[ODFPlugtest] the rules, wrap-up

[Basil Cousins]

Bart,

Hope this works,

Basil

2009/11/20 Hanssens Bart <Bart.Hanssens at fedict.be>

> 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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