Re: [gentoo-dev] Mailing list moderation and community openness

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 12:55 PM, R0b0t1 <r030t1@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I can't tell, and I suspect other people can't either.
>

This is the crux of the issue.  Decisions involving people issues are
made behind closed doors, which means that others are not free to
confirm for themselves whether those actions are correct.  This tends
to lead to ongoing debate over whether those decisions were
appropriate, with everybody arguing from their own knowledge, and the
only ones who know the information used to make the decision are
barred from talking about it.  This is basically a debate where
participation is limited to the ignorant, at least as far as the
particular details go (the general principles are debated by all).

That said, even if the decisions were made in the open I wouldn't
expect all to agree with them.

Ultimately though there are pros and cons to making these kinds of
decisions in the open, and there is not universal agreement regarding
how these situations ought to be handled.  We can either fight about
it until the end of time, or we can agree on some way to determine
what approach we are going to take and then support it (perhaps
begrudgingly).  Right now the mechanism that we have in place is the
Council.  The only other mechanism I could see that would make any
sense would be a referendum on the issue.  That gets unwieldy if we
try to apply it to every little decision, but maybe for the big
picture issues it would make sense.

However, I think a lot of people would be surprised at the outcome.
We all assume that we're all here for the same reasons, but as I
commented on my blog Gentoo is a bit unique among distros and many of
us are here for very different reasons, and have different priorities.
Also, there is sometimes a tendency to assume that all FOSS projects
work the same way.  When I was listening to a talk about how one of
the BSDs dealt with these kinds of issues I was shocked to discover
that much of their dev communications happens on completely closed
lists (not just closed to posting, but to reading as well).  Gentoo
has the gentoo-core list but it is very low traffic and it tends to be
used for things like swapping cell phone numbers before conferences.
When anything substantive comes up there are usually several people
who chime in to rightly point out that this talk belongs on a public
list.

Bottom line is that there are a lot of different ways projects can
run, and they all have their pros and cons.  A lot of the FOSS we
depend on actually gets built or discussed behind closed doors.  I
doubt many of us want Gentoo to go that far, but I suspect there is a
lot of interest in taking smaller steps in that general direction.

-- 
Rich