At Thu, 10 Mar 2005 03:43:48 +0100, martin f krafft wrote: > > My sincere apologies for the delay. > Note up front: I have not yet looked at your platform. [...] > Could you please state in public that you did not use the delay in > any way to gain an advantage by looking over the others' platforms > and the ensuing discussion? I did not use the delay in any way to gain an advantage by looking over the others' platforms and the ensuing discussion. (I was too busy writing the platform!) I understand your concerns, but now that you've had time to read my platform, I hope they no longer remain. At Thu, 10 Mar 2005 04:25:01 +0100, martin f krafft wrote: > > I have a few ideas about how to improve communication within Debian > > and I will try to bring an attitude of tolerance and more efficient > > communication to the mailing lists. > Could you please be more specific and give us more details about > these ideas? Sure. (I hope you don't plan to choose your next DPL based on their undeveloped personal ideas for mailing list policies, however) Like most other Debian Developers, I think we have an unhelpful culture of flaming, ad hominem attacks and general "posturing" on our lists. Improving this culture is going to be difficult, and our noisiest contributors are the ones that are going to be most affected. Given Debian's size and geographical distribution, I think holding more in-person meetings is not going to make much difference to the lists. It would cost US$millions to bring every developer to the one place, so clearly only regional gatherings are possible. We already have various debconfs that bring American and European developers together (and those of us in less densely populated parts of the planet do the best we can), and yet clearly the tone of the mailing lists has not improved. As a general strategy, I'd like to move a lot of the actual discussion off the mailing lists and into some higher bandwidth, higher turnover medium. For small focussed teams, in-person meetings such as the recent one between release and ftp-master teams are the ideal and should of course be continued. As I mention in my brief "debian-thoughts" article (linked from my platform), something I'd like to explore is VoIP - now that the tools and the bandwidth seem to be available. Even IRC, with its famed ability to waste time, seems to somehow avoid the nastiness of public mailing lists. The approach I think is going to have the most dramatic impact here is of course mailing list moderation. Although some people are hotly opposed to this form of "censorship", this is something I believe the project would benefit from and something we need to experiment with. I know the listmasters have some ideas here and there is obviously huge variation in possible algorithms - I would think different lists might even want different policies. I think this is a discussion we need to have and I think its an area where we need to feel confident to try out different ideas, make mistakes and not be afraid to roll them back. -- - Gus
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