Re: [gentoo-dev] Proctors - improve the concept or discard it?

[Richard Freeman <rich@thefreemanclan.net>]

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Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> 
> Perhaps if the proctors had discussed things first, they wouldn't have
> made two major screwups that resulted in Gentoo losing yet another
> developer.
> 

Might I suggest that anybody who is waiting for "one last straw" go 
ahead and take a month or two off right now and save everybody the 
drama?  If I felt like I was in a position on a project where I was so 
fed-up that if anything serious happened I'd just quit, and I wasn't 
being paid at all, I'd take a vacation.  Relax!  Come back with an idea 
of why it is I'm participating in the project in the first place.  It 
would be better for myself and the project than doing something that 
will upset a lot of people and which I might regret down the road.  It 
might be harder in the "real world" if you need a steady income, but 
most of us at Gentoo have the liberty of taking time off without much of 
a drop in income...  :)

If the proctors overstepped their bounds I'm sure the council will talk 
to them about it in the appropriate forum, and straighten things out. 
Some general positive contribution as to what role if any proctors 
should have is also a good thing.  I've really only seen two roles 
advocated in this series of posts:

1.  They're essentially doing the right thing already - short-term bans 
are OK to enforce cooldown periods and stop off-topic flames.
2.  They really aren't needed at all.

The few posts that don't fall into those categories haven't really 
suggested anything else in-between as an alternative.  Personally I tend 
to fall into category #1 - maybe with the addition of sending private 
warnings before enforcing bans.  A better solution might be closing 
threads, but this probably isn't all that practical to accomplish in a 
mailing list without moderating the list with approval of all posts.

If somebody has a practical suggestion as to how the proctors can 
fulfill their mission without causing problems, I'm sure they're open to 
it.  I'm not sure I'd call the CoC a failure so much as a work in 
progress - it may already be causing an improvement in bugzilla or 
elsewhere even if not obviously on this list.  In any case, there really 
isn't anything in the CoC that isn't generally good-policy, so just 
having it acts as a warning to those who might later need to be dealt 
with simply for being super-obnoxious.

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