[Qgis-community-team] Plugin author emails after the GDPR apocalypse

[Maik Riechert]

On 26/06/2018 12:34, Borys Jurgiel wrote:
> One of the key values of the open source world is the easy 
> communication we
> have within our community. For any purposes: asking questions, sharing
> knowledge, making contacts or even hiring the author. As a plugin author I
> really appreciate I'm not forced to fully disclose my email on websites (nor
> set up any contact forms with captchas) just to be accessible by users.
Currently, plugin authors *are* forced to fully disclose their email. It 
appears in their QGIS public source code repositories, as well as in the 
plugin manager. So you might as well put it publicly on your GitHub 
profile, right?

> As a
> plugin user, I appreciate the possibility of contacting authors easily, as
> bugtrackers are not appropriate for e.g. common networking. Btw. bugtrackers
> are also not so efficient, as most plugins use github with their unreliable
> notifications...
I honestly never had any issues with GitHub notifications. I would leave 
it to the plugin authors whether they want to engage in common 
networking or not and what kind of communication mechanism they prefer. 
I think most people are quite happy receiving issues via GitHub.

I'd like to ask again what the purpose of this email address is since I 
got different answers so far. I was told it was for "administrative 
purposes" only. What does this mean exactly? And is it true? From the 
above discussion it seems the purpose is more wide. My main confusion is 
also: What about the email address of the osgeo account? Isn't that 
enough for administrative purposes? Why is it not used?

Cheers
Maik