Re: [gentoo-project] Items for Council Agenda, May 14

[Gregory Woodbury]

On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 6:52 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
> On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 6:08 AM, Kent Fredric <kentnl@g.o> wrote:
...
>> Unless this proposal suggests that all new senders are themselves,
>> defacto-censored.
>>
...
> Yes, doing it before the fact has both philosophical and practical
> challenges.  We need to accept those and make a decision one way or
> the other.  I think this is one of those cases where either decision
> is better than compromise.  If we don't have the manpower to moderate
> posts by non-devs then we shouldn't moderate them at all.  If we
> consider it against our values then we shouldn't.
>
...
> Honestly, I think we'll lose people either way (and we probably have
> been losing them for years with the status quo).  Certainly they'll be
> different people, but there isn't really any hard data one way or the
> other as to which will have the larger impact.  Trying to collect some
> kind of data around preferences might help here, though I'm not sure
> it will make anybody more/less happy with the outcome either way.

There are folks I know that use Gentoo but don't get involved in discussions
or as developers because of the "politics and annoyance" of the procedures
and policies that currently prevail. I occasionally present a "News from Gentoo"
mini-talk at various tech meetings in this part of NC [RTP] that filter out a
lot of chatter and focus on the technical issues; and the interest is
still quite
high by users, as Gentoo is their development platform.

If there is a perceived lack of people to do the job of moderating, I
might suggest
that insisting the moderators have to be developers may be too high a
qualification
for getting people involved. I hesitate proposing that another class
of involvement
be implemented -- that of some sort of 'certified user' of
'technician' -- but it has
been successful for some other projects.  This might expand the amount
of trust in the project, both within and without the system.
Certainly, the vetting
process should be at a lower level than the 'developer' title requires.

Finally, perhaps a "robo-moderator" system could be implemented that
would know the trusted posters (developers + others) and refer new posters
to moderators by an email alert so that there is minimal delay in looking
at the new poster's material.  This worked well on several USENET groups
for a long time. [James Levine wrote one that could be easily adapted.]

-- 
G.Wolfe Woodbury
redwolfe@×××××.com