OTW Board Absences

From the public minutes, from November’s election up to the June 2 meeting:

Out of 20 meetings, board members were absent for:

10 Francesca Coppa (50% absentee)

8 Naomi Novik (40% absentee)

7 Ira Gladkova (35% absentee)

4 Julia Beck (20% absentee)

4 Jenny Scott-Thompson (20% absentee)

1 Nikisha Sanders (5% absentee)

1 Kristen Murphy (5% absentee)


Your votes at work, ladies and gentlemen. Or, in some cases, not.

Okay, no

So, anyone at all can submit pull requests to the OTW github, now. Supposedly, this way "experienced coders" can help in a drive-by way without having to jump through all the volunteering, form-filling, hoops.

That's nice.

Except for the part where you still need to jump through the hoops to get a development environment, the thing that lets you see the code from the back end. Without a development environment, the only way you can write a drive-by bug fix is by installing a local version of the Archive on your own computer or webspace which effort, the github documentation specifically says, will not receive any help or support. ETA: That's a bit better. A Windows install will not be supported, but there are some docs available for OSX or Linux; the Secretary has also added a link to the new IRC channel, which is entirely laudable.

And why the hell should anyone go to that kind of trouble? In what way is that "casual"? In what way is this actually useful? ETA: In particular, how is this useful given the OTW's history of bad faith and abusing their pool of volunteers, to date? How is a "well, it's better than most" barrier going to convince anyone who's been watching this train wreck for a few years, now, to dip a toe in?

I am seriously out of patience with this run-around, and the misinformation someone is evidently feeding the rest of the org. Whoever first suggested that opening up pull requests alone would open up development in some meaningful way? Lied.

And if there was no active misinformation, then I'm sorry but chalk up another mark for incompetence. I'm honestly not sure which I'd prefer.