On 2022/02/21 07:06, Scott Kitterman wrote:
Currently a DAM warning is a suspension/expulsion with deferred execution.
I don't believe that's quite accurate, a DAM warning isn't necessarily meant as a final warning, it's a larger prod for an individual to course correct their behaviour.
If an individual chooses to continue being disrespectful to other people after general requests and then also from one or more formal warnings from DAM, then I have little sympathy for them if they are kicked out of the project after they continue with abusive behaviour.
The technical issues we take on in Debian is already challenging enough that the last thing we need to do is to enable abusive people to stick around and hijack our causes and continue to distract from the actual issues we collectively care about.
That doesn't mean that there isn't problems to fix, some people have expressed concern that concentration of power with DAM is too much, DAM themselves have expressed that they have too much responsibility and don't want it, and want to focus on account management itself rather than having to be responsible for community management in addition to that.
So we do need to discuss and figure out what our ideal community processes should look like and who should be responsible for things like warnings. Should it be from the community team? A newly formed team? I'm against it being a DPL responsibility and it should really be delegated to a team instead of just resting on one person.
I think every non-government job I've had had a discipline process that went:1. Verbal warning. 2. Written warning. 3. You're fired.
Perhaps that could be used as a starting point. A process needs to be fair, but it also needs to be efficient, and the action taken should be in line with the offense. If someone, for example, starts issuing death threats and starts physically hurting people, we would need to have a process available to take quick action.
Also, I do think that people can improve, and I like to think that I've improved in many ways even just as a human being since becoming involved with free software 20 years ago. I hope that our processes will also take that into account and have some leeway for people to grow and improve over time, but there is a hard line that gets crossed when transgressions get in the way of people doing their work and they feel unsafe participating in the community, and when that happens, swift action will continue to remain necessary.
-Jonathan