Both DPL candidates: handling social conflict

[Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 08:49:41PM +0000, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> We have a number of delegated teams. How detailed should the
> delegations be? What is the appropriate level of oversight,
> management, and control that the DPL and the project in general should
> have for deciding what the teams work on, and how they do their job?

Thank you, Lucas and Neil, for your answers. My interpretation of them
is that you're both roughly on the same lines, with differences mainly
in style and approach rather than substance. I don't have follow-up
questions on those, and I'm happy with your answers.

Since nobody else is asking questions, I'll ask another one, which
again I am unable to distill into a single sentence.

We have, from time to time, situations within the project where
people's feelings are strong and raw at the same time. These might
turn into outright flame wars, but even before they go that far, they
can be damaging. For example, most of the init system discussions of
the past couple of years haven't been flame wars, but they have been
divisive and have caused hurt feelings and generally made Debian be
less fun for a lot of people.

Some of these situations are traditionally difficult for us to deal
with. Clear trolling, or name calling, or unambiguous flaming is easy
to deal with. Where we typically fail, as a project, is dealing well
with situations when people mainly talk past each other, not listening
to the other parties, and are entrenched and uncompromising, leading
to quite voluminous discussions that often don't make any progress.

My question is: what do you think we, as a project, and you, if
elected as DPL, can do to handle such situations, and ideally prevent
them? I am asking a general question, not specifically about the init
discussions.

In previous years we've had a number of discussions about this, and in
those a "social committee" has been proposed. What do you think about
that?

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