Re: On community and conflicts
Roberto C. Sánchez <roberto@debian.org> writes:
> I'm afraid that you miss the point. I specifically chose flat earth, &
> co., as a contrast. My position is that we are all adults, capable of
> deciding for ourselves and that, absent some behavior that is a clear
> violation of the Code of Conduct and/or mailing list rules (e.g.,
> harassment), simply uttering something that some people do not like does
> not form cause for removing someone, or even for issuing any sort of
> warning. Else, why bother having a Code of Conduct and mailing list
> rules?
Let me propose an alternate way of thinking about this, which I think is a
bit more accurate description of what happens in practice.
1. Someone has something they feel passionately about but which is not
very related to the work of Debian. One can argue some connection (we
are people living in the world -- there will always be some
connection), but it's not obviously directly relevant to our work.
They start using project resources (mailing lists, etc.) to talk about
this topic.
2. Those discussions upset other people in the project. Often this is
because they directly disagree, sometimes it's just because they don't
want to talk about that topic here. The former is usually what creates
the initial reaction, of course, and the latter is more of a fallback
position among the vocal people, but I suspect is a more common initial
position among the quieter people who just want to do Debian work.
3. We reach some sort of rough consensus as a community that this
discussion is disruptive and we don't want to have it here. This is
the critical point: for many previous controversial discussions, we
*didn't* reach this consensus for one reason or another. Perhaps
there's ongoing disagreement over whether this topic is directly
relevant to Debian or not. But sometimes we reach a pretty
overwhelming consensus (by this I mean nearly everyone speaking up is
arguing in that direction) that regardless of the merits of the
argument we don't want to talk about it on project resources.
4. The person who feels passionately about this thinks that consensus is
wrong and keeps talking about it anyway.
5. Eventually DAM gets involved, judges the consensus about declaring this
off-topic, and asks the person to stop.
6. The person refuses to stop because this topic is of overwhelming
importance to them and for some reason they feel like they have to
discuss it in Debian.
7. Eventually, DAM takes action to force them to stop. At this point, I
would argue that it doesn't make sense for them to continue as members
of the project because they're pretty clearly unwilling to respect a
boundary the project is trying to draw (step 3). That's a fairly
irreconcilable difference and it's better for everyone to go their
separate ways.
I think this is a pretty typical process for just about any community
space where people interact. I've seen versions of this play out in just
about every community I've been involved in. Usually things stop at step
2 because discussing something when other people are upset at the
discussion isn't very fun and usually people don't like to keep doing it.
Very often the process stops at step 3 because no sufficiently strong
consensus emerges. Hopefully the rest of the time the process stops at
step 5. Very rarely it runs through the whole list.
If this is a reasonably accurate model, I think it makes it somewhat
obvious that you can't have a list of banned topics written down in
advance because steps 2 and 3 are really important (and step 3 can change
over time!). The point isn't that there is a specific set of off-topic
topics. The point is that if you talk about something that makes other
community members actively upset (step 2) *and* they can build a project
consensus that we want to shut down this specific topic here (step 3),
then the rest of the process potentially comes into play.
Nearly all controversial topics in Debian do not get past step 3. We have
endless recurring topics that run up to step 3 every year or so, and never
progress any farther.
At least in my opinion, having watched this specific incident from the
start, we passed point 3 fairly clearly with a rather remarkable consensus
by Debian standards (not unanimity, but a pretty strong consensus). I
realize other people may disagree, and that perhaps part of your point in
getting involved in this discussion is to register your disagreement with
the conclusion that we reached a step 3 consensus. But I do think we did.
This process is *inherently subjective*, because it depends on the people
in the community and what upsets them and what topics they form a step 3
consensus about. It's not a question of absolute right or wrong or any
generalizable universal moral judgment. It's a question of self-policing
and a community's ability to declare what they do and don't want the
community discussion space to be used for. And yes, that inherently
requires someone with power in the community to make a judgment call about
whether step 3 was truly satisfied, and that judgment call is often going
to be controversial, and we as a community should guard against making it
prematurely or too easily, and there may be ongoing disagreements over
whether that happened.
But I don't think the process *as such* is inherently unfair; in fact, I
think it would be hard to have a community of humans that didn't have some
sort of process similar to this. Not everything is going to be talked
about everywhere all the time; people are occasionally going to say "hey,
please don't talk about this here," and I think that's a reasonable thing
to want. And there's really no way to build a comprehensive list of such
topics in advance.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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