Re: [gentoo-dev] Living in a bubble [gentoo-proctor] Warning^2

[Marien Zwart]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 10:29:47AM -0500, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni wrote: [Tue Jun 05 2007, 05:00:28PM CDT]
> > As a member of the Council, I find it personally offensive that the
> > Proctors have taken this action on what wasn't even a "problem" thread.
> > I'm sick of this.  I call for the immediate disbanding of the Proctors.
> >
> > As much as I dislike many of the posts from geoman/ciaranm, they really
> > had not done anything worthy of being banned.  I ask that this ban is
> > undone *immediately* and that the Proctors have their powers revoked.
>
> *Sigh*  I, too, was quite surprised to see people banned for what
> appeared to be reasonable behavior (in this case).  That said, I wish
> you'd started w/ a more temperate response, instead of going all nuclear
> on the proctors.  It's likely to create some hard feelings, and that
> just makes things harder to fix.
>
> So, how about using this incident as an opportunity for a calm
> discussion about the mandate and role of the proctors?  The proctors
> clearly felt that they should shut down this thread _before_ things
> got out of hand.  Perhaps the goal was laudable, but the methods were
> not?  (As an aside, I didn't realize that Roy's e-mail was supposed to
> be a proctor directive.)  Or are people really looking for the proctors
> to get involved only when behavior is particularly egregious?  Is there
> a way to fix the current system, or should it be chucked entirely, as
> has been suggested?
>
> Well reasoned thoughts and opinions welcome.

I was originally planning to send this yesterday, but wanted to delay
it a bit because the list had just calmed down again.

I'm a recent addition to the proctors team, probably pulled in mainly
because I'm a #gentoo op, and have also been involved with conflict
resolution things for the userrel project. This was the first time I
was around as a proctor during an event involving proctors. A
disclaimer: I was a bit tired when I originally wrote this and have
not fully proofread this, so expect the grammar to be a bit bizarre in
places. I probably missed some relevant bits too, but this is more
than long enough already.

An attempt at a "timeline" of what happened with that thread:

An initial mail from Benjamin Judas is sent to the gentoo-dev list
(which is mainly a *technical* list), with a sent date of 20:09 UTC,
arriving in my inbox at 20:15 UTC. It contains pretty much no
technical content, and some things ("small scottish griper brain",
"I'm waiting for the stinky comments from the usual corners." that
seem likely to lead to flames.

The second mail is from Stephen P. Becker, dated 20:18 UTC (less than
10 minutes after the first), arriving in my inbox at 20:25 UTC. It
contains no technical content, but does contain "Clean the sand out of
your pee-hole...", which might be a joke but seems likely to fuel the
flames even if it was meant as one.

More mails follow, with pretty much no technical points in them. I'll
skip them, since they did not really affect the decisions that were
made.

Around this time a proctors member (NeddySeagoon) sends another mail
to the list asking people to stop replying. He was alerted to the
thread via irc at around 20:33 UTC (after which he still had to
actually read the start of the thread). His mail has a sent header of
20:44, arriving in my inbox at 20:55.

This gets two replies that both make it rather obvious they disagree
with this suggestion and definitely do not intend to stop posting to
the thread (one sent 20:52 (*before* Neddy's mail makes it to my
inbox) arriving in my inbox at 21:00, and one sent 21:00 arriving at
21:10). At this point the decision is made to *temporarily* disable ml
access for those two people in an attempt to let the thread die out
(mail from amne, 21:13 sent, 21:20 in my inbox).

Please take a look at the timestamps above. We spend some time reading
the mail sent to the list, discussing what to do, and typing in
replies. Add in the roughly ten minute lag between sending mail to the
list and it reaching most of the subscribers and we're continually
about 15 minutes "behind" no matter how quickly we try to react. And
we do try to react quickly, because it seems likely more flames are
being sent and making their way through the list software while we
decide what to do. Amne actually responded to the second reply to
NeddySeagoon's mail before I had the time to receive and read the
thing.

In hindsight it is obvious this attempt to stop the thread failed. A
flood of replies resulted, most of them taking apart the wording of
NeddySeagoon's original request to stop replying.

And some more flaming later we get the following from a council member
to the -dev list:

From Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@g.o>:
> I really have to agree with you. The proctors have completely lost
> their way. They are ineffective. They tend to compound the problems
> they were created to stop.

Yes, they obviously did not manage to stop this particular thread. I
am not sure how they *could* have though. Had proctors done nothing,
would this thread have been much more peaceful?

> They are slow.

*Slow*? If anything the decisions were made too quickly. There were at
most minutes between receiving the inflammatory mails and responding
to them, and we needed *some* time to discuss things.

> They have not prevented anything, which was the reason for their
> creation. Rather, what they *have* done is stifle conversation

This is a *technical* list, or at least that's what it is supposed to
be. Do you really think this thread belonged on -dev?

My "background" is more on irc than on the ml. From an irc point of
view, the proctors are the people with +o who attempt to keep the
channel (list) mostly on-topic and somewhat polite. A couple of people
tried to start up a discussion that had nothing to do with the
technical discussions the list is meant for, attacking each other,
etc. Proctors reacted by (in irc terms) temporarily muting the people
in an attempt to move the discussion off the list.

As far as I can tell this is what the proctors team was meant to do:
keep the list usable for technical discussions. I'm not going to dig
up my council meeting logs right now, but if I remember at all
correctly the plan was for the council and infra to back proctors when
they made impopular decisions needed to keep the -dev ml on track.
Instead, what we get is a council member demanding the immediate
reversal of two temporary blocks of people making inflammatory posts,
and that proctors be disbanded. If this happens every time the
proctors actually try to enforce a decision then yes, they will be
ineffective.

People really need to make up their mind about what the -dev ml *is*.
If the proctors are not supposed to keep the discussions there mostly
focused on technical matters and keep people from attacking each other
(I quote again: "Clean the sand out of your pee-hole..."? does that
really belong on a technical list like this?) then that should be made
a lot more obvious than it currently is. Currently proctors believe
they should keep the list on technical matters, using (temporary)
access blocking if they consider it necessary, while most other people
seem to think any kind of access blocking is out of the question. We
cannot have it both ways. The council should remove the access *they*
gave proctors to block mailing list access if they do not want us to
*use* that access.

-- 
Marien.