Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: desultory <desultory@g.o>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o, Thomas Deutschmann <whissi@g.o>
Subject: Re: Shutting down the Off the Wall (was: Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items ...)
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2020 07:37:01
Message-Id: 0477131b-bc57-da97-dc51-9adbc47049a6@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: Shutting down the Off the Wall (was: Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items ...) by Thomas Deutschmann
1 On 12/11/20 21:38, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
2 > Hi,
3 >
4 > On 2020-12-12 02:07, Roy Bamford wrote:
5 >> [...]
6 >>
7 >> Can the council provide a problem statement that a least
8 >> a majority of the members support?
9 >
10 > Let's cool down the heated debate a bit.
11 >
12 Asking for the council to actually state the problem at hand as it sees
13 it seems to be an entirely reasonable thing to do, especially given how
14 long it has gone without doing so.
15
16 At this point you are the only council member to bother to express what
17 you consider the problem to be. Which, while that is a start, is one
18 seventh of the way to even having a basis to start to formulate a
19 gestalt opinion of the council and comes a couple of days before the
20 meeting before which a proposal which would satisfy that gestalt opinion
21 would need to be formulated and presented. I would ask that you kindly
22 forgive me for being distinctly underwhelmed on the whole.
23
24 > Anyone can bring up a topic to council at anytime. This also applies to
25 > council members and nothing else has happened yet.
26 >
27 While that is true, a council member making a motion to the council
28 usurping the role of an active project, then complaining that the
29 project in question has not fulfilled its role as it otherwise would
30 have is a perverse privilege unique to council members.
31
32 > I don't get your reference. Like said, this is not about free speech.
33 > Not about section 230 currently discussed in the US:
34 >
35 > We as Gentoo community have created our code of conduct.
36 >
37 > The code of conduct we created should protect our values.
38 >
39 > This has nothing to do with liability. It doesn't matter if anything
40 > which happened violates any law applying to Gentoo foundation or not.
41 >
42 Might I be so bold as to suggest that your opinion of that would change
43 rather dramatically were such liability brought to bear?
44
45 > This is about our 'own' law we gave ourselves to protect the values we
46 > believe in to run this Linux distribution and how we want to treat each
47 > other while doing what we love.
48 >
49 > Don't you believe in our code of conduct?
50 >
51 > Don't you agree that from time to time, especially those active in the
52 > OTW forum adopt the wrong tone and tend to offend people?
53 >
54 > I think you do. Like I hope every community member do.
55 >
56 I believe that when there is a problem which calls for the attention of
57 a moderator, it should be brought to the attention of a moderator,
58 preferably the entire team, not declared to be the sole purview of the
59 council which then refuses to let moderators act on it for weeks on end.
60
61 > The current motion is about those few people (<20!) who don't. All of
62 > them will have the chance to change their behavior in case they really
63 > share our values. If they don't, those people no longer have a place in
64 > our community.
65 >
66 If those few people make such frequent violations of the code of
67 conduct, it should be utterly trivial to find reasonably current posts
68 of theirs to properly report, be handled by the moderators, and if
69 necessary the users could then be subject to disciplinary action by the
70 moderators under existing rules. That it is somehow evidently considered
71 to be an intractable problem is bewildering to me. Either there is cause
72 to report the problem users, or there is not, and if not there is no
73 cause to do anything about their posts either.
74
75 The code of conduct is inherently subjective, the differences in posts
76 in this discussion by different council members demonstrates that rather
77 openly, and there will be disagreement on how it is enforced and indeed
78 on whether it is enforced at all. That the council appears to be
79 treating it as a fully objective document with hard binary pass/fail
80 criteria while evidently not even agreeing amongst itself on quite what
81 the CoC means in practice is itself concerning. That the council is
82 treating it as an excuse to interfere with the basic functioning of a
83 project on a level even below a bug report is an extremely concerning
84 precedent to set, especially considering that the proposed remedy would
85 negatively impact that project on an ongoing basis. The irony that the
86 council is doing this with regard to the only project which enforces the
87 CoC and has not openly stated that it avoids doing so as a general
88 practice is not lost on me.
89
90 > And that's also why I think you don't need any statement:
91 >
92 > A community member like you and me brought to everyone's attention that
93 > there's a place in Gentoo forums where a minority of people violates our
94 > code of conduct from time to time and want to stop that (and not for the
95 > first time but hopefully for the last time!).
96 >
97 > We are currently in the process to find a solution for this. And
98 > everyone in Gentoo is invited to join and help with that problem.
99 > Especially the current forums team who usually do a great job.
100 >
101 Final solutions to social problems, real or imagined, imposed by those
102 divorced from the consequences have a rather unpleasant history.
103
104 > Of course, if nobody comes up with another, working, solution, like
105 > said, we will have no choice but to close it.
106 >
107 > Please join the process. I think we all agree that we need to address
108 > this problem because we believe in the values Gentoo is known for but we
109 > can only do this together.
110 >
111 >
112 Reporting problem posts is itself a working solution, and has been since
113 before the forums formally became a part of Gentoo, if it weren't there
114 would be a much broader problem.

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