Announcing the elephant in the room BOF

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Carsten" == Carsten Schoenert <c.schoenert@t-online.de> writes:

    Carsten> Was it really needed to give this "wanted" "discussion" a
    Carsten> specific announcement on DC19? If someone wants to discuss
    Carsten> these topics they can simple do it by the normal ways we
    Carsten> have for this.

I feel like I ought to step forward and take some of the blame/credit
for pushing for the Elephant in the Room BOF to be widely announced.
I did not ask for this BOF, but once I became aware that it was going to
happen I took a strong position that it should be widely announced.

My position when talking to the organizers and DC committee is that if
we were going to have the discussion it should be widely announced.

There are several things that contributed to that decision.

1) The reasoning behind Social Contract #3 while not directly applicable
influenced my thinking.  We don't hide problems.

2) Debian is a generally open community.  Part of that is making sure
that people on all sides of the discussion are aware of the discussion.
It makes it easier for those of us who have to think about project
opinion and consensus if discussions actually have all their
stakeholders present.  Especially if a discussion is organized at the
last minute, it is more important to announce it more widely.

3) In this specific case, I felt that the announcement was important.
People with strong views had made it clear they were going to have the
discussion no matter what we did.  The question was whether it was going
to be narrowly advertized and effectively open only to people who had
fairly strong views, or whether it was going to be broader and open to a
wider subsection of the project.

I did not push for an announcement in an attempt to give any particular
position a platform.
Instead, I pushed for an announcement  so that we had more
representative views across the entire community and so people with
strong views on both sides were able to see more of the positions in the
middle.

Also, I honestly do believe this discussion needs to happen.  I think
that we ended up shutting this down a bit too prematurely after the
decision was announce.  I think people have not been fully heard on this
issue, and I think that is harmful for our community overall.

I think the discussion at Debconf was significantly improved by being
widely announced among the attendees at the conference.