Re: Social Committee proposal
On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 10:55:02AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> That, in a nutshell, is my complaint against this draconian social
> engineering proposal. It would be a powerful loose cannon on deck,
> which could punish whole swathes of WASP developers, or (more likely
> IMO) could further support majority prejudices, or something else. I am
> fearful because of things like the outright disdain for the suggestion
> that DDs should approve the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
>
> This isn't even as clear-cut as an east/west or A/B cultural
> difference. Even among the cultures most-represented among DDs,
> developers seem to be atypical of those cultures as a whole.
I must note that it would be no less powerful loose cannon on deck than
the technical committee, and indeed it would be less loose because direct
election would make it vastly more accountable (currently we can only
replace tech-ctte members via proxy, and in a catastrophic scenario,
that just doesn't cut it).
> If the point truly is that we don't have any group doing any organized
> thinking about this, then form such a group, but don't empower it yet.
The problem with a an ad hoc group is the composition. We need elections
to get it the group be representative and to be accountable.
Do you think that we could just form it by way of modifying constitution,
but strip out half the proposed Powers section?
> > Umm, what? You do realize by the amount of my participation, or rather
> > the lack thereof, that I barely ever looked at the Sven Luther
> > discussions that caused this latest commotion? Please let's not resort
> > to semi-random cheap shots.
>
> You do realise that other DDs do not generally install keyloggers or
> other monitoring software on your -private mailbox and so cannot tell
> how much you looked at the Sven Luther discussions? Please don't
> resort to cheap shots. Just answer the question.
>
> I think "Umm, what?" is rather rude - see comments below about register.
I wasn't the one who started with the rude insinuation, so please don't
point the finger only at me.
I'll happily answer the gist of the question directly - no, this is not
related to Sven Luther. Yes, I know that there was a lot of commotion about
him, and I know that it would be possible for Sven Luther, like all other
developers, to bring up an issue in front of soc-ctte, but that's it.
> I believe that there should be some lesser process than expulsion for
> resolving problems with developers, but I do not believe that a new
> "social committee" would be a good way to create that. It would be
> better to reform some of the existing posts and make their actions
> less binary and secretive.
The committee would be a representative way of saying that, for example.
Right now we have either unorganized people practically chatting about it,
unorganized people voting for the DPL (a proxy, and an inefficient one),
or someone calling for a general resolution vote. None of these measures
are fruitful, for years now.
> > [...] (Before anyone says "but this is also a reasonable
> > forum for discussion", I will just remind that this is a 694-member
> > mailing list, just think about that a bit...)
>
> The problem is not the total of 694 members. It's the behaviour of
> the 694 members in total. Appointing a subset of them is less
> beneficial than educating the 694 members in total. This is a
> reasonable forum for discussion, but it needs to be led in an open,
> transparent and respectful manner.
>
> But that's common for many lists and not a uniquely debian problem.
It is practically impossible to fully 'educate' the total number of members,
and it's practically impossible to even start doing that before we define
what this 'education' really is. I'm sure you would like to have a say if
someone just suddenly started defining a curriculum :)
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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