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

[Martin Vaeth <martin@mvath.de>]

Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Fred is a community member.  Fred consistently harasses and trolls new
> contributors in private.

Sure, it's a problem. But not a problem which can be solved by
closing the mailing list, in no step of the issue.

First of all, this happens in private, so you cannot prevent it
by closing a mailing list.

> No mention is made of why Fred as booted out, because everything
> happened in private.

That's the mistake which is made in this example. Be open in the
decisions. If you cannot be open in order to protect other people's
privacy, be open at least by saying exactly this.

> Now a bunch of community members get upset about Fred being booted out
> without reason.  Fred claims it is because he disagrees with the
> leadership on something.  People start arguing endlessly about
> openness.

Yes, this might happen due to the non-openness. This might happen even
if you are open. And nothing will prevent it. Closing a mailing list
will not close such a debate; it will then just happen elsewhere.
Anyway, such a debate does not belong to dev-ml. The correct solution
is to continue to point people to have this debate on the appropriate place,
not on the mainly technically oriented dev-ml. Making the posters silent
by blacklisting even more is contra-productive and will give the
impression that they are actually right. As it is a commonplace:
You cannot solve social problems by technical measurements.

> Ultimately the leaders just want Fred gone so that new contributors
> aren't getting driven away.  They can't explain that because then they
> create potential civil liability for the project.

Why not? Is it against a law to exclude somebody who is hurting a
project? If it is (or if there is a danger that it is), then the
problem is not that they cannot explain it but that they must not
do it in the first place.
In any case, this is a different problem and cannot be solved by
closing a mailing list.

> The problem is that
> the debate goes on for over a year despite intervening elections and
> now this becomes the issue that is driving new contributors away.
> What solution would you propose for this problem?

How would closing the mailing list solve the problem? It will give
the impression that you want to close the debate by taking away the
medium where people can argue. And the impression is correct, because
this actually *is* the intention if you are honest.
Of course, it will not close said debate. The debate will just happen
on another channel. (Which in this example might be appropriate, but
pointing to the proper channel is what should have happened and not
closing a mailing list and thus excluding random people from posting
things about clompletely different topics which *are* on-topic on dev-ml).

> Sure, but we can at least force the negative advertising of Gentoo to
> go elsewhere, rather than basically paying to run a negative PR
> campaign against ourselves.

Closing dev-ml will not help here. If people have a strong
disagreement with a decision, this will happen on gentoo channels.
If you want to prevent it technically, you have to close all channels.

> And what about the freedom to endlessly troll and harass you and
> others? [...]

Closing a mailing list will not prevent this.
Somebody who behaves this way (or feels being treated wrong) will not
stop this only because one channel is closed for him.
What is really happening by closing the mailing list is that you stop
innocent contributors.

In any case, that's the discussion blacklisting vs. whitelisting:
To stop one specific single poster, blacklisting is enough,
at least for the beginning. Sure, technically it can be circumvented,
but you will not stop this social problem anyway by technical means.

> Surely Gentoo's mission isn't to run completely unrestricated forums
> for discussion of anything and everything.  Our main purpose here is
> to maintain a Linux distro, not provide a platform for anybody who has
> an opinion on anything.

Sure, pointing to the right channel is appropriate. This is something
completely else than to prevent posting *by default*.

> without being endlessly trolled and harassed.

This is unrelated about closing the mailing list. Especially if this
happened in private, anyway.

BTW, I do not think that contributors are that blue-eyed that they
will stop contributing only because one person does not know how to
behave. Especially if it is made clear somewhere that this happens
in disagreement with gentoo as a whole. *This* might be a way how
one might react to such a problem. Anyway, this discussion now is
getting off-topic: All these problems have nothing to do with
closing a ml and cannot be solved by this.