Improving OpenWrt internal communication

[Hauke Mehrtens]

Hi,

Like described in the failed vote about 2 months ago [0], [1] we have 
some communication problems in the OpenWrt project.

In the previous vote mail I did not provide detailed examples to protect 
other parties, but I do not see that the situation improved.

Here are some examples from the last 3 months of not so good 
communication I am aware of, maybe there is more communication going on 
which I am not aware of. I would like to find a way how we can improve 
this in the future.

Problem examples:
For example there was an exchange about OpenWrt involvement in ETSI 
activities related to the CRA between SFC, FSFE and OpenWrt, as far as I 
understood. I was only getting aware of this some months later in 
private after I posted something on the public mailing list about this 
topic, see [2].
For such activities it would be nice if all OpenWrt project members are 
getting informed. I wrote the mail to the public list only because Ilu 
contacted me and I exchanged some mails with here about this topic.

There is an unofficial OpenWrt meetup at the WCW in Berlin this weekend 
[3]. I do not know who exactly was invited, all communication with me 
happened in 1:1 chats in Signal.

Regarding the OpenWrt two development I only got some rumors that it is 
hitting some challenges with some vendors and it is not clear if it will 
finish, but I do not have much more information that the vote. These 
information were only shared orally with me and are maybe also wrong or 
outdated.

I was contacted by someone from Capgemini who is doing a study for the 
European Commission about Radio Equipment Directive (RED) for an 
interview to provide OpenWrt's perspective about this. I shared the 
request with some people in a private mail. The person also contacted 
contact at openwrt.org 6 times, but nobody noticed.

We also had some discussions some years ago when we were unhappy with 
SFC actions or none actions. This was only discussed in private.


Proposal:
I would like to have a private mailing list which all OpenWrt committers 
can read and write to, but which is not public readable. Maybe we can 
make it public writable, that would make it easy to ad the mailing list 
into CC when communicating with other parties.

I think just saying we will improve and move all communication onto the 
public openwrt-adm mailing list will not work. I see that I and also 
some other people, are sometimes doing bilateral communication to 
prepare writing something to openwrt-adm, seeing it more as an 
announcement channel. I intentionally did not mention any people in the 
examples in this mail, on a private mailing list I would probably have 
done it.


Other remarks:
I think it is now even worse than the time when the LEDE fork was done, 
but maybe I only have some part of the information from that time. I 
like that the votes and release planning is done in public and not on 
openwrt-hackers, the old private mailing list, but some communication 
also moved to 1:1 communication which is even worse from my point of view.

We have already private mailing list or will have soon for some groups 
like infrastructure and buildbot management. These mailing list are 
probably helpful.

I would keep the handling of conatct at openwrt.org out of this discussion 
for now. I still think it is not working, we miss too many mails send to 
contact at openwrt.org, maybe we should just remove the links from the website.

What are your opinions on this topic?
Does someone have a better idea that a mailing list only OpenWrt 
committers can read, but everyone can write to?


Hauke


[0]: https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-adm/2025-April/002672.html
[1]: https://openwrt.org/voting/2025-04-04-private-mailing-list
[2]: 
https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2025-April/043899.html
[3]: https://wiki.freifunk.net/Wireless_Community_Weekend_2025:Participants