Re: Censorship in Debian
Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au> writes:
> There are times when you don't have to think about what you're saying
> before you say it; that situation is often called being "among friends",
> or "in a safe space", or "able to let your guard down".
> I think it's probably news to a lot of people that Debian isn't that
> sort of a situation today.
But of *course* we're not! The project is more than 1,000 people!
There's no way that is a situation where we're all among friends and can
completely let our guard down and say whatever we think without any
filters.
What you're talking about is trust, and we can certainly try to build
trust within the project, and part of that is giving other people the
benefit of the doubt, assuming good will, and so forth. To the extent
that we can achieve that uniformly across everyone in the project, that's
great. But a project with a couple dozen people can reach a much higher
level of trust than a project of over a thousand people. As the scale
gets larger, the level of baseline trust we can establish is necessarily
going to be lower.
Trust is complicated and involves a lot of factors. It's not just the
assumption of good will, it's also the chances that someone else agrees
with you politically, has the same motives that you do, cares about the
same goals that you do, and so forth. Even things like sharing a native
language or an economic background or a national origin help build trust.
When the project gets larger, some of those parts of trust will lessen
necessarily because we have a wider variety of members. It's sad in a
way, but it's inherent in size. 1,000 people is a *lot* of people.
(Obviously, there's a smaller core of people who participate in
discussions like this, but it's still a *lot* of people.)
I'm afraid Debian as a project is not in "small gathering with your close
friends" territory. It's in "small town" territory. The good news is
that this means we have way more people doing way more interesting work,
and way more cultures and thus more interesting things to learn. The bad
news is that, yes, the level of baseline trust is a bit lower, which means
that we have to be more polite and more thoughtful and more, well,
"civilized" in the old definition of "the way people behave in cities."
> (IMO, one of the problems with planet aggregators is it changes your
> personal blog from being a place where you can say whatever you want and
> have it only affect yourself, to a place where you have to watch what
> you say because it's automatically pushed to strangers who are only
> interested in very particular parts of who you are)
Yup. And if you don't want that effect, well, don't aggregate your blog.
It's okay to not aggregate your blog!
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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