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

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 1:36 AM, Eray Aslan <eras@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 10:28:48AM -0500, Matthew Thode wrote:
>> While I personally do no agree with mailing list moderation infra has
>> been tasked with moving forward on it.
>
> That was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment but not wholly.  You cant
> cop out by saying it was an order from council.  I understand if you
> dont but do consider it.  Fight the good fight.

Interesting.  When exactly should we all start ignoring the Council,
and when should we do what they say?  And what is the likely result of
that?

For all the complaining of "cabals" in Gentoo it seems odd to suggest
putting the final decisions of the one group that is about the least
democratic in the organization.

(That isn't really intended as a criticism: there are a lot of
practical reasons why infra operates as it does and I've yet to come
up with any better approach.  With the council/trustees the authority
comes from the collective, and nobody would pay attention to a
directive that didn't have a majority backing or the appearance of due
process.  With any other project the decisions are appealable to
council.  With infra one guy with the root password can cause a lot of
havoc, and the computer isn't going to stop and question what they're
doing.  That creates a lot of incentive to minimize the number of
people who are trusted.  In any case, I think it makes the most sense
to do the decision-making in more open/democratic processes, and then
minimize the execution footprint that requires "cabals.")

As I've commented elsewhere [1] I think an issue here is that we just
don't have enough of a critical mass to be able to afford to split
along ideological lines.  The set of developers interested in a
source-based distro is barely sufficient to create a viable
source-based distro.  If you split it into the subsets who prefer open
vs closed mailing lists on top of this then the individual groups lack
critical mass.  And so we're forced to co-exist, and agree on one or
the other, or some kind of compromise.

1 - https://rich0gentoo.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/gentoo-ought-to-be-about-choice/

-- 
Rich