Re: Conflict escalation and discipline
On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 09:28:44PM +0200, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Did I get this right that you think that a person can be a problem that
> possibly would have to be removed from the project?
>
> If so I heavily disagree with that.
It's an action the project has had to take a few times before, and it's
probably worthwhile for that sort of inevitably very stressful situation
to take advantage of the judgement of several experienced mediators (or
whatever term we end up with) to decide whether it's in fact the right
course of action.
Most of the time, of course, there are usually better answers.
Expulsion is no fun for anyone. But in the past some members of the
project have turned out to be abusive in ways that were exceptionally
serious or persistent or both, and I'm sure it will happen again in the
future, and in such cases it's better to expel them than for everyone
else to suffer their behaviour.
I think I would prefer the final decision for that kind of thing to
remain where it is now, with DAM (though of course that's easy for me to
say from the outside), but since it's usually the most serious step in
an escalating sequence of behaviour, a team whose responsibility it is
to try to resolve and de-escalate conflict and who may well already have
been involved would surely have valuable input.
> I think its crucial to make a clear distinction between the behavior of
> a person and the person him/herself.
This is indeed very true and important to keep in mind, but it doesn't
mean that the project or its members should have to tolerate abusive
behaviour indefinitely.
I mean, if your main point is that we should describe the behaviour as
the problem rather than the person, then that seems like a laudable
practice. Just let's not kid ourselves that every situation can be
resolved without exclusionary measures.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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