Re: Social Committee proposal
On Fri, 26 Jan 2007 00:33:55 +0100, Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net> said:
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 01:07:30AM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
>> > Why don't I think it is a good idea? Well, because,
>> > unlike
>> > technical issues, social issues are very subjective. Also,
>> > social and cultural norms differ widely from culture to culture;
>> > which culture shall be represented in, and whose norms shall be
>> > enforced by this social/cultural committee?
>>
>> That's easy: we should enforce (assuming that is not too strong a
>> word) the social and cultural norms that we, as a community, agree
>> on. The comparison to technical policy is not entirely invalid: we
>> make up our technical policy ourselves, too.
>>
>> We can determine social policy by discussion and, if necessary, by
>> voting. I'd rather see consensus, and, more specifically, see the
>> soc-ctte spell out the social norms and if the developer body
>> disagrees with it, and can't convince the soc-ctte via discussion,
>> they can force a change via a GR.
> Thanks for saving me from having to say all that. :)
> The developer's reference, for example, includes several social
> norms already - anything that isn't a strict technical obligation
> but instead a matter of procedure and/or courtesy.
But the dev-ref is optional -- last time I read it, I did not
find it very useful tome, and I disagreed with a lot of its dictums,
and so I largely ignore it while building packages; I rely on my
sense of best practices. The tech ctte does not come down on me like
a tonne of bricks for not removing the . from my short descriptions.
> A code of conduct, if you will. The mailing lists have an explicit
> code of conduct which is generally not enforced by any technical
> measure but maintained by consensus (or at least diligence of those
> who care, for the cynics among us ;). Those are some existing
> documented topics that a social committee could keep an eye on;
> there are also numerous matters relating to our day-to-day
> interaction that go unnoticed because they're so "normal" to us, but
> are indeed something that we would be wise to take care of.
Frankly, a ctte that enforces things like the dev-ref scares
the living daylights out of me.
manoj
--
"I am ... a woman ... and ... technically a parasitic uterine growth"
Sean Doran the Younger
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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