Matrix Council Meeting report: 22 February 2024
Meeting participants: Merlijn Sebrechts (@merlijn-sebrechts), Marc Gilligan (@ulfnic), Aaron Rainbolt (@arraybolt3), Seth Arnold (@sarnold), Mauro Gaspari (@ilvipero), Nils Büchner (@nbuechner)
Meeting chair: Nils Büchner (@ravage:xentonix.net)
Screenshots in documentation
-
Some of our documentation has screenshots, and it looks somewhat ugly. It also comes with possible accessibility issues, and the info in them can get out of date quickly and is cumbersome to update. Canonical’s Technical Support team doesn’t use screenshots at all. An absence of screenshots make it easier to adapt and update docs as needed.
-
At the same time, screenshots make it much easier to follow instructions, make documentation feel more inviting, and may provide a better user experience if kept up-to-date properly.
For now, we have decided to experiment with text-only documentation primarily, with each documentation writer adding or omitting screenshots at their discretion. We’ll revisit this once we can more easily see the pros and cons in action.
Ghost EMS IRC-bridged rooms
Apparently even after the shutdown of the EMS bridge to Libera.Chat, some of the #channel:libera.chat rooms are still active. These have become somewhat independent communities, and while new users cannot join, the rooms still exist and can even have messages sent in them. The Ubuntu Summit room is one of these rooms.
We may have the permissions to tombstone the room and move it to an official Ubuntu Matrix room. That is the current intended plan. If that fails, we will request that members of that room move to an official Ubuntu Summit room on the official Ubuntu homeserver.
Managing unmoderated rooms
We discussed how to handle it if a room’s admins and moderators abandon a room and are intending to write documentation for the process on dealing with unmoderated rooms, ensuring room admins and mods are active, and how to take over and/or clean up unmoderated rooms. This is unauthoritative and simply represents what general direction we’re thinking of these things moving.
-
Leaving a room as an admin is not alone enough to abandon a room - we don’t want people who briefly leave after getting upset to suddenly lose their room. A certain time period will of being absent from a room without prior planning would be considered abandonment (what that time period is has not yet been determined).
-
It needs to be very clear that if you leave a room as admin or mod, and then come back, you are still an admin or mod.
-
Once a room is abandoned by all mods and admins, control of it is implicitly handed to the Matrix Council, whereupon we may appoint new admins and mods, or decommission the room, as the Council sees necessary. Mjolnir will allow the Council to appoint new moderators and admins (if the proper permissions are given to it).
-
The Council will not get involved if a user who is an admin or mod abandons a room but other admins and mods are still in the room. The abandoning user will retain their power as admin or mod if they come back. Room admins and mods can come to the Council to ask for the Council’s intervention if they so desire.
-
If all admins abandon a room but mods are left, the Council may need to appoint new admins while leaving the existing mods in place (or promoting one or more of them to admin). This should be handled on a case-by-case basis since some rooms may have different concerns in this area than others. As a general rule, unless there was a misconduct report for the admin(s) who left, we will not strip admin permissions from them. We did not yet decide on a process for if new admins do need to be elected.
IRC and Libera.Chat bridging
Libera.Chat hasn’t responded about the bridging stuff for a while. Seth intends on asking them if we can turn on IRC bridging tests yet.
Canonical’s Staging cloud may not allow us to properly test the IRC bridge. Testing in the production instance could be disruptive and so is undesirable. We have requested that the staging instance be moved into the same access zone for testing. If IS does not wish to do this, we have people who are willing to attempt to spin up their own instance for testing (Gregory and Marian {is that how you spell these people’s names?})
Some discussion was done around how the double puppeting works on the Matrix-to-IRC bridge as far as account creation in relation to nick changes. We do not want people to get locked out from making legitimate Ubuntu.com accounts because of an IRC nick choice. We will be testing how this works.
Action items
- Nils to review screenshot-enhanced and text-only versions of documentation
- Seth to contact Libera about enabling IRC bridging tests
- Mauro Gaspari to ask Phillip Kewisch to attempt to tombstone the ghost Ubuntu Summit room and request users to move over if needed
- Mauro Gaspari to chair next meeting