Re: Questions around Justice and Our Current CoC procedures
Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> writes:
> Figuring out how to accomplish requesting a statement is a little
> tricky, but I think it is worth the effort. DAM takes membership
> actions (including warnings) by consensus. It's fairly difficult to get
> all the members of DAM together.
> I don't think it would work in practice for the request for a statement
> to be a consensus action and to be followed shortly there after by
> another consensus action to take a decision and to write it up. That
> would require DAM to get together as a group twice in short succession;
> given how hard it is to schedule DAM action, that would not work.
I think Debian is in danger of a degenerative spiral, both here and in
other places. We make fewer and fewer decisions, slower and slower, which
raises the cost of reversing a bad decision because it requires a second
decision, which will also be slow. This raises the stakes of each
decision, so they have to be made more carefully. This makes the decision
take more effort, and thus we make even fewer decisions, and those
decisions then carry even more weight. That in turn leads people to want
them to be made even more carefully, and the spiral continues until we
talk endlessly and make no decisions at all.
We need a careful and slow process for kicking someone out of the project
because that's a big deal. Having a careful and slow process for issuing
a warning is faintly absurd, and I think we've only arrived at that state
because it's so hard to decide to ever do anything that they've reached an
unrealistic level of apparent importance.
I think the solution in many, many places across Debian is to make more
decisions, faster, and allow some of them to be wrong. Lower the stakes
and consequences of a bad decision, and lower the perceived weight of a
single decision, rather than trying to make every decision perfect.
Anyway, to be more concrete, what your description of the process says to
me is that ideally DAM would be much larger and would deal with more minor
things, such as warnings, in panels. Have a rotating "on call" or
something similar, empower them to make decisions on anything that comes
up while they're on call, and if someone thinks their decision is
profoundly unfair (I still think people are making far too much out of
warnings), or if some more serious issue comes up, it can be reviewed by a
different panel, a larger panel, or by DAM as a whole, but that would be
rarer.
Having more people empowered to make decisions faster would also lower the
perceived significance of each decision, since there's going to be some
minor human inconsistency and I think that's actually healthy. The goal
of warnings is not to precisely measure and describe exactly what someone
did wrong to some nonexistent objective standard. It's to say "hey, this
is making things shitty for other people, you need to knock it off."
People can grumble about that all they want; the grumbling doesn't require
a response. If they think twice about doing the thing that was making
things shitty for other people, mission accomplished. If it turns out
that what they were doing was fine in context, great! It was a warning;
no one did anything. If that was the first warning someone got for
something they didn't actually do, they've led a way more sheltered life
than I have, and my life has been pretty sheltered.
I dunno, I realize I may be being too cavalier here, but see the point
above about making more decisions, faster, and accepting a few mistakes.
If we end up with a rash of bogus warnings, we can reconsider. But right
now warnings are about as frequent as Papal encyclicals, and I think
partly as a result people have gotten really weird ideas about them.
I guess the other possibility is that people really want warnings to be
way more serious than any meaning I personally would ascribe to the word
"warning" and are thinking of them as formal project censure or something
akin to that. In that case, my argument is that we need a warning that's
actually just a warning, and the thing we've got is much too strong and
the real problem is that we don't have something lighter touch.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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