Re: Results of the Antiharassment Team Survey
On 15.07.19 13:02, Sam Hartman wrote:
> First, it sounds like you'd have an interaction where reporters,
> respondents and the DPL (or AH) might all be talking together.
No, although I can see how one could read it like that.
With "including all parties", I meant what you said further below:
> Typically the DPL or the AH team sits in the middle and exchanges
> separate mails with both sides.
> Also, typically neither the DPL nor the AH team is entirely neutral.
> They are more aligned with creating a welcoming community than is
> entirely consistent with neutrality.
Fair point.
> I agree that we need a way to have a disagreement about whether some
> issue is or is not a violation of the code of conduct.
>
> I don't think we want that to be a default part of handling a given
> issue.
>
> Often discussing whether something is a violation tends to escalate the
> conflict significantly.
I'd expect the exact opposite from proper mediation.
It's clearly what happens in practice: discussions get heated, people
gravitate towards either pole, the issue escalates, ad nauseam. It's as
if everyone had fallen in the "outrage culture" trap.
What if all of this is just because we don't have the proper mediation?
And this is not a jibe at A-H -- I think we are all in agreement that
volunteers can do so much, and maybe this is one of the issues where we
could use some outside help, just as we do when we need legal help.
> You have what starts as a relatively simple problem. Someone is
> aggressive on a list.
> You ask them to stop.
>
> They debate whether they are agressive. Quickly both sides have heals
> dug in
That's a difficult problem that I can, for the moment, only acknowledge.
> Having someone who is presumed to be able to interpret the code of
> conduct helps a lot. Yes you want a procedure for overriding them.
Agreed, even though I would attach a caveat to the presumption.
> Yes, you want to have community discussions about interesting corner
> cases.
IMHO: absolutely not, at least not on our lists. The "interesting corner
case" quickly becomes "strongly A" or "strongly B" (and the majority of
people wisely just stay out of that mess). There's far too many people
(on both sides) obsessed with trying to be right at all costs, rather
than searching for compromise.
> But being able to say that a particular behavior strongly defaults to
> being inconsistent with our code of conduct can really help de-escalate
> the situation.
For particular behavior: absolutely.
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