[HCoop-Discuss] My hats

[Adam Chlipala]

-----Original Message-----
From: "Ryan Mikulovsky" <ryan at hcoop.net>

>There's no reason to browbeat
him over e-mails and bugzilla requests.

Again, "browbeating" is an emotionally-motivated activity, and I haven't engaged in it.  I made an offhand, parenthetical remark based on facts that I thought everyone agreed on.  The musing on what those facts implied needed to be done was my own, contestable opinion.  This thread has drawn out to look like my relishing posting diatribe after diabtribe of an anti-ntk nature because people keep accusing me of lying about the facts or exaggerating the importance of following the rules that ntk broke.

So, to settle this for my side, I'm going to list some specific things that ntk has done that cast doubt on whether it's worth having him in any volunteer capacity if he is going to keep doing them.  ntk will agree that he did all of them, so there's no point in questioning them factually.

1. At least twice, scheduling a visit to Peer 1 and then not showing up and not notifying the admins who are waiting for him until hours later.

2. Taking more than 48 hours to respond to hcoop-sysadmin messages with his username in their subjects.  I'm particularly remembering our attempts to hook frank up with Peer 1 access during his recent two-week visit to NYC, but I know there were recent precedents.

Problem 1 is just basic courtesy that I wouldn't have thought needed any formal rule or agreement.  Problem 2 should have been avoided by ntk sending an AWAY message to hcoop-sysadmin warning that his response time would be over 48 hours.  While I only recently created a wiki page detailing this policy, the relevant aspects had been discussed on our mailing lists and IRC months before, and I can produce logs to prove it if anyone really wants to claim that ntk hadn't committed to uniform 24-hour response time to messages addressed to him on mailing lists.  All it takes is an e-mail to announce unavailability, so no stressful life experience of the kind ntk described can be a justification for just disappearing.  Do you think I like struggling to type this message in time on my mobile phone because my DSL is down and I ned to leave soon for my first day of work?  It's worth notifying other volunteers in any situation where taking the time to do so doesn't have grave, permanent consequences, and you can make a phone call to ask one of us to post your AWAY message if you don't have 'net access.

So, there are the facts.  The best resolution is that this fracas motivates ntk to take these guidelines more seriously from now on.  I really do think that repeated incidents like these merit removal from volunteer positions, but that I'll agree is open to debate.  Right now, I think that the best resolution is most likely.