Dear debian-user subscribers, While most of use don't have a vote as per the Debian Constitution we can (and sometimes do) get involved in various decision processes, even if just by providing our opinion or point of view (in a discussion on some list, on a bug report, etc.). In my opinion (ha!) Russ makes excelent points below on how to engage in respectful and constructive ways. I believe this approach can be used outside Debian as well. Kind regards, Andrei ----- Forwarded message from Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> ----- Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 10:01:26 -0700 From: Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> To: debian-project@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: [Summary] Discourse for Debian Organization: The Eyrie User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.3 (gnu/linux) Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> writes: > today i'm not sure whether it's worth rehashing this on the list (and > which part to quote also, but thats a minor detail), so I'll just reply > here to you now. > a.) I can see how my reply (replies?) in this thread were negative like this > and for all the good reasons explained by you I'm sorry about that. > b.) and at the same time I don't know how else to respond to such proposals, > because if I don't speak up, silence can and will be seen as consent. And > I've seen too many test ballons which became real thing later, so if > someone comes and says 'I would like to move Debian communication to > slack' (or discourse or facebook or foo) i'm not sure "I wont use that" > is really bad. Also, if someone has 'crazy ideas' (not Neil here) *and* > shares them with hundreds of people, I don't see why the burden of work > (explaining in detail why those ideas are not good...) is on the side of > people who would like to stay with things how they are. > So, IOW, yes, I can see how my comment 'I think discourse sux and I wont > use it' is not improving the situation, but then I do think that > suggesting discourse already worsened the situation and it's not my job > to fix problems introduced by someone else, while I should at least be > able to point this out. > If you could help me with an idea here I would really appreciate it. This is a great question. I'm not sure I have a great answer, and I've struggled with this too, but here's how I think about it. (And to be clear I don't always follow my own advice on this! But usually I'm more satisfied with the outcome when I do.) In addition to asking myself "do I think this is a good idea," I try to ask myself two more questions: 1. How do I think the project should make a decision about this idea? 2. How would I find out if I'm wrong? I think most of your concern stems from the first, so in this sort of case I'd focus there. Your primary concern is that you don't like Discourse and don't want the project to move to it, but what I'm hearing is that the reason why you feel pushed to express that opinion right away is that you're afraid that this will become the accepted direction without an opportunity for further input. So, in the case where people disagree, how should that decision be made? Looking at it from that angle, I think a form of voting by positive or negative messages in a mailing list isn't a good decision-making method. Among other things, it leaves a lot of people out. So I wouldn't want to engage by assuming that volume of responses will be the decision-making process. But I'd also want to be sure the decision didn't just happen without a further opportunity to express my opinion. So I'd try to say something like, "This seems like a bad idea to me and I'm worried it will get adopted by default if I don't say something but I don't know enough right now / don't have enough time right now to make a detailed counter-argument. Can we agree that after the end of experimentation we have some vote or further detailed discussion before we make this official?" Then once you've secured that promise, you can step back and see if people realize on their own that you were right or if other people with more time or motivation will step up and do the work of making the argument. I'm a great believer in process. We aren't all going to agree, but hopefully we can agree on a decision-making method that's good enough that we can live with disagreements when they're handled thoughtfully, and part of that is slowing things down a little and not letting things happen by default. So I start looking for what process will make me feel heard and will let me express my concerns. That ties into the second part. If someone else thinks something is great, maybe I'm missing something. Maybe Discourse used to suck but doesn't any more, or there's some configuration I haven't seen that makes it suck less. Or maybe there's some way for both of us to get what we want; maybe Discourse is now a great mailing list manager and I didn't know. I'm wrong about a lot of things, and I hate taking a strong stance on something and then later realizing I'm wrong. So I look for some way to learn that my concerns aren't well-founded due to some information that I don't already have. Your point that this can be a lot of work is valid. My counter-argument is that most bad ideas go away by themselves; it's usually not necessary to explicitly shoot them down because Debian has a ton of momentum and doesn't change easily. That's why I start with having a decision-making process and then see if it will just go away before the decision-making process is ever reached. If people are invested enough in something to do the work and take it back to that decision-making process, then at that point I feel like I do have an obligation to engage with their idea and try to spell out my concerns if it's important to me. Most of the bad ideas will be filtered out before that point, so the chances are much higher, when something reaches that level, that other people are seeing merits in something that I'm not seeing, and it's worth the time and effort to dig into why and where the points of disagreement really are. -- Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> ----- End forwarded message ----- -- http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser
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