Re: Social committee, legislature, sanctioning
Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 02:22:41AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> 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. :-)
The tech-ctte is the example that I think the soc-ctte is partly modelled
after. It works pretty well and handles internal disagreements, but it's
aided in that by the fact that the questions are very technical and voting
is used to resolve disagreements. I'm not sure the same tools would work
here. Taking votes on difficult personal issues often ends up being a
lose-lose situation, where every voting outcome escalates the situation in
a different way and at least creates the appearance of factions.
I do want to stress, though, that I may be too pessimistic and I don't
want people to stop trying to put something together. I'm more just
airing my worries in case they spark any thought or in case thinking about
them in advance helps head them off.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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