Hello Dennis,
And who is this capital-C "Community" of which you speak? (I was teasing about founders.libreoffice.org, but not members.libreoffice.org.) What was done to engage all effected parties?
the Community is all of us, the people engaging on the lists, contributing. We received many requests like "can I have a @libreoffic.org address like it was at OpenOffice.org", and during one of the public calls, the steering committee agreed in doing so, help people identify with the project. The limitation to members -- anyone active can apply as a member -- is solely because of bad experiences we had at OpenOffice.org, where people simply could register an @openoffice.org address and pretend they speak on behalf of the project. We ran into problems indeed with that.
We discussed on the public lists and in the public calls -- it cannot be more public and transparent, anyone had a chance to join. In fact, the discussion has been running since February or even earlier, so there was plenty of time.
But why is the change not made a slight change, if any, for those who are the beneficiaries of the change, rather than those who are not?
Because it is technically not possible. We want to issue @libreoffice.org addresses, and by doing so, we cannot have mailing lists on the same addresses. I also proposed to instead use @libreoffice.net for the mail forwarders, but nobody agreed to that. This, again, on the public list where anyone could discuss.
And, honestly, it's no bigger change than if one contact of yours has a new e-mail address. You change it in the address book, and that's it.
Florian
