Re: Community Team - where we want to go
On October 10, 2019 9:00:43 AM UTC, Gerardo Ballabio <gerardo.ballabio@gmail.com> wrote:
>Steve McIntyre wrote:
>> Within the team, we've brainstormed about this and come up with the
>following to describe our role and responsibilities. We'd like to
>discuss it now with the rest of the project. Feedback welcome please!
>
>Hi Steve,
>that looks good (I especially like the "Examples of things the team
>does *not* do"), but I think you should also add something on how the
>team will be handling confidential information that it's going to have
>access to as part of its job.
>
>I suppose it won't be easy to strike a good balance between the right
>to privacy, the right of accused people to know what they're accused
>of and by whom and to defend themselves, the right of victims to not
>having to confront their abusers, and so on. So this deserves to be
>thought through carefully and clear guidelines should be set.
>
>Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> From what does the team believe they derive their authority to do
>things like interpret the CoC and to whom is the team accountable?
>
>Norbert Preining wrote:
>> As "just another group of Debian Developers" I am not sure how you
>can usurp the right to exegesis of the CoC?
>
>My understanding is that the team is expecting to receive a formal
>delegation from the DPL which would give them such authority. Given
>also that they are going to handle confidential information (see
>above), my opinion is that a delegation is indeed necessary.
What's the basis for this understanding? I've not seen anything discussed to that effect, in fact the last time this came up (that I'm aware of) there was substantial push back from the team on the idea?
>However, I'd also observe that it's quite common in Debian for people
>to take over a specific responsibility and be granted a de facto
>"monopoly" over it without a formal delegation. For example,
>maintainers take ownership of their packages without being delegated,
>yet everybody accepts that it is a very bad thing to act on a package
>against the maintainer's will. That isn't really different from the
>Community Team claiming ownership of interpreting the CoC simply
>because they were the first who started working on that.
I think you inadvertently make my point for me. The maintainer role is defined in Debian policy and the tech-ctte had a constitutionally defined responsibility to decide who the maintainer is in case of disputes.
Yes, one can volunteer to be a package maintainer for a particular package, but the role and it's oversight are well documented by the project. There's nothing self-defined about it.
Scott K
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