Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Alec Warner]

On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 6:30 AM Kristian Fiskerstrand <k_f@g.o> wrote:

> On 6/4/19 3:15 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> >  I looked at the links a bit, but there's very little substance there.
> Does
> > anyone want to give some more context and background?
>
> There are several elements being discussed; but noting, in no particular
> order, some of them;
>
> (a) The forums are hosted on Gentoo infra and in the name of the
> distribution, but there is a very split user and developer base; are the
> forums properly moderated wrt (i) CoC (ii) legal liability / copyrights
> (iii) potential PR issues towards the distribution for user contributed
> content;
>

(i) I think you need to convince the existing forum-mods team that the CoC
matters, and that they should actually enforce it. I don't see a very
robust conversation with the existing mods team on this topic. My
impression from forum-mods is that they view this action as a cudgel (to
get rid of / change something most developers dislike) rather than as the
CoC is intended (to encourage a more open and safe Gentoo Community,
presumably.)

(ii) is a Foundation issue, as the Council has no legal liability for the
forums or their content that I am aware of. I (personally as a board
member) am happy with the existing legal liability the forums represents.

(iii) I'm not sure how the forums differ from other UCG Gentoo hosts (wiki,
bugzilla, blogs) or Gentoo affiliated areas (public Gentoo prefixed
Freenode IRC channels.) Are you suggesting we not host UCG, or why would we
limit this action to the Forums? Or you assert that we have sufficient
moderation of the other UCG channels but forums is not sufficiently
moderated?


> (b) Part of (a) discussion is appeals process, so a user banned from
> forums can appeal a ban to other parts (comrel, council), so a decision
> with regards to forums also affects other projects / groups within the
> distribution. Is the additional overhead worthwhile?


I think if you want to root agency in the Council or its delegate that is
fine, but I haven't seen this as a problem in practice. I also don't see
things like "Oh I was banned from #gentoo for 4 weeks" come to comrel very
often, FWIW.


>


> (c) The discussion has mostly focused on OTW (Off-The-Wall) section of
> the forums, one argument for keeping it is it is a convenient place for
> moderators to move threads that are started in other forums but doesn't
> belong there instead of deleting it, and keeping off-topic discussion in
> separate threads minimize the noise for the rest of forums.
>

I'm not sure we have explored this sufficiently, so I'm trying to drive
more discussion here. Why has it focused on OTW?

(i) Because it contains content that violates the CoC?
(ii) Because it contains content unrelated to Gentoo?
(iii) Because it contains content we find objectionable?

I'm trying to narrow down the scope here. Most UCG sites contain (i), and
(ii) and probably (iii). I have concerns that basically no one in the
council even uses the forum, we have no data that describes a problem on
the forum, and we are (as described in the 10/02 meeting log notes[0])
trying to legislate the job of a moderation team that we have essentially
failed to achieve any common ground with.

The other exciting part is that currently the forums are hosted at the
pleasure of the Board on behalf of the community and the board owns the
trademarks and relationship with the sponsor who donates the hardware for
the forums. I want to desperately avoid an outcome where the Council votes
to make changes to the forum, but the board objects to said changes. In
other words; I want to achieve some kind of consensus on how the forums
should be operated.

[0] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20190210.txt


>
> --
> Kristian Fiskerstrand
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