Re: Question for Planet Admins: What Should I do if another Developer Removes my Blog
On Tuesday, May 21, 2019 7:41:51 PM EDT Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> I'm a planet admin although, as you suggest, I think this is outside
> of the area of documented policy.
>
> <quote who="Sam Hartman" date="Tue, May 21, 2019 at 06:15:05AM -0400">
>
> > Imagine that I get a note from a random developer saying they have
> > removed my blog from planet. I understand what they are saying enough
> > to believe it is not vandalism; they honestly believe I did something
> > wrong. I can't understand from their message how they hope I'd fix it.
> >
> > I cannot engage with them in what I think is a timely manner.
> >
> > They copied the planet admins who have not gotten involved in the
> > conversation.
> >
> > What should I do?
>
> The problems caused by a revert war are greater than the threat of a
> person not being on planet for a short period of time. As a result, I
> think it's best not to start a "war" by reverting a change without
> first understanding or attempting to address the underlying problem or
> getting feedback from the planet admins that the problem that caused
> removal in the first place can be ignored.
>
> As a result, I think the preferred approach would be your (2):
> > 2) Ask the planet admins to respond to the situation and either help
> > me understand the problem or add my blog back.
>
> If somebody removes a feed from planet because they think it is on the
> wrong side of appropriate behavior within Debian, the appropriate
> first step is to discuss it with the parties involved. I think it's
> part of the planet admins' job to mediate this conversation.
>
> If consensus on an outcome cannot be reached this way, the
> conversation will likely need to move a mailing list and/or leadership
> within the project.
>
> I'd be happy to document this on the Planet wiki page.
>
> I understand that this approach gives everyone with access to the
> repository on salsa the power to temporary silence anyone else. I
> think that the benefits of this level of openness (documented in the
> list of actions Joerg shared) are high enough that they outweigh he
> risks this introduces.
The Planet Debian admins are, IMO, free to run the service however they want
(thank you for providing it).
I think defaulting to silencing people is the opposite of openness.
I don't recall for certain how much blogging there was about systemd during
that debacle (irrelvant to the goodness/badness of the final result, the
process was ugly), but I can imagine if something similarly controversial
comes up in the future, deletions from Planet Debian being rather more common
in the heat of the moment if we codify a policy that endorses random DDs
removing feeds from Planet Debian.
I think it's more open and equally clean for someone who's blog has been non-
consensually removed to be able to put it back themselves immediately (if they
think the removal was unreasonable) and point the remover at the Planet Debian
admins.
There should be consistency about what is OK and not and it's the Planet
Debian admins that can apply that. Yes, we have a CoC, but if something is OK
CoC wise or not is not generally a clear cut decision. If there's a problem,
I think (absent some of the types of cases Joerg mentioned) that people with
concerns should be asking the admins to address it and not unilaterally
applying their personal standards to a project resource.
Scott K
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