Re: Results of the Antiharassment Team Survey
Hi Russ,
I'm deliberately commenting on just two very short fragments of your mails:
On 10.07.19 05:45, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Telling people they crossed a line and need to stop, and then if necessary
> forcing them to stop by temporarily restricting their access to the place
> where they're crossing the line, *is* engaging members of the project in
> relatively minor things and guiding their behavior.
This statement is, by itself, entirely reasonable.
However, if there's one thing I've learned from reading -project and
especially -private in the recent past, it's that where this line is
drawn seems to be entirely unclear, and an unclear rule rarely (if ever)
results in an improvement of things.
In my observation, given any two sides of the discussion, the line
between the two extremes -- which, unfortunately, are also the loudest
-- is actually a chasm (and the middle 90% of the discussion just stay
out of it, for obvious reasons).
As it appears to me, one extreme seems to reject even the concept of a
CoC, while the other seems to define "harassment" as something
exclusively subjective.
I consider both of these extremes irrational. As to the former: I
believe that Debian should be a welcoming place, and that we should
enforce conduct that makes it such. As to the latter: however, I also
believe that we need objective interpretations of what the proper type
of conduct *is*. Because otherwise, we risk labeling as aggressive or
offensive behavior that is objectively clearly not so simply because a
given individual perceived it as such.
Hence, I not only personally like Sam's idea of mediation, I believe it
is essential to actually drawing that line. I believe it is essential to
leading to improvement.
That doesn't mean that every problem needs mediation, or the same amount
of mediation. As an extreme example, a death threat against a member of
the community is objectively harassing, as it is defined as criminal
behavior in all jurisdictions I'm familiar with.
On the other hand, a complete rejection of mediation can lead to cases
such as the following, where I cannot see the positive effect of A-H
enforcement at all. On the contrary, I find this utterly confusing, and
mails like these lead me to actively question whether I should even
publicly disagree with someone on a list, lest it be considered
harassment (this is not hyperbole, I can give an example on -private
where simple disagreement led to an A-H report).
https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2018/12/msg00033.html
As to your other mail:
> The conclusion that I personally would draw from this is that a number of
> people in the project have unrealistic expectations for what is possible
> for a voluntary anti-harassment team in a project like ours.
I concur. However, I believe that the expectations, most notably
mediation, are entirely reasonable, and hence if it is unrealistic that
these expectations can be satisfied by a voluntary team, the Project
should engage a professional resource. As far as I understand it, the
Project does this all the time when a lawyer is needed, for example.
Regards,
Christian
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