated by English native Users.
Kind Regards
Wolf Zirbs (@wolfflow)
FYI: The term/word Scope
FYI: The term/word Scope used in my Comment above was and is used with following definition:
In project management, the scope of a project is the sum total of all of its products and their requirements or features.
please do not misunderstand my additional note and clarification as only meant to avoid further wrong interpretation of my no-native English writing.
Kind Regards
As I really cared for this Community
I will also provide an approach for all interested in improving this Community quality and Management resources.
This is somehow a draft plan for a possible additional approach to a development strategy for this Community.
Please consider that my knowledge of English is limited and some points maybe unclear and misinterpreted.
and outreach strategies, including both tools presently being used to emerging technologies.
Limited Actions for continue to contribute for Drupal Community
Hi, after reconsidering my actual position in and out the community I have decided to start a new action for helping in discussing the overall position of the closest teams contributing to the "Drupal Project" in the interest for helping User that might encounter difficulties with the (documented/undocumented) policies actually applied on the Drupal.org Sites.
In consideration of my not native English writings and formulation of material and documentation about this I would really appreciate any help coming from inside and outside the teams members of Drupal Community.
I am either not very confident with all the features that exist on Drupal.org sites as those on Groups.drupal.org and on any that would be a great enforcement for managing the Drupal.org Membership Help Line Working Group.
I will appreciate any kind of support and suggestion for this intent.
Thanks