I’ve been spending more time that I want to in the last week talking about should or should not be on Planet Debian. In particular, there is some disagreement on what should happen to the blogs of people who resign from the project.
In the interest of my own sanity, here is the text I just posted on the wiki page that talks about Planet Debian:
Planet Debian is for any active and directly involved participant in the Debian development community. Inclusion in Planet should reflect a relationship that already exists — it is not meant to create one. Inclusion is not restricted to people who are currently Debian developers nor are ex-developers necessarily barred from inclusion.
Defining activity and direct involvement is tough and there are many ways of participating in Debian (e.g., packaging, translations, administration, etc). I am happy to consider all of these types of involvement for the purposes of inclusion in Planet. In terms of deciding what is enough activity, I am daunted by the fact that there has been academic research on the difficulties of deciding what an active member in Debian is. As a result I will continue to rely primarily on what blog owners themselves feel unless the evidence available to me points to the contrary.
Planet participants should include feeds that provide stable permanent URLs so that they do not flood planet repeatedly and should include content in English only. An inability to do either of these will be grounds for exclusion from Planet until this can be fixed.
In the past, I’ve made incorrect assumptions about whether people did or did not want to be included in Planet. I’ve apologized to those involved. In the future, I will ask people that appear inactive to me or that have resigned from the project if they feel that they still qualify under the terms above. If I approach you about inclusion in Planet, please don’t be offended or assume that I, or the project, doesn’t want you on Planet. There are feeds in Planet Debian that annoy me but I have yet to remove a feed from Planet that I dislike.