On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 02:22:41AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > It's not about opinions. It's about people. The problem most often > materializes when there are heated opinions, but the fundamental problem > is when people can't work together with mutual respect. If you end up > with people who intensely dislike each other, the group will have an > exceedingly hard time reaching consensus on anything. It is very important that the people in the Social Committee can work together well. If we can use a voting system which makes sure we don't elect people who dislike each other, we certainly should. But that doesn't mean they all have to be on the same side of important arguments. The members of the committee must respect each other, so they can work together. But they must also represent both sides (or none) of any argument, so that they are acceptable as a mediator for both conflicting parties. > It's one of those sorts of landmine situations where it looks like it > works fine up until the point where there's a major problem that provokes > a lot of heated disagreement, and that's when the body designed to try to > defuse such situations is most vulnerable to a breakdown of civility and > willingness to work together among its members. Of course. It's a hard job, and it will likely be hard to keep the committee together at times (but those times are exactly what the committee is set up for). I'm confident that we vote for people who we expect to be good at that. But that quality is orthogonal to most conflicts, so having all people in the committee being able to work together even in hard times doesn't mean they cannot be representative. > One of the things that I find troubling about the idea of the social > committee is that I think it takes the idea of a democratic body and > some vague notions that smart people can work anything out and applies > them to problems that are considerably thornier than the technical > problems our existing example deals with. I'm not sure what example you're talking about, but I think we all agree that what we're trying to solve is an extremely hard problem. But we're Debian. We try anyway. And we try to do it the best way possible, not just acceptable. :-) > Constructing organizations that can effectively deal with social > problems is way harder than constructing a technical committee and I'm > worried that insufficient attention is being paid to some of the > fuzzier aspects of how such a group can work together. This is something I would leave to the voters. If the voters are stupid enough to elect stubborn people in a social committee, well, then they get a non-functional committee. I don't expect us to be so stupid. ;-) However, I think a voting system which would give the candidates some say in who they are willing to work with would be a very good idea. > Legislatures in governments handle a spectacular degree of hostility > and animosity, but they resolve all issues by voting and compromise is > measured in terms of votes and voting alliances, definitely *not* > consensus. I think it would be good to have some kind of legislature as well. But they have a very different function from the social committee. The social committee should try to solve and prevent conflicts, while the legislature should decide them. Deciding a conflict should not be done if it can be solved. This means that the legislature should only come into action when the social committee gives up on a problem. A related subject is sanctioning. At the moment, the only sanction we have is expulsion, and we obviously don't want to use it too much. There's been a ban for people on mailing lists (and IRC?), but that was "just done", without any rules on when and where that is acceptable (AFAIK). I think it would be a good idea to have some DPL delegates for this purpose (sanctioning). There should also be some general guidelines, but mostly I would just leave it to their discretion. They should be allowed to ban people from communication media, for example. When there is discussion about repeated abuse of that power, it can be first mediated by the social committee, and if that doesn't work, decided on by the legislature. And of course anything can be overturned by a GR. So why do I write this here and not in a new thread? Because IMO these things are all connected. The social committee is bound to fail in some cases. And without light sanctions, conflicts are more likely to get out of hand. Only installing a social committee isn't going to solve the problems. We need the whole system. > Members of the executive, where most of the expectation of day-to-day > action rests, pretty universally are chosen in part for their ability > to work together rather than be representative of the whole > population. But the social committee is not comparable to the executive (that's the police, right?). It doesn't do sanctioning. It's a part that is missing in our laws, but is present in many organisations: a mediator. > I think it depends a lot on what role you expect the committee to > take. If the role of the committee is to serve as peacemaker and > facilitator, it doesn't matter as much whether or not it's > representative; it would matter a great deal more whether the members > were people capable of acting in that role. That is important indeed, but that doesn't mean it can't be representative. And IMO it would be a big bonus for them if they are. Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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