response 320 of 480:

Dec 15 02:39 UTC 2006

I'm not sure that grex staff has what can be said to be clearly defined
processes.  Rather, there's a set of general guidelines for doing things:
try to get a concensus, work on what you're interested in, unless it steps
on someone else's toes.  Some things are always okay for all staff members.
For instance, cleaning up stale accounts, deleting hacker tools or copies of
BNC or eggdrop or other large files.  Some are okay for certain staff
members at all times.  For instance, Marcus can more or less make whatever
changes to the authentication system or password database he wants.  Steve
can more or less do whatever he wants (for instance, repartition the disks
during an upgrade without, I don't think, consulting anyone beforehand or
really making a plan to make sure we don't lose data).  Some are okay for
some staff members some of the time.  Remmers can make certain changes to
system configuration files in an emergency; usually he will go out of his
way to let people know that he's done and and solicit feedback, etc.

Let me reiterate because I think this is important: if you're one of the
what one might call ``principle'' staff members, you can more or less do
what you want and if someone objects you can later lay down an argument, but
do so knowing that, basically, there won't be any real consequences (for
example, under what circumstances would Steve ever get *his* root access
pulled?  Now before someone jumps down my throat, I'm not saying that anyone
*should* pull Steve's access, but has anyone ever given any serious
consideration to what it would take for that to happen?  Now what would it
take for someone to pull someone else's?  We recently saw Mic's get yanked,
for instance.  What would have happened if the roles had been reversed?).

It was also my sense that the idea of putting some processes in place just
wasn't going to fly.  The usual argument against would be something along
the lines of, ``staff is busy; they have lives; they aren't paid; you can't
ask them to do something they don't want to do; be grateful they do anything
at all; why do you want to create more work?''

It's interesting to see some people other than myself say things that
basically echo my own sentiment of how staff operates: if you want to make a
controversial decision, odds are good you'll be told that it needs
discussion first, and then discussion will continue until you lose energy to
pursue it and just let it go.  I feel like the password hash thing is a lot
like that: there's no good reason for sticking with what we have now, but
instead of changing, we're told we need to ``discuss'' it first and then no
one says anything until whoever proposed it (in this particular case, me)
gives up.  If it's raised at some point in the future, the person raising it
(again, in this case, me) is told that it's been discussed, no one wanted to
do it, stop wasting everyone's time with endless debate, it creates friction
on the staff team to keep raising the same issues, etc.  Eventually the
cycle repeats.

Here's another way to look at that particular issue: some people are
motivated to work on staff because sometimes they get to work on things that
interest them.  That was my initial draw to grex: the technology that
allowed an open-access Unix system to actually work without imploding on
itself.  When I first got on grex staff, I was sort of dismayed at what a
patchwork the software on the old Sun really was: in particular, the
password subsystem was *really* hacked together, very brittle, and very,
very easy to break (for example, making a textual edit to the password file
would *really* mess things up.  Instead, Marcus or someone had written an
*interactive* tool for manipulating the user database.  If you forgot and
ran ``vipw'' you would really, really screw things up).  It was interesting
to me, with the move to the OpenBSD machine, to work on that problem, and it
eventually became clear that the BSD people had sufficiently evolved the
password subsystem in the standard distribution so that grex didn't need
customizations.  To me, it was an interesting problem to figure out how to
get from our custom solution to the standard solution (which was necessary
on the Sun given the primitive nature of that system's password subsystem).
However, I found great resistance to doing that, because a lot of it was
Marcus's baby, and no one wanted to make him mad, even though he hadn't
really been active on grex in some time.  Okay, fine, but *I* as a newish
staff member was still prevented from working on a problem that interested
me.  Well, if that happens enough times, why would I *want* to continue to
do anything but the grudge work that no one seemed to mind anyone doing?

If every time you raise interest in working on some problem you're told no
because someone else ``owns'' it, even though they're not doing anything
with it, how long until you lose interest?  Is that being thin-skinned?  I
don't really think so, but I'm no psychology expert, so take what I say with
a grain of salt.  I do think it's fair to say that it's not being inclusive
of the interests of ``new'' staff members.  It is, in my opinion,
essentially saying that the interests of long-time grex staff members, even
if they're inactive, outweigh the interests of newer members, particularly
those that aren't local to Ann Arbor.

response 322 of 480:

Dec 15 03:09 UTC 2006

 re #318, 321:  I was on staff for at least a year and I frankly
 don't recall ever hearing about any staff meetings either.  I
 definitely never participated in one.  I thought they were something
 Mary imagined until comments from other respondents confirmed that
 they believed in them, too.

 Like Dan, it's also possible that I, too, might have missed e-mail
 notifications due to filtering the ludicrous amounts of mail that
 I got deluged with after being added to the staff mailing lists
 (I haven't mentioned this before but I almost resigned from staff
 less than a week after volunteering to help because the crap from
 the mailing lists so disrupted my personal mail account.)  Instead
 I diverted that mail to gmail and archived it.  A search through
 the archived staff mail shows only one conversation where the
 phrase "staff meeting" was used in mail that I received and on
 that occasion (in 11/2005) no staff meeting was called (that I
 was informed of..)  My contributions as a staff member were 
 extremely paltry, but if there was a loop I was so far out of the
 loop that I apparently wasn't even aware of its existence.

response 324 of 480:

Dec 15 03:27 UTC 2006

To the best of my knowledge, the staff has not met since you were added to
it, Mike.

response 326 of 480:

Dec 15 04:36 UTC 2006

Is anyone currently working on restoring newuser?
keesan's proposed spam filter is simply using spamassassin to filter on
anything with three spam points, plus a sample of how to put your friends on
a whitelist, which is much shorter than what keesan is using to filter her
own spam (which got all but one spam today) which probably uses less cpu time
because most spam is WIndows charset or the 60 stock spams a day and I put
those filters first.

response 328 of 480:

Dec 15 04:47 UTC 2006

Regarding #326; I really doubt it.

response 330 of 480:

Dec 15 06:27 UTC 2006

i don't know why anyone responds to keesan.  she's obviously in her own world

response 332 of 480:

Dec 15 13:13 UTC 2006

Let me be sure I have accurate data:  There has been no face-to-face staff
meeting since sometime before November 2005?

The way staff communicate about a problem is to 1) discuss it in staff
conference, 2)  email each other using staff at Grex as the email address,

Do staff members ever telephone each other?  Do staff members have alternative
email addresses that are known to other staff members?  

I'm curious about how staff decides who will handle an emergency, what
problems are important to be working on, and whether or not any two staff
members ever work together on a problem.

I'm also curious who has staff privileges on Grex.  

So far I can see remmers, gelinas, STeve, marcus.  Former staff members
include mcnally, cross, spooked.

response 334 of 480:

Dec 15 18:25 UTC 2006

In case this is actually the spam item, I am curious if anyone got the usual
60 copies of Russian stock spam in the last 24 hours.  I don't think I did,
unless they changed to a different method of randomizing subject lines.
Today my spam filter did not miss a single spam or get a single false
positive.  It caught lots of Russian or Chinese English viagra spam.

response 336 of 480:

Dec 15 18:29 UTC 2006

I am NOT suggesting that people use my filter, but a much shorter and simpler
one that I wrote a sample of - see procmail.simple.  It uses spamassassin and
also has samples of how to whitelist your friends.  The filter I am using for
myself precedes spamassassin by a few other filters on Windows charsets and
the current day's stock spam subject line, to save cpu time by searching only
on header (including whitelisting friends).  Header is the stuff you see all
of when you view a mail with pine and hit H.

response 338 of 480:

Dec 15 18:45 UTC 2006

Which one of those on staff is the newbie?  That's the same staff from 10
years ago if I'm not mistaken.

response 340 of 480:

Dec 15 20:36 UTC 2006

I'm not sure I see how staff reaches consensus, given that they don't seem
to have a communication mechanism that includes all staff members.  

How do "meetings" occur.  By "meetings" I mean whatever group process was used
to reach decisions that were then conveyed to cross and mcnally as decisions
reached "at a meeting last night"?

response 342 of 480:

Dec 15 20:46 UTC 2006

We are Devo

response 344 of 480:

Dec 15 21:34 UTC 2006

I have been given the strong impression that the current staff would 
not take kindly to having the board take too much control over how 
staff chooses to run things. It is a delicate situation to be sure 
since anyone can easily quit and walk away at any time because they 
dont like the politics.