On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 08:36:22PM +0100, Rayna wrote:
> I have been thinking about a global "anti-harassment committee". That
> is, a group of people involved not only in one community, but coming
> from various ones who could be contacted via a mail in case of any
> mistreatment.
Frankly speaking, I don't think that a truly global (in the sense of
inter-community) "committee" would work. First of all there is a matter
of confidentiality: I *guess* it would be easier to escalate, as a first
step, any harassment episode to members of your community than to
members of other communities you don't know anything about. Don't get me
wrong, there is nothing community-specific in harassment episodes, they
do are a global problem, but I fear that overly generalizing the scope
of a committee can create barriers to contacting it.
Then, as a second reason, I doubt about the effectiveness of something
which is too broad. You need to know a community to understand who
better contact to address the issue, once it has been reported. Hence,
the only way I can see a global committee working efficiently, is to
"delegate" inside itself competencies about episode occurring in
specific communities to representative of those communities. But if we
arrive there, what would then be the difference with having
per-community committees?
Last but not least, implementing a Debian-specific contact point is
something that we can do here and now, improving the awareness of the
issue within the Debian community. If we want to go for something more
global, we can't do that in isolation, and I've no idea about how the
corresponding timeline will look like.
Of course, no-one says that per-community committees should not talk to
each other :-) In fact, advertising clearly one such contact point for
Debian on our contact page will surely travel a long way in letting
other know Debian has it, and encouraging contacts across communities.
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 11:51:35AM -0800, Patty Langasek wrote:
> I was actually going to propose something as well, but through DebConf
> channels.
I guess you're subscribed to debconf-team, but it's worth pointing out
for other followers of this list, that the topic of an anti-harassment
policy for DebConf is being discussed as we speak on that list.
> As such, I'd be more than happy to be involved, shoulder-to-shoulder
> with Amaya and Lars! =)
Great, thanks!
From other replies it seems to me that something like
"antiharassment@d.o" will be more acceptable. I'll wait for some more
feedback and then proceed requesting its creation as an alias initially
pointing to Amaya and Patty.
Thanks to you hall for your enthusiastic feedback,
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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