Fwd: Barrier of entry to participation

I've just submitted my first feedback to www-style
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2015Aug/0329.html>, and
wanted to bring up the issue of how non-trivial it was. Here was my
workflow:

1. Read the draft
<https://drafts.csswg.org/css-font-loading/#dom-fontfaceset-check-font-text-font>
I was interested in and identify an issue I wanted to offer feedback on.
2. Search for "issue" in the draft. Found Github. Great.
3. Go to GitHub - turns out there are only pull requests there.
4. Back to the draft, I see that feedback should be sent to an email
address, www-style@w3.org
<www-style@w3.org?subject=%5Bcss-font-loading%5D%20YOUR%20TOPIC%20HERE>.
5. Send email there - it's a mailing list, so my email wasn't approved (OK,
I'm not that naive to send feedback directly to a mailing list without
subscribing first, but this is a legitimate step that someone who wasn't
born in the Listserv era might take)
6. Try to subscribe to the mailing list by clicking the "archives" link.
7. On the Archives page, there is a "subscribed" link.
8. The "Managing mailing list subscriptions" page doesn't list the "style"
mailing list. No problem, I infer it from the examples.
9. Send an email to www-style-request@w3.org.
10. Wait two minutes for a reply.
11. Reply to that and wait for the confirmation message.
12. Finally email my feedback.
13. Get an automated reply asking me to release my email address to the
public, with the risk of it being harvested by spammers.
14. Take the risk and give permission to archive mail.
15. The next page notifies me that my message might be delayed for up to
two business days.

Is all of this really necessary? Since the contribution process is managed
on GitHub, why not use GitHub issues for feedback? That would solve the
spam problem as well (spam is virtually nonexistent on GitHub), and if
there is a need to archive messages somewhere under w3c's control, the
GitHub issue notification emails could be forwarded onto the mailing list,
as primitive as a mailing list is as a discussion forum, compared to modern
alternatives such as a Discourse instance.

16. Since I must be subscribed to send my feedback, I started to receive
all the traffic to www-style.

Received on Monday, 31 August 2015 04:56:58 UTC