[ODFPlugtest] the rules, wrap-up

[Hanssens Bart]

Hi,


ok, I think all view points are clear now, so let's wrap it up and move on to the real
test work, shall we ? :-)


As far as I can see:


1) everyone agreed upon the "keep the positive attitude"

2) strictly speaking, we never used Chatham House rules, since more or less all
participants and presenters were known anyway (hello group photo), which isn't
a problem as far as I can tell

3) no-one actually commented / objected the openness of the wiki, which is good

4) IMHO, it's a fair game to keep adding scenarios and test results on the public
wiki for whatever implementation that's available for public download or sale, as
long as it isn't vendor bashing

5) non-public previews of commercial offerings can be used and discussed during
the plugfest, but they shall not end up on the wiki, nor blogged about unless the
vendor is OK with it

6) by very definition of it, one can of course add issues to the wiki about alfa or beta
releases of open source projects...

7) I don't think any vendor would mind if other people write blogs / tweets about the
progress they've made and how great it is to be there  (= positive)

8) the one thing we really shouldn't do, is before/during/after the event blog on how
bad X is, and why Y is sooo much better (neither commercial nor open source)

9) I'll make these rules clear when sending out invitations for the next plugfest, and
repeat them at the event itself

10) we stick to these rules :-)



Example:

GOOD:  FancyFreeChart did an interesting session on multi-axis charts. Some
implementations don't implement it that way. We have to dive into this.

BAD: FancyFreeChart showed the One True Way, CorpChart has some serious
issues with it, so we rock and they s*ck





Best regards,

Bart

________________________________________
From: plugtest-bounces at opendocsociety.org [plugtest-bounces at opendocsociety.org] On Behalf Of robert_weir at us.ibm.com [robert_weir at us.ibm.com]
Sent: Friday, November 20, 2009 3:04 PM
To: ODF Plugfest mailinglist
Subject: Re: [ODFPlugtest] Chatham House Rule

plugtest-bounces at opendocsociety.org wrote on 11/19/2009 06:50:15 PM:

> Personally, I think these rules create a complex situation of that
requires
> people to keep a duality in place about what can be said and what not
and
> can you infer things I cannot say from things I am allowed to say. Also,
> since many bugtrackers are public, Chatham rules would stop bugs from
being
> allowed to be reported.
>
> Being cooperative is an important goal and 'Chatham rules' serves as a
> synonym for 'be constructive' and I appreciate it as such. Strictly
> following the rules seems impractical though. In my mind, what is more
> important is that the standardization process allows a low threshold for
> new implementors.
>


That is a fair point.  One of the primary goals of the plugfest is to
identify interoperability bugs between implementations.  I'd fully expect
that Microsoft or IBM or Google would take what bugs it found and report
them to their development teams.  So at IBM we might enter a bug that says
"Symphony 1.3 does not process feature X from implementation Y" and if
this was due to a bug in implementation Y we would say so in our defect
report, and then discuss how to work around the bug to the customers'
benefit.  I'm sure something similar would happen for other proprietary
products.

Where it gets interesting is when the ODF implementation is open source
and has its defect tracking system public.  Surely we want open source
implementations to be able to leave the plugfest with a set of bugs to
look at?

So I don't think we want to be so strict as to prevent all implementers
present to make use, as engineers, of the information they received in the
plugfest.

But what we want to avoid is things like:

* Ascribing a statement to a specific person or company.  We shouldn't be
reporting, "Doug Mahugh from Microsoft said that Office 2007 had bugs X, Y
and Z".

* Speaking derogatorily of another product's performance at the plugfest,
especially where pre-release software is shown.  We want to encourage
vendors to show their beta and earlier software.

Of course facts that are know from outside the plugfest are fair game.
Otherwise I'd just come in, show a list of all known Symphony bugs on the
screen for 5 minutes and declare that no one can ever talk publicly about
Symphony bugs in the future because they are all covered by Chatham House
Rules.   The point is the confidentiality applies to the activities and
statements of participants in the plugfest.  But if you later find the
same bug in the publicly available version of Symphony, then I don't think
I have any expectation that this public fact will remain secret.  Of
course, you still would not want to discuss conversations about it from
the plugfest or ascribe statements to participants at the plugfest.

The overarching theme is you want to make it safe for engineers to
participate in the plugfest and show, test and discuss code that is not
yet perfect.  But facts concerning publicly available code -- I don't
think we can expect secrecy about those.

Regards,

-Rob
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