Tickets are private for privacy purposes. Mostly because receipts with personal information (addresses, personal email addresses, booking references, etc) are attached to the ticket so the owner can ask for reimbursement.

I know pagure doesn't handle this nicely (it just shows a 403 error instead of redirecting you to the login page), but I think it's best to keep tickets private.

I'd prefer to have the discussion around funding public. This would help avoiding the suspicion, approvers and benefiting people are the same.

I agree to have payment or shipping information private.

mrunge, this was discussed at an earlier point I believe. I think we abandoned the idea because of Pagure limitations and added complexity. The way we are doing it right now, everything is in one place easily accessible by the right people.

Maybe it would be a better idea to mirror the tickets here somewhere publicly without changing the internal process. This way we get public info about funding but keep everything as it is, for us. Even a report at a given time interval would work.

That's only my idea about it, I may be wrong. :)

Cheers,
Nemanja

Discussions and approvals are not private. In fact, they mostly take place during the bi-weekly IRC meetings which are public and logged. However, it is not always feasible to review all requests during the bi-weekly meetings due to time constraints - this is where FAmSCo steps in.

Any vouched Fedora ambassador may access funding requests on Pagure. Therefore, among Ambassadors, all requests are processed in a transparent way.

@mitzie explained why tickets are kept private - it is because of the personal information enclosed.

They're not public because they may contain private personal information. However, I don't like the idea that it's only open to ambassadors. When we had requests in trac they were open to any FAS member. Things like funding are not exclusive to ambassadors, other contributors are eligible, too. This policy keeps all other contributors behind the door and pretty much contradicts it.

Discussions and approvals are not private. In fact, they mostly take place during the bi-weekly IRC meetings which are public and logged. However, it is not always feasible to review all requests during the bi-weekly meetings due to time constraints - this is where FAmSCo steps in.

... unless funds is being approved without further discussion. That happened in the past, like today with https://pagure.io/ambassadors-emea/funding_requests/issue/19

They're not public because they may contain private personal information. However, I don't like the idea that it's only open to ambassadors. When we had requests in trac they were open to any FAS member. Things like funding are not exclusive to ambassadors, other contributors are eligible, too. This policy keeps all other contributors behind the door and pretty much contradicts it.

Actually every logged in user in pagure can create a ticket, even if he is not a member of the ambassadors-emea group. That's how asamalik who is not a member of the group, was able to request funding for DORS/CLUC[1]

[1]https://pagure.io/ambassadors-emea/funding_requests/issue/16

That's much of a feedback :)

As a fedora user I would be interested - and just to feel good - to view - in the retrospective - how decisions were made.
This itcket system seems to be the ultimate place where decisions are tracked (IIUIC), thus it would be nice if these decision processes could be open.

I do understand that there is personal data exposed in those tickets, but maybe it's worth to separate the personal data from the process, to allow interested readers to read and to prevent that awkward feelings to arise.

Thanks for the open ears.

mrunge, this was discussed at an earlier point I believe. I think we abandoned the idea because of Pagure limitations and added complexity. The way we are doing it right now, everything is in one place easily accessible by the right people.
Maybe it would be a better idea to mirror the tickets here somewhere publicly without changing the internal process. This way we get public info about funding but keep everything as it is, for us. Even a report at a given time interval would work.
That's only my idea about it, I may be wrong. :)

If we are going to do this, it may just be easier to have two tickets. 1 Ticket is for the discussion/approval. The other is private and contains the receipts for reimbursement. It should reference hte discussion ticket.

mrunge, this was discussed at an earlier point I believe. I think we abandoned the idea because of Pagure limitations and added complexity. The way we are doing it right now, everything is in one place easily accessible by the right people.
Maybe it would be a better idea to mirror the tickets here somewhere publicly without changing the internal process. This way we get public info about funding but keep everything as it is, for us. Even a report at a given time interval would work.
That's only my idea about it, I may be wrong. :)

If we are going to do this, it may just be easier to have two tickets. 1 Ticket is for the discussion/approval. The other is private and contains the receipts for reimbursement. It should reference hte discussion ticket.

Yes, this is actually what we were discussing after we migrated to pagure, and a lot of people came up and said that "it's double work for the Ambassadors". The idea was to have another tracker under fedora-budget, where only treasurers/card holders & bex would have access, and the person requesting reimbursement would open a new ticket referencing the approved ticket. Ideally other regions would follow.

I really don't have an opinion whether we should split requests and reimbursements, but I definitely don't want to make the current tracker public as it is :)

@bex suggestion of having 2 tickets sounds good. IMHO it would actually make the process cleaner - the decision making part is decouplde from the actual financial transaction related stuff.

And this model might actually be applicable to other places as well, where the decision can be open, but for privacy reasons, the finanacial part should private.

I'd favor such a solution.

Another suggestion would be to add a feature "comments only visible by a specific group" . That way, one could mark a comment as private (shipping, payment), but keep the rest of the ticket public.

@bex suggestion of having 2 tickets sounds good. IMHO it would actually make the process cleaner - the decision making part is decouplde from the actual financial transaction related stuff.
And this model might actually be applicable to other places as well, where the decision can be open, but for privacy reasons, the finanacial part should private.
I'd favor such a solution.

I am biased because it is my idea, but this is something that I think would be fantastic to have as a pattern in Fedora. If Ambassadors lead that effort that would be great.

Another suggestion would be to add a feature "comments only visible by a specific group" . That way, one could mark a comment as private (shipping, payment), but keep the rest of the ticket public.

While this can work, similar functionality is in Bugzilla, I think it also adds sufficient complexity to Pagure to make it a non-trivial feature. This means it is not likely to get implemented quickly.

Should we vote on this during our next meeting?

I don't think we should be going the two-ticket way, it seems unnecessarily confusing...

If there is any internal place, like a wiki - couldn't the personal informations be collected there and just be kept outside of the tickets then?

This was discussed during our last EMEA meeting:

https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2017-07-05/emea_ambassadors.2017-07-05-20.00.html

Please check the logs. It is in my opinion best to vote about this here in the ticket.

I would prefer for ticket to remain the way they are, because it's the simplest solution.

Kind regards,
Nemanja

Thanks for discussing it.

Simple is good, but the intrasparency does not go away, and this is helping to steer distrust in the worst case.

Please reconsider it, but feel also free to close the ticket.

This was discussed during our last EMEA meeting:
https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2017-07-05/emea_ambassadors.2017-07-05-20.00.html
Please check the logs. It is in my opinion best to vote about this here in the ticket.
I would prefer for ticket to remain the way they are, because it's the simplest solution.

To make it easier for everyone to get the details from the meeting (TLDR: no new arguments in the meeting, continue to discuss the issue here):
https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2017-07-05/emea_ambassadors.2017-07-05-20.00.log.html#l-53

20:13:56 <nmilosev> So there was this discussion I want to address first
20:14:03 <nmilosev> About making tickets public
20:14:35 <nmilosev> I personally think the way they are now is fine, but other people say that they should be more transparent
20:14:41 <nmilosev> Which is perfectly reasonable
20:15:16 <lupinix> yes
20:15:55 <lupinix> but having two tickets is also not that nice… i'm fine with the current solution
20:16:16 <nmilosev> Same here, I think it's best to propose a vote in the ticket and we can vote what we think is best
20:17:04 <lupinix> and i also think if someone else wants to get info, he can get it on request, without personal stuff of course
20:18:27 <nmilosev> Exactly
20:18:42 <nmilosev> So we can also discuss it in the ticket
20:18:57 <lupinix> yes, will leave a comment there

I would also welcome an approach that allows to disconnect personal/private details from other discussions. This would allow to take data protection more seriously. For example it would also allow to delete the personal data eventually when it is no longer needed.

Additionally I agree that more transparency is also good, especially in Fedora where everything else is as transparent as possible. And another positive result would be to reduce noise from the funding requests. The private details for payment only concern the requester and the credit card holder. There is no need to send details or notifications to everyone after the funding decision was made.

Closing due to inactivity. Feel free to re-open the ticket if you want to add more comments.