[uf-discuss] Unjust banning of Andy Mabbett

[Eric A. Meyer]

At 4:45 PM -0500 3/8/08, Manu Sporny wrote:

>With respect, I have no idea how Drew McLellan, Eric A. Meyer, and Dan
>Cederholm became admins. Is there a secret handshake? Were they voted
>into the position? How are these things done?

    Sorry, I missed this bit until just now.
    I can only speak for myself.  As I understand it, I was invited to 
be an admin because I co-authored XFN; did early supporting work in 
developing the general principles of microformats; and have a lot of 
experience in e-mail list administration.  There was no handshake so 
far as I recall, unless you count the ones that take place between 
e-mail and IM servers.  (Do communication protocols even use 
"handshakes" any more?)
    I don't think anyone's ever been voted into the position of 
anything in the microformats community, because it's really not a 
process-driven kind of place.  There's no process for approving new 
microformats, for example, so it doesn't much surprise me that 
there's no hard process for things like appointing list 
administrators.  Heck, back in the days of creating XFN, our only 
process was that we looked at established usage patterns to derive 
values, pared down our list of possible values fairly ruthlessly, and 
didn't include anything that didn't get a unanimous approval of the 
three of us.  And then we wrote it up.  That was it.

-- 
Eric A. Meyer (eric at meyerweb.com)     http://meyerweb.com/