Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: comrel changes

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 11:54 AM William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
>
> > Outside of ComRel the problem I've personally had is that reports have
> > been ignored. In fact, one report lead to agreement that a ComRel
> > action should take place and then... nothing. Once ComRel responded
> > again the lead at the time said too much time had passed (~a month) to
> > punish the person now. Extremely frustrating for reporters. I don't
> > think I'm the only one with this sort of experience. (I suggest that
> > we require bugs to be filed -- not emailed to comrel@ -- so they're
> > more easily tracked).
>
> Agreed, this is very demoralizing. Besides your suggestion of requiring
> bugs to be filed, I would consider a hard timeout of 7-14 days when a
> bug is filed. Once that timeout passes with no action from comrel, the
> bug goes to the council.

I think that this depends a bit on your definition of "no action."  Do
you mean no final decision?  Or simply no activity?  The former is
easy to measure, the latter is going to potentially a lot of heartbeat
activities that just kick the can.

I think comrel activities by their nature tend to require a bit of
investigation/etc.  They're also not intended to be purely punitive.
That is, the goal isn't just to decide "do we kick them out or not?"
The ideal comrel outcome would be if the parties involved were able to
resolve their differences, agree to work together in a more
mutually-agreeable fashion in the future, and for over the long term
this to actually happen.  Obviously this doesn't always happen, but
this ideal outcome is the sort that is actually the fuzziest to
measure:

1.  It probably takes a while to be "completed."  Kicking somebody out
or telling the complainant to go away is simpler than getting them to
hash out their issues.
2.  It doesn't involve a top-down decision so much as the parties
coming to an agreement.
3.  Its ultimate success isn't really demonstrated until much later in time.

Plus if you send it to council you're now faced with council having to
actually do all the investgating, arbitration, and so on.  When there
have been council appeals it has been more about examining descisions
to kick somebody out, with the investigations/etc already being done.
So, this was more about examining all the data and just affirming or
reversing the decision that was made.  However, stepping in earlier
means council members having to get their hands dirty.

Generally we've tried to make the council more of a decision body and
less of a hands-dirty body, deferring to QA/comrel/etc for these
activities.  This gives more people access to those roles, and also
allows council to effectively have their hands in everything while not
getting bogged down.

> I'm sure comrel is a thankless job, but if it isn't done and the hard decisions are not made, the community suffers.

IMO it isn't helpful for comrel to operate without ANY positive
feedback.  I think the current design makes it hard for people to
offer any kind of meaningful feedback.  However, if a job is important
to the community, then people should not feel that it is thankless.

It isn't just about making people feel good either.  Without any
positive feedback all you have is the negative, and it really does
become difficult to tell if you're having a positive impact.

Proctors basically hasn't done anything in the last 6 months or so and
I think part of it is that the few actions that have been taken have
almost exclusively received negative feedback.  I can't remember the
last time that somebody thanked me for taking some action (and unlike
Comrel the actions of proctors are much more visible).  How is that to
be interpreted as anything other than a community consensus that the
actions were inappropriate?  And if so, why would we want to keep
doing it?  Perhaps ignoring all requests for intervention is an
improvement.  Certainly I've seen far fewer complaints about inaction
than past actions.  No doubt this isn't helping with the Comrel
workload.

I guess the point is that if we want these bodies to do something,
there should be positive as well as negative reinforcement for the
actions they do/don't take.

-- 
Rich