Re: Questions around Justice and Our Current CoC procedures
Marc Haber <mh+debian-project@zugschlus.de> writes:
> But please don't forget that a person vanishing from a heated discussion
> just in a whim creates the feeling of victory in the orht discussion
> parties.
> And I KNOW what I would do as participant of a heated discussion after
> receiving a DAM warning.
I think the way you've framed this captures a lot of what we're struggling
with right now. Why is victory a desired outcome in discussions? Why is
victory something we're trying to prevent other people from feeling? (And
this is not just you, to be clear; I completely recognize the feeling that
you're describing.) How have we managed to make vanishing from a heated
discussion a bad thing? Shouldn't it be good to back away from something
that's too heated and let it calm down?
Part of the problem you're getting at, I think, is that we feel like we've
lost the capacity for constructive discussion in some areas, and the
options are either to win a heated discussion or to vanish. This is a
very bad place to be. That's a sign of an unhealthy community and an
unhealthy project, and Debian is not going to survive if that's where we
stay.
My goal is to have non-heated discussions and a clear decision-making
process. If *everyone* stepped away from heated discussions, the heated
discussions would end, and that would be great. What I think you're
identifying is the worry that one side is going to "win" by default, and
to me the answer to that is to end the heated discussion, but not the
*discussion*. To ensure there is some explicit decision point that you
will not miss by leaving the uncomfortable and draining discussion that
has gotten too heated.
There are some decisions (although I hope not very many!) where we have a
fundamental disagreement over the path forward and still have to decide,
and some group is going to feel like the project is going in the wrong
direction. We should try to minimize those, but they exist. But that
still doesn't mean we need to have a heated discussion. We can identify
the core points of disagreement, try to narrow them down as much as
possible, and resort to a vote. That's why I care so much about GR
process; it gives us a way to make a decision that doesn't involve one
group of people yelling down another group of people until they achieve
some sort of victory. I think those victories are pyrrhic.
Sometimes I'm going to be in the minority in the project on something that
matters to me and I'll have to decide whether to live with that or whether
that means Debian is no longer aligned with my goals. That's hard to deal
with, but at least if it comes in the form of a clear vote, I'll have
concrete facts to work with. It can't come in the form of people willing
mailing list arguments by attrition, since then I'll never be convinced
that I really was in the minority as opposed to just being unwilling to
shout loud enough.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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