Re: CoC / procedural abuse

[Mason Loring Bliss <mason@blisses.org>]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2014 at 11:24:59AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:

> Debian does not ban people from the mailing lists for expressing dissenting
> opinions.  If Zenaan told you this was the cause of his ban, then he has
> deliberately misled you.

No, no, he didn't suggest that. His concern was that it was done privately.

I read the email thread you suggested and I am sorry that the result wasn't a
public list of links to the emails that led to banning. That seemed to avoid
reputation damage from web crawling but to provide a welcome transparency
into the process.

I took particular interest in this:

    https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/10/msg00134.html

I value the notion of forgiveness and the idea that someone can start fresh
after a transgression. I also value the notion of warning - in this case, it
wasn't my impression that Zenaan was told "use of this variety of language
will result in banning". It was my strong impression that he was caught
entirely by surprise.


> In addition to Don's explanation of the current policy, you can find
> discussion in the debian-project archive explaining how this policy was
> arrived at:
> 
>   https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/10/msg00090.html

Was there a non-public action that resulted in the current policy? I didn't
see anything like consensus about anything resembling the current policy. The
suggestions about a public list of current bans consisting of links to the
emails in question seemed the most popular option. Something that wasn't
brought up was the fairly clear utility of such a list in showing what bans
are old enough to warrant clearing.

It just strikes me that we can do better, and I'd like to see us do so. I
value Debian as the most relevant vehicle for distributing and promoting free
software in existence by a very wide margin. The community already values
many important things and acts to do the right thing in most cases. One place
where we fall down is in our application of force.

PS: I saw "we" here, but I have no formal relationship with the project. I
speak as an interested long-time Debian user and free software advocate.

-- 
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it
flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.