Re: Shutting down the Off the Wall (was: Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items ...)

[desultory <desultory@gentoo.org>]

On 12/12/20 17:23, Michał Górny wrote:
> On Sat, 2020-12-12 at 14:42 +0000, Roy Bamford wrote:
>> Now we have a council member appealing directly to council again ...
>> that sends the message to the community, yet again, that the 
>> processes that council are supposed to enforce don't apply to
>> council 
>> members.
>> Will the damage from that message ever be undone?
> 
> Is this really a message sent 'by the event', or a deliberate FUD
> spread by people who don't like the message?  Because when people start
> disputing the process and not the actual arguments, the message I get
> is 'they are right and we can't argue with that, so let's try to sweep
> it under the rug'.  Then we get walls of meaningless text, arguments
> about the process, conflicts of interest, etc.
> 
Sometimes, such as in this case, it really is the case that the process
has been abused to the point where even bothering with arguing what
points have actually (finally) been made is a largely quixotic exercise.

The direct counterarguments to "I don't like it, make it go away" are,
broadly:
1. Yes.
Which would imply that there was no need to make the complaint in the
first place, as the thing being complained about was being removed
anyway, which was not the case in this instance.

2. No.
Which is simply dismissing the complaint out of hand, which did not
happen in this case.

3. Learn to like it.
Which presumes that there is no fault in the thing being objected to,
which is not an argument which any moderator has made regarding Off the
Wall.

4. Tell us why and we can work from there.
Which can indeed at least be a path to discover whether common ground
exists. Unfortunately the complainant in this case, by their own
admission, deliberately avoided this and other council members delayed
until ridiculously close to their meeting to bother even starting with
if they even started at all.

Instead we got trolling, various snide remarks, council usurping the
role of moderator with respect to the subject of the complaint, council
proceeding to do nothing regarding the post being complained about, a
council vote calling for the entire section to be removed from public
view instead of anything in regard to the supposed subject of the
initial complaint, and at no point were we cleared to actually respond
to the cited post.

In short, there are actual problems with the process as executed.