On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 02:54:00PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > 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. Agreed. IMO the social committee must not vote, in fact it mustn't ever decide who is Right and who is Wrong. For that, we could use some "judges". Combining the function of mediator and judge in one committee will very likely escalate problems instead of solve them. What I think is the main task of the social committee is to defuse situations when that is still possible. So they must be there early on. Some policing helps there (kicking people off IRC channels, temporary list bans, that sort of thing), because either people will think about their actions and conclude the sanction was appropriate, or they will get angry and request mediation (hopefully). Without the sanction, the problems can grow while they remain unnoticed until it's too late to solve them. 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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