[gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Michał Górny]

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Hello,

TL;DR: I am suggesting that we should vote out existing Council members,
and give new people a chance to make a better Council.


Back in April I have voiced concerns about 'low Coucil member
involvement outside [Council] meetings' [1].  The Council members did
not really reply to that thread.  However, blueness has made
an interesting point:

| I was on the Council for several years in a row.  When I first got
| on,  I was super enthusiastic and always came prepared.  However,
| after a few years, I burned out.  I noticed the same in other council
| members that slowly petered away during the year.  Since at any given
| time there are only a few enthusiastic gentoo devs who would step up
| to do council work, and that incumbents tend to be re-elected, I'm
| not surprised that this is a chronic problem.  [2]

Given that half of the existing Council members have already accepted
their nominations, including three that were in the Council for at least
4 years in a row (see [3] for nominees, [4] for past terms), I'm
starting to feel like the next term is not going to be different.

Last year, I've attempted to improve things by organizing a pre-election 
Q&A session [5].  I think it was a partial success.  The interest in it
exceeded my expectations, and as a result the work involved in it
exceeded my preparations ;-).  Sadly, as it happens in politics, not all
Council members followed their early ideas.

This year I don't really have time nor motivation to do such a thing. 
Instead, I would like to focus on summarizing the problems I've noticed during the existing Council term (where I happened to be one of top agenda posters), and attempting to encourage you to vote on getting new people into the Council over the dinosaurs.

In this post, I will try to focus on general problems and not specific
people.  All nicknames will be replaced with 'xxx' (and 'yyy'...
as necessary).  Please note that 'xxx' will not mean the same person
in different citations.  However, at the same time I wish to support my
claims with evidence in the form of meeting logs.  I have to warn that
if you don't wish to learn who the member in question was, please do not
follow the evidence links.


Lack of time
============
I understand that we all have a lot of work, and we can't be expected to
spend all our free time on Gentoo.  However, at the same time I believe
that if you choose to accept Council nomination, you should be able to
find time to do the necessary work.  This involves not only spending ~2
hours around monthly meetings but also the time needed to prepare
and discuss agenda items *before* the meetings.

An example that got me quite mad was when a Council member started
quickly listing problems with a GLEP during the meeting because he
didn't find time to review it in the previous month:

<xxx> yyy: last month I've been out of country 3-4 days of the week, I
haven't really read it before now  [6]

Good news is, the member in question finally managed to review it three
weeks later.  Does he expect to have more time this year?


Meeting time changes without announcement
=========================================
This year we had a pretty unique situation.  Possibly for the first time
in history of Gentoo, a Council member who couldn't attend the meeting
requested changing meeting time rather than appointing a proxy.

What I perceive to be a problem is that Council unilaterally changed
the meeting time without being concerned about other attendees.  They
not only failed to ask people submitting the items but also failed to
inform them properly.

The only way to know about the changed time was to notice it
on the agenda [7].  There wasn't even a single 'please note that
the meeting will be held 2 hours later than usual'.


Council members avoiding public discussion
==========================================
Having agenda items discussed properly before the meeting is important. 
However, we still tend to have Council members who prefer to save their
arguments for the meeting, and make decisions based on their private
opinion without consulting it with the wider community.

So back when GLEP 63 updates were proposed, two of the devs decided not
to provide their feedback before the meeting:

<xxx> I am sorry for not providing my feedback yet... but I have
negative feedback
<yyy> i'd like to see explicit approval from security@  [8]

Again, this is three weeks after the GLEP was sent for review.  It is
really frustrating when people choose not to take part in normal
discussion but instead prolong the meeting bringing the points
and demanding immediate explanation during the meeting.

In the end, I am put in a rough spot.  I have to either choose to follow
my ideals and defer the GLEP to another month on the mailing list, just
to possible have it deferred again on the next meeting when Council
members come again unprepared, or I have to convince people to accept it
on the spot.

And it's not the first time we end up making last minute changes to
GLEPs that are never publicly discussed properly.


The usual deal with summaries
=============================
This is so common that I'm only going to dedicated a single paragraph
on it.  Council members are chronically failing to publish meeting
summaries on time.  At this very moment, the summary for Dec 2018
meeting is still missing [9].  git log for the repo pretty much
summarizes it all [10].


Secret meetings, secret decisions
=================================
This year's Council has been engaged in accepting secret agenda item
concerning commit access of a pseudonymous dev, holding secret meetings,
over it and making secret decisions that were never announced.
At the same time, they managed to blame Undertakers for not knowing
about any of that.

To cite a Bugzilla comment on the topic:

| You are aware that we have a special situation here? Most of
| the inactivity period falls between the acceptance of GLEP 76
| (in September/October 2018) and the Council sorting out a way for him
| how to proceed (in April 2019).  [...]  [11]

Are you aware of those April 2019 proceedings?  Because there's no trace
of any decision in meeting logs.


Abusing Council position to change own team's policy
====================================================
How would you feel about a person that's both in QA and Council using
his Council position to change a policy that's been proposed with QA
lead's blessing?

<xxx> I'd be fine with 14 days at most
...
* xxx no (I said before I would be o.k. with 14 days at most)  [12]

And so the Council has voted 3 times: first for 30 days (rejected with
3/3 y/n votes), then for 15 days (rejected with 2/3 y/n), then finally
passed with 14 days (3/2 y/n).

Besides the dev in question being clearly in conflict of interest, he
also managed to childishly fight over one day.

To quote another Council member during the same meeting:

<yyy> This is exactly why I proposed banning qa and comrel members from
council


Summary
=======
It is my vision for the Council to represent community, and work with
community to make a better Gentoo.  However, I feel like the current
Council is more focused on treasuring their own superiority and power.

To reiterate two of my major points:

1. Council members don't really have time to be on the Council, yet they
continue running for the next term.

2. Council members like to make important decisions within one or two
hours of Council meeting privately, and frequently don't value wider
feedback beforehand.

The way I see it, proposals should be discussed on mailing lists,
and Council approval should be merely a formality based on earlier
discussion.  However, with the current Council you are required to
attend meetings and personally convince Council members to whatever
seemed like wholly agreed thing beforehand, or promptly answer feedback
that should have been made to the mailing lists beforehand.

I have raised this problem earlier, and Council members did not consider
answering.  Now they expect that they will become elected again, just
because they were elected last time and the time before that.  I think
it's really time to make a change, and show that Council elections are
not a popularity contest.


[1] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/30927021be7c8425f43b95f7364111fb
[2] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/a4cb19a3c922b78d0fa9f365d06306cb
[3] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Elections/Council/201906
[4] https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/gentoo-management.html
[5] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/6be23c1cbffb7e27cd161a3b51312a8c
[6] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20190414.txt
[7] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/f13a423c093fef063d3d738154faa99c
[8] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20180729.txt
[9] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/Meeting_logs
[10] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/sites/projects/council.git/log/
[11] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=np-hardass#c33
[12] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20190512.txt

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 1:57 PM Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> The usual deal with summaries

Yes, summaries aren't fun, but they're not exactly hard either.  The
chair should just take notes during the meeting if at all possible.
Just copy/paste the agenda into a text editor, copy/paste decisions as
they are made, and copy/paste the votes.  It takes all of about 15
minutes of editing after the fact to get it cleaned up.  Usually the
pace of IRC decisions is such that you can get 90% of it done during
the meeting...

> Abusing Council position to change own team's policy
> ====================================================
> How would you feel about a person that's both in QA and Council using
> his Council position to change a policy that's been proposed with QA
> lead's blessing?

As I've said before, I have no issues with this and if anything
consider it a feature, and not a bug.

If the entire project could be run in its entirety by 7 people without
sacrifice, we'd be that much better off for the streamlined
decision-making.  In reality as you've pointed out the Council members
often don't have enough time to even run the Council, so others need
to be involved in other rules, which leads to conflicts.  It makes far
more sense to make sure that QA/Council are aligned before QA creates
policy than to have the one body set policy and the other body reverse
it (whether directly, or via appeals of individual decisions).

This is just speaking generally, and not about any particular decision
or whether it was correct...

Devs can of course decide to vote for who they wish for council.

> The way I see it, proposals should be discussed on mailing lists,
> and Council approval should be merely a formality based on earlier
> discussion.  However, with the current Council you are required to
> attend meetings and personally convince Council members to whatever
> seemed like wholly agreed thing beforehand, or promptly answer feedback
> that should have been made to the mailing lists beforehand.

So, I don't think Council should consider itself bound to any kind of
general consensus.  If every developer except the 7 council members
felt one way, and the council members felt the other, and they felt
the matter was important enough, I wouldn't have a problem with them
unilaterally making a contrary decision.  This is why you should
exercise care when voting for Council members.  Of course, most
Council members tend to be at least fairly reasonable (which is why
they get elected), so this sort of outcome is pretty unlikely.

That said, I also believe that all Council members ought to share
their opinions on a proposal BEFORE the meeting to invite commentary.
By all means feel free to disagree with those comments, but at least
do people the courtesy of giving them a chance to express them.  Doing
so before the meeting is both more convenient and gives everybody a
chance to think about their arguments vs walking into a meeting and
firing from the hip.  This encourages people to back up their opinions
with data where possible, or at least the best arguments they can put
forth, and is likely to benefit the final decisions made.

> I think
> it's really time to make a change, and show that Council elections are
> not a popularity contest.
>

Make no mistake - all elections are popularity contests.  :)

Other than the one point above I certainly agree with everything you
brought up.  I'm not sure if I'd go so far to say that incumbents are
a bad thing, but I'd urge them to take these concerns seriously.
While I don't have the volume of GLEP proposals that mgorny has, I
also found it very frustrating to have no idea what most of the
Council thought about my proposed GLEP change.  I know a few devs were
frustrated that I kept promoting it despite what they considered
near-universal opposition, but the fact is that the majority of those
who would actually vote on it voiced no concerns until the meeting.
If I knew a majority were unlikely to accept it in any form I'd have
just dropped it early and not wasted everybody's time.

Even after my proposal was defeated a few suggested that it might be
accepted with alterations, but could offer no specifics about what
alterations might or might not be acceptable.  It is silly to just
throw one draft at another to see if they get voted up and down and
try to guess what everybody is thinking, so I dropped it and somewhat
regret wasting everybody's time (even if I still think my proposal
would have been an improvement).

I think this sort of thing does discourage people from trying to
propose improvements or changes.  By all means disagree with a
proposal or change - I can completely respect that.  But, at least be
up-front about it so everybody isn't guessing, and we don't waste
month after month iterating.  We slow decisions down enough already
waiting until meetings to make them, so it is pretty discouraging to
see these decisions get deferred even further.  If somebody fails to
react to comments on their proposal before the meeting that is on
them, but failing to make the comments at all is on the one witholding
their approval...

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Ulrich Mueller]

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>>>>> On Fri, 14 Jun 2019, Michał Górny wrote:

> Meeting time changes without announcement
> =========================================
> This year we had a pretty unique situation.  Possibly for the first time
> in history of Gentoo, a Council member who couldn't attend the meeting
> requested changing meeting time rather than appointing a proxy.

Time of meetings was changed more than once in the past, for various
reasons.

"The time and date of each meeting is decided by the active Council
and is announced at least two weeks earlier through email to the
gentoo-project and gentoo-dev-announce mailing lists."
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council

> What I perceive to be a problem is that Council unilaterally changed
> the meeting time without being concerned about other attendees.  They
> not only failed to ask people submitting the items but also failed to
> inform them properly.

> The only way to know about the changed time was to notice it on the
> agenda [7].

So it *was* announced, in the very meeting's agenda sent to
gentoo-project and gentoo-dev-announce. (In addition, date and time were
present in the topic of #gentoo-council.) Sorry if you have missed it.

> There wasn't even a single 'please note that the meeting will be held
> 2 hours later than usual'.

Indeed, that could have been more prominent. Note that normally we try
to emphasise such changes (just picking two examples, there are more):
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/49e642140724ad0d22847e4e6798cc84
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev-announce/message/6b32250b8bf53cd3016331aebd75c956

> Secret meetings, secret decisions
> =================================
> This year's Council has been engaged in accepting secret agenda item
> concerning commit access of a pseudonymous dev, holding secret meetings,
> over it and making secret decisions that were never announced.
> At the same time, they managed to blame Undertakers for not knowing
> about any of that.

> To cite a Bugzilla comment on the topic:

> | You are aware that we have a special situation here? Most of
> | the inactivity period falls between the acceptance of GLEP 76
> | (in September/October 2018) and the Council sorting out a way for him
> | how to proceed (in April 2019).  [...]  [11]

This has been taken out of context, with the rest of the comment (about
not blaming Undertakers) being omitted:

| I don't see any accusation there. It is a motion drafted during the
| meeting, so please give us some leeway if it isn't the most beautiful
| wording in the world. 

> Are you aware of those April 2019 proceedings?  Because there's no trace
> of any decision in meeting logs.

Of course there cannot be a public log of a private meeting where
personal matters of a dev are discussed. And how do you know if any
votes were taken during that meeting? Maybe there weren't?

What do you suggest? Should the Council refuse any requests of a
developer to discuss personal issues?

> Summary
> =======
> It is my vision for the Council to represent community, and work with
> community to make a better Gentoo.  However, I feel like the current
> Council is more focused on treasuring their own superiority and power.

Hear, hear!

> To reiterate two of my major points:

> 1. Council members don't really have time to be on the Council, yet they
> continue running for the next term.

> 2. Council members like to make important decisions within one or two
> hours of Council meeting privately, and frequently don't value wider
> feedback beforehand.

These are generalisations which aren't admissible.

Ulrich

> [7] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/f13a423c093fef063d3d738154faa99c
> [11] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=np-hardass#c33

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Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Michał Górny]

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On Sat, 2019-06-15 at 11:46 +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> > > > > > On Fri, 14 Jun 2019, Michał Górny wrote:
> > There wasn't even a single 'please note that the meeting will be held
> > 2 hours later than usual'.
> 
> Indeed, that could have been more prominent. Note that normally we try
> to emphasise such changes (just picking two examples, there are more):
> https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/49e642140724ad0d22847e4e6798cc84
> https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev-announce/message/6b32250b8bf53cd3016331aebd75c956
> 
> > Secret meetings, secret decisions
> > =================================
> > This year's Council has been engaged in accepting secret agenda item
> > concerning commit access of a pseudonymous dev, holding secret meetings,
> > over it and making secret decisions that were never announced.
> > At the same time, they managed to blame Undertakers for not knowing
> > about any of that.
> > To cite a Bugzilla comment on the topic:
> > > You are aware that we have a special situation here? Most of
> > > the inactivity period falls between the acceptance of GLEP 76
> > > (in September/October 2018) and the Council sorting out a way for him
> > > how to proceed (in April 2019).  [...]  [11]
> 
> This has been taken out of context, with the rest of the comment (about
> not blaming Undertakers) being omitted:
> 
> > I don't see any accusation there. It is a motion drafted during the
> > meeting, so please give us some leeway if it isn't the most beautiful
> > wording in the world. 
> > Are you aware of those April 2019 proceedings?  Because there's no trace
> > of any decision in meeting logs.
> 
> Of course there cannot be a public log of a private meeting where
> personal matters of a dev are discussed. And how do you know if any
> votes were taken during that meeting? Maybe there weren't?
> 
> What do you suggest? Should the Council refuse any requests of a
> developer to discuss personal issues?

If the Council meeting resulted in situation change from A. a dev being
apparently unable to contribute to B. a dev being able to contribute,
then it counts as a change to me.  It doesn't matter whether it was
taken as a vote.

Don't you think others who possibly are in similar situation would like
to know about it?  Don't you think it's double standards to set rules
for general population, then privately admit loophole for a specific
developer?

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Ulrich Mueller]

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>>>>> On Sat, 15 Jun 2019, Michał Górny wrote:

>> What do you suggest? Should the Council refuse any requests of a
>> developer to discuss personal issues?

> If the Council meeting resulted in situation change from A. a dev being
> apparently unable to contribute to B. a dev being able to contribute,
> then it counts as a change to me.  It doesn't matter whether it was
> taken as a vote.

> Don't you think others who possibly are in similar situation would like
> to know about it?  Don't you think it's double standards to set rules
> for general population, then privately admit loophole for a specific
> developer?

IMHO it is not a double standard. The situation is special and unique
that the developer was able to contribute, but lost that ability due to
policies that weren't in place (or at least, not enforced) at the time
he had been recruited. The Council didn't go as far as "grandfathering"
him, but we felt (and unanimously voted) that at this point, retiring
him for inactivity was also going too far.

Ulrich

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Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Thomas Deutschmann]

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Hi,

On 2019-06-14 19:57, Michał Górny wrote:
> Meeting time changes without announcement
> =========================================
> This year we had a pretty unique situation.  Possibly for the first time
> in history of Gentoo, a Council member who couldn't attend the meeting
> requested changing meeting time rather than appointing a proxy.
> 
> What I perceive to be a problem is that Council unilaterally changed
> the meeting time without being concerned about other attendees.  They
> not only failed to ask people submitting the items but also failed to
> inform them properly.
> 
> The only way to know about the changed time was to notice it
> on the agenda [7].  There wasn't even a single 'please note that
> the meeting will be held 2 hours later than usual'.

As council member who was chairing the meeting in question, this false
accusation makes me angry. Let me add some facts:

- On 2019-04-25, a council member asked other council members to move
upcoming meeting on 12th of may by an hour or two in advance.

- All council member agreed to change time to 21:00 UTC for this meeting.

- Topic in IRC was set accordingly.

- When meeting agenda was published, the changed meeting time was
communicated.

- Yes, I did *not* add a special paragraph like

> +++ IMPORTANT +++
> +++ IMPORTANT +++
> +++ IMPORTANT +++
> +++ PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO CHANGED MEETING TIME +++
> +++ IMPORTANT +++
> +++ IMPORTANT +++
> +++ IMPORTANT +++

- In addition, people *required* for meeting according to agenda
received an additional invitation with all details (antarus should be
able to confirm).

So really, saying "meeting time changes without announcement" is wrong,
misleading and discrediting current council. Sure, in retrospective I am
sorry for not adding a special paragraph. But on the other hand: When
you don't read announcement mail in first place, why should you notice
the special paragraph?! You either read mail or you don't...


> Secret meetings, secret decisions
> =================================
> This year's Council has been engaged in accepting secret agenda item
> concerning commit access of a pseudonymous dev, holding secret meetings,
> over it and making secret decisions that were never announced.
> At the same time, they managed to blame Undertakers for not knowing
> about any of that.
> 
> To cite a Bugzilla comment on the topic:
> 
> | You are aware that we have a special situation here? Most of
> | the inactivity period falls between the acceptance of GLEP 76
> | (in September/October 2018) and the Council sorting out a way for him
> | how to proceed (in April 2019).  [...]  [11]
> 
> Are you aware of those April 2019 proceedings?  Because there's no trace
> of any decision in meeting logs.

This is another false accusation.

Like you can read in *public* meeting log, NP-Hardass asked council
member for a private talk:

> 16:01 <+NP-Hardass> Yeah, I'd like to meet privately with the council
>                     after open floor to discuss my commit privileges


Really, aren't council member allowed to talk with others privately?
Like you can see I made it very clear that we will not decide anything:

> 16:02 <@Whissi> Sure we can talk privately but any decision must be public.

And exactly that's what happened: We talked about a *private* topic and
nothing was decided.

So please stop your false accusation, misleading statements and
discrediting current council.


> Abusing Council position to change own team's policy
> ====================================================
> How would you feel about a person that's both in QA and Council using
> his Council position to change a policy that's been proposed with QA
> lead's blessing?
> 
> [...]

This is an interesting topic. If I would be part of QA project and I
would be the person you are talking about, I would contradict you
energetically. Because I am not I just want to add the following note to
the remarkable council meeting you quoted:

If you read raw meeting log you could come to the conclusion that you
(mgorny) were threatening ulm or that ulm wasn't at least free anymore
in his decision:

> 21:42:29]<mgorny>    Whissi: are you going to call another vote with 14d,
>                      so i could be angry with ulm for wasting time over
>                      one day?

This isn't just my view, more than 2 other developers shared their
concerns with me after they read posted raw meeting log.

Sure, you were pushing for that change and seeing it already failing two
times can be frustrating if you really believe that this is an important
change which is good for Gentoo (while I still disagree with the motion,
I can understand that this can be a frustrating experience). However you
cannot say that you heard for the first time that people have problems
with the proposed ban period
(https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/ba028e0ca53f6f55cf04f52645b52cee).

Like I acknowledged after meeting, as meeting chair, I did a very poor
job: I wasn't prepared to reprimand dilfridge (because I didn't know
about the rule that only meeting chair should ban) and I did not have
the courage to end this unworthy spectacle.

In reply to Andrew's mail
(https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/d1433dbe7fcbe81305e7b0b0007441ee)
who criticized the decision I just want to add that the decision was
very close and far from unanimous: If either QA member would have
abstained from vote due to possible conflict of interest or didn't
change from NO to ABSTAIN to demonstrate protest, the last motion would
have failed like the others before...


PS: In your mail you wrote later,

> The way I see it, proposals should be discussed on mailing lists,
> and Council approval should be merely a formality based on earlier
> discussion.

I agree with that. Discussion should happen before, council should only
ack/nack. It must be surprising for all Gentoo developer to see a
proposal about 30d and you stop discussing at some point because you
assume everything is said and it will get rejected that way just to
learn later that it passed because motion was changed during meeting and
you hadn't any chance to speak up. I hope nobody is surprised that
everything has at least two views...


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
C4DD 695F A713 8F24 2AA1 5638 5849 7EE5 1D5D 74A5


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Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Michał Górny]

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On Sun, 2019-06-16 at 23:42 +0200, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
> [...]
> 
> - In addition, people *required* for meeting according to agenda
> received an additional invitation with all details (antarus should be
> able to confirm).

It's interesting how you define 'required'.  Because I see myself
explicitly mentioned *twice* in the agenda [1], and I certainly did not
receive any additional invitation.  Does this mean that agenda items are
not considered important by the Council?

[1] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/f13a423c093fef063d3d738154faa99c

> 
> So really, saying "meeting time changes without announcement" is wrong,
> misleading and discrediting current council. Sure, in retrospective I am
> sorry for not adding a special paragraph. But on the other hand: When
> you don't read announcement mail in first place, why should you notice
> the special paragraph?! You either read mail or you don't...

And on what grounds do you accuse me of not reading it?  Is this really
an appropriate way for a Council member to treat your fellow voters?

Just because I don't notice a tiny change on the otherwise boilerplate
first line of the announcement?  This is especially likely to be
confused to us in CEST timezone as 19:00Z is 21:00 to us.

If that's what you want to hear then yes, it's my fault for not being
more careful and being too trusting to people I voted for.  I won't make
that mistake twice.  I mean the latter mistake.

> 
> 
> > Secret meetings, secret decisions
> > =================================
> > This year's Council has been engaged in accepting secret agenda item
> > concerning commit access of a pseudonymous dev, holding secret meetings,
> > over it and making secret decisions that were never announced.
> > At the same time, they managed to blame Undertakers for not knowing
> > about any of that.
> > 
> > To cite a Bugzilla comment on the topic:
> > 
> > > You are aware that we have a special situation here? Most of
> > > the inactivity period falls between the acceptance of GLEP 76
> > > (in September/October 2018) and the Council sorting out a way for him
> > > how to proceed (in April 2019).  [...]  [11]
> > 
> > Are you aware of those April 2019 proceedings?  Because there's no trace
> > of any decision in meeting logs.
> 
> This is another false accusation.
> 
> Like you can read in *public* meeting log, NP-Hardass asked council
> member for a private talk:
> 
> > 16:01 <+NP-Hardass> Yeah, I'd like to meet privately with the council
> >                     after open floor to discuss my commit privileges
> 
> Really, aren't council member allowed to talk with others privately?
> Like you can see I made it very clear that we will not decide anything:
> 
> > 16:02 <@Whissi> Sure we can talk privately but any decision must be public.
> 
> And exactly that's what happened: We talked about a *private* topic and
> nothing was decided.
> 
> So please stop your false accusation, misleading statements and
> discrediting current council.

If nothing was decided, then why did he suddenly become able to commit? 
Again, as I said in the other reply, if you cause something to happen
it's a change, even if you don't formally decide it.  Especially when
you afterwards publicly admit that he wasn't able to commit before this
secret meeting.

> > Abusing Council position to change own team's policy
> > ====================================================
> > How would you feel about a person that's both in QA and Council using
> > his Council position to change a policy that's been proposed with QA
> > lead's blessing?
> > 
> > [...]
> 
> This is an interesting topic. If I would be part of QA project and I
> would be the person you are talking about, I would contradict you
> energetically. Because I am not I just want to add the following note to
> the remarkable council meeting you quoted:
> 
> If you read raw meeting log you could come to the conclusion that you
> (mgorny) were threatening ulm or that ulm wasn't at least free anymore
> in his decision:
> 
> > 21:42:29]<mgorny>    Whissi: are you going to call another vote with 14d,
> >                      so i could be angry with ulm for wasting time over
> >                      one day?
> 
> This isn't just my view, more than 2 other developers shared their
> concerns with me after they read posted raw meeting log.

That is pure nonsense.  If you focus on what I was saying earlier (or
later), you'd clearly understand that I was frustrated because
*the meeting was very late*, *I was losing precious sleep* (but I guess
sleep deprivation is nothing compared to the importance of Council
members making their decisions) and *silly difference of 1 day was
causing me to lose another 10 minutes of sleep*.

> In reply to Andrew's mail
> (https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/d1433dbe7fcbe81305e7b0b0007441ee)
> who criticized the decision I just want to add that the decision was
> very close and far from unanimous: If either QA member would have
> abstained from vote due to possible conflict of interest or didn't
> change from NO to ABSTAIN to demonstrate protest, the last motion would
> have failed like the others before...

And what does that exactly demonstrate?  How unprofessional Council was
in making this decision?


-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Thomas Deutschmann]

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Hi,

On 2019-06-17 07:32, Michał Górny wrote:
> On Sun, 2019-06-16 at 23:42 +0200, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>> - In addition, people *required* for meeting according to agenda
>> received an additional invitation with all details (antarus should be
>> able to confirm).
> 
> It's interesting how you define 'required'.  Because I see myself
> explicitly mentioned *twice* in the agenda [1], and I certainly did not
> receive any additional invitation.  Does this mean that agenda items are
> not considered important by the Council?
> 
> [1] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/f13a423c093fef063d3d738154faa99c

No, it isn't. It's already exactly the way you want it to be (and I had
to learn it during my first council meeting the hard way, too; See
https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20180729.txt):

In general, we already have the mantra, "No discussion during meeting"
(for topics from mailing list).

So regarding agenda items you added (topic 3 & 5):

These topics were already discussed on mailing list so they should NOT
require discussion during meeting. Therefore you did NOT receive an
additional invitation like antarus received for topic 4 where I asked
him to participate to report status.


>> So really, saying "meeting time changes without announcement" is wrong,
>> misleading and discrediting current council. Sure, in retrospective I am
>> sorry for not adding a special paragraph. But on the other hand: When
>> you don't read announcement mail in first place, why should you notice
>> the special paragraph?! You either read mail or you don't...
> 
> And on what grounds do you accuse me of not reading it?  Is this really
> an appropriate way for a Council member to treat your fellow voters?
> 
> Just because I don't notice a tiny change on the otherwise boilerplate
> first line of the announcement?  This is especially likely to be
> confused to us in CEST timezone as 19:00Z is 21:00 to us.
> 
> If that's what you want to hear then yes, it's my fault for not being
> more careful and being too trusting to people I voted for.  I won't make
> that mistake twice.  I mean the latter mistake.

Erm, you are the one who blamed current running council for *NOT*
announcing changed meeting time. Something which I take *very serious*
because if that would be true, we would have violated important
principles like

> The Council members are elected for a year and must hold monthly public meetings.

So when you bring that up, I have to assume that you are the one who
didn't read the announcement mail and therefore accuse us for not
announcing the meeting time in advance making it impossible for anyone
interested to attend which would be equal to a non-public meeting which
would be a serious violation of Gentoo's principles.

I always wrote "21:00 UTC" so I am sorry, I don't understand what you
are trying to say with the "CEST timezone" paragraph at the moment.


> If that's what you want to hear then yes, it's my fault for not being
> more careful and being too trusting to people I voted for.  I won't make
> that mistake twice.  I mean the latter mistake.

Like written above, I am taking this reproach seriously, also personally
because I was meeting chair and therefore responsible for announcement.

I hope I have the courage to take consequences if I am wrong and would
have violated such an important principle but when I have NOT and people
start thinking it is inappropriate to defend yourself against false
claims I have nothing more to say.

So yes, if that's your view and that's all you got from my response, be
careful and don't do 'mistakes' twice!


>>> Secret meetings, secret decisions
>>> =================================
>>> This year's Council has been engaged in accepting secret agenda item
>>> concerning commit access of a pseudonymous dev, holding secret meetings,
>>> over it and making secret decisions that were never announced.
>>> At the same time, they managed to blame Undertakers for not knowing
>>> about any of that.
>>>
>>> To cite a Bugzilla comment on the topic:
>>>
>>>> You are aware that we have a special situation here? Most of
>>>> the inactivity period falls between the acceptance of GLEP 76
>>>> (in September/October 2018) and the Council sorting out a way for him
>>>> how to proceed (in April 2019).  [...]  [11]
>>>
>>> Are you aware of those April 2019 proceedings?  Because there's no trace
>>> of any decision in meeting logs.
>>
>> This is another false accusation.
>>
>> Like you can read in *public* meeting log, NP-Hardass asked council
>> member for a private talk:
>>
>>> 16:01 <+NP-Hardass> Yeah, I'd like to meet privately with the council
>>>                     after open floor to discuss my commit privileges
>>
>> Really, aren't council member allowed to talk with others privately?
>> Like you can see I made it very clear that we will not decide anything:
>>
>>> 16:02 <@Whissi> Sure we can talk privately but any decision must be public.
>>
>> And exactly that's what happened: We talked about a *private* topic and
>> nothing was decided.
>>
>> So please stop your false accusation, misleading statements and
>> discrediting current council.
> 
> If nothing was decided, then why did he suddenly become able to commit? 
> Again, as I said in the other reply, if you cause something to happen
> it's a change, even if you don't formally decide it.  Especially when
> you afterwards publicly admit that he wasn't able to commit before this
> secret meeting.

Really? Are you still on your crusade against NP-hardass? I really hoped
you get the closing statement from
(https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20190512-summary.txt
6a), something which happened for the first time in council history.

> If nothing was decided, then why did he suddenly become able to commit?

Where do you see commits from him?

If there is a commit from him (=where he is set as committer and have
signed the push) *after* GLEP 76 was enforced I assume that he did so in
compliance with GLEP 76 like any other Gentoo developer.


Regarding your bugzilla quote:
You, as part of undertaker project, started retirement of NP-hardass
which can be seen in bug history. You, as part of undertaker project
ignored any input from NP-hardass because it didn't match secret
(https://wiki.gentoo.org/index.php?title=Project:Undertakers&curid=116572&diff=801701&oldid=801431
+ more edits) undertaker policy.

During council meeting from 2019-05-12, we, the current running council,
tried to make it very clear that we are really concerned about
undertaker project's attitude expressed in pre-meeting talk in
#gentoo-council on 2019-05-08, 2019-05-09 and during meeting. And it
looks like you still haven't understand our point:

You are lacking humanity.

With the quoted text, ulm tried to make you aware of the special
situation: You, as undertaker project, are saying "Sorry NP-hardass,
according to _my data_, you are no longer active, therefore I am going
to retire you as part of my job as undertaker". With some kind of
empathy you should have recognized that NP-hardass was unable to show up
in your logs due to GLEP 76.

If you understand the paragraph as if the Council had created a special
regulation for NP-hardass, then there is a misunderstanding, something
like that did *not* happen.


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
C4DD 695F A713 8F24 2AA1 5638 5849 7EE5 1D5D 74A5


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Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Michał Górny]

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On Mon, 2019-06-17 at 13:41 +0200, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
> In general, we already have the mantra, "No discussion during meeting"
> (for topics from mailing list).
> 
> So regarding agenda items you added (topic 3 & 5):
> 
> These topics were already discussed on mailing list so they should NOT
> require discussion during meeting. Therefore you did NOT receive an
> additional invitation like antarus received for topic 4 where I asked
> him to participate to report status.

I agree this would be the ideal state.  But as already pointed out
previously (and it's not just me saying that), the current Council
as well as past Councils didn't follow this rule through, and repeatedly
it was necessary for posters to attend meetings in order to avoid
proposals being deferred for months because of Council's inability
to resolve their concerns before the meetings.

In order words, you're saying that I shouldn't need to be invited yet
more than once my presence turned out to be necessary.

> > > 
> > If nothing was decided, then why did he suddenly become able to commit? 
> > Again, as I said in the other reply, if you cause something to happen
> > it's a change, even if you don't formally decide it.  Especially when
> > you afterwards publicly admit that he wasn't able to commit before this
> > secret meeting.
> 
> Really? Are you still on your crusade against NP-hardass? I really hoped
> you get the closing statement from
> (https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20190512-summary.txt
> 6a), something which happened for the first time in council history.

I would really appreciate if you were able to address the topic at hand
rather than trying to deflect this into an ad hominem.  There is no such
crusade and there never were.  It is sad that Council has taken that
bait and rather than trying to professionally look at the issue tried to
portray themselves as some kind of saviors of tormented developers.

> > If nothing was decided, then why did he suddenly become able to commit?
> 
> Where do you see commits from him?
> 
> If there is a commit from him (=where he is set as committer and have
> signed the push) *after* GLEP 76 was enforced I assume that he did so in
> compliance with GLEP 76 like any other Gentoo developer.

I see commits authored by him.  Similarly to what I asked during
the meeting, I'd appreciate if we discussed this civilly on topic rather
than deflecting by playing with meanings of words.

> You are lacking humanity.

Do you really think that's an appropriate way to offend Gentoo
developers from a Council member, on a topic that's strictly related to
Council business?

Besides, everything else related to NP-Hardass is entirely off-topic
here.  I could have accused Council of failing to behave professionally,
ignoring existing project policies with no effort to improve them,
refuting non-existing decisions that wouldn't have been made
in the first place, etc.  But that's an emotional topic and I chose not
to.  Therefore, I'd appreciate if you also stayed on topic and didn't
try to reflect accusations by trying to present me as some inhumane
monster eating developers for breakfast and Council members for dinner.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 8:16 AM Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2019-06-17 at 13:41 +0200, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
> > In general, we already have the mantra, "No discussion during meeting"
> > (for topics from mailing list).
> >
> > So regarding agenda items you added (topic 3 & 5):
> >
> > These topics were already discussed on mailing list so they should NOT
> > require discussion during meeting. Therefore you did NOT receive an
> > additional invitation like antarus received for topic 4 where I asked
> > him to participate to report status.
>
> I agree this would be the ideal state.  But as already pointed out
> previously (and it's not just me saying that), the current Council
> as well as past Councils didn't follow this rule through, and repeatedly
> it was necessary for posters to attend meetings in order to avoid
> proposals being deferred for months because of Council's inability
> to resolve their concerns before the meetings.

++

This just goes along with your separate concern along those lines.
When Council members don't state their thoughts ahead of time there is
no way to address them.

Now, if you interact and they disagree, that is just how decision
rights work.  However, decision-makers should certainly give those
making proposals SOME kind of opportunity to have at least a round of
back-and-forth, and IMO being a global organization a list discussion
is WAY more productive than doing it in meetings.  It not only is more
convenient in terms of timezones, but it also lets everybody offer
their best arguments vs just reacting.

> > You are lacking humanity.
>
> Do you really think that's an appropriate way to offend Gentoo
> developers from a Council member, on a topic that's strictly related to
> Council business?

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest that this was
perhaps not the most nuanced use of the English language on a list
with many non-native speakers.  If so, I'd suggest a simple apology
might help.  The wording used there was very strong, and I suspect he
was just trying to suggest that you weren't taking into account
mitigating factors and were sticking too strongly to the letter of the
rules.  However, that wording does tend to imply a complete lack of
moral decency/etc, and you were not wrong to detect this meaning in
the text.  The fact that this wasn't the explicit thrust of his
argument suggests to me that it was unintentional, and I reply mainly
to point that out for his benefit as well as your reaction might have
been unexpected if he really didn't realize it would give so much
offense.

Best to try to avoid giving offense, and also to try to avoid taking
it.  As you said elsewhere in your email the substantive matters in
the discussion are serious enough that we should avoid ad hominims.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Thomas Deutschmann]

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On 2019-06-17 14:44, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>> You are lacking humanity.
>>
>> Do you really think that's an appropriate way to offend Gentoo
>> developers from a Council member, on a topic that's strictly related to
>> Council business?

We are talking. I didn't intend to offend anyone. If anyone feels
insulted please accept my apology.


> I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest that this was
> perhaps not the most nuanced use of the English language on a list
> with many non-native speakers.  If so, I'd suggest a simple apology
> might help.  The wording used there was very strong, and I suspect he
> was just trying to suggest that you weren't taking into account
> mitigating factors and were sticking too strongly to the letter of the
> rules.  However, that wording does tend to imply a complete lack of
> moral decency/etc, and you were not wrong to detect this meaning in
> the text.  The fact that this wasn't the explicit thrust of his
> argument suggests to me that it was unintentional, and I reply mainly
> to point that out for his benefit as well as your reaction might have
> been unexpected if he really didn't realize it would give so much
> offense.

I stand by the statement

"He lacks empathy and humanity (or "human touch"). The social
indifference with which he fills the undertaker project, I consider
questionable."

Please see this statement in context after multiple people have tried to
express that at some point, a HR project like Undertaker, cannot blindly
 follow rules. But when you ignore everyone and keep doing your thing...
that's when I say you are lacking...


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
C4DD 695F A713 8F24 2AA1 5638 5849 7EE5 1D5D 74A5


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Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Andreas K. Huettel]

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> > 
> > Really? Are you still on your crusade against NP-hardass? I really hoped
> > you get the closing statement from
> > (https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20190512-summary.txt
> > 6a), something which happened for the first time in council history.
> 
> I would really appreciate if you were able to address the topic at hand
> rather than trying to deflect this into an ad hominem.  There is no such
> crusade and there never were.  It is sad that Council has taken that
> bait and rather than trying to professionally look at the issue tried to
> portray themselves as some kind of saviors of tormented developers.
> 

As someone who tried to mediate and talk to people 

* without making a big fuss of it
* weeks before this particular council meeting happened

I share the impression of a personal crusade against NP. I leave it up to you 
to prove otherwise.

-- 
Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer 
(council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)

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Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 10:35 AM Andreas K. Huettel
<dilfridge@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> I share the impression of a personal crusade against NP. I leave it up to you
> to prove otherwise.
>

(Speaking personally...)

Can we all take a step back please?  We already have one CoC
enforcement request and I really don't want to deal with a stack of
them, mostly involving current and former council members.

I'm not in charge of Comrel but I'm pretty sure that our solution to
interpersonal issues in Gentoo is not to post accusations on the lists
and invite public debate on them.

If we want to talk about how meeting annoucements ought to work we can
do it without getting into speculation around motivations, and maybe
make things better around here in the process.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 7:41 AM Thomas Deutschmann <whissi@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> During council meeting from 2019-05-12, we, the current running council,
> tried to make it very clear that we are really concerned about
> undertaker project's attitude expressed in pre-meeting talk in
> #gentoo-council on 2019-05-08, 2019-05-09 and during meeting. And it
> looks like you still haven't understand our point:
>
> You are lacking humanity.

The Proctors have decided that this post/message/etc is in violation
of the Gentoo Code of Conduct and are issuing this warning.

While we recognize that a language barrier may have resulted in this
statement being made more strongly than intended, it is still a
personal attack in nature.  When discussing application of policy it
is better to focus on the policy itself and its application, and less
on the individuals making the decisions.  If there are concerns with
how an individual is interacting with others on a personal level, this
should be raised in private with Comrel, if direct communication
fails.

The fact that the discussion involves current/former council members
makes it important to try to set an example.

Since Proctors is still a fairly new concept we wish to clarify that:

* Proctors doesn't get involved in trying to resolve interpersonal
conflict or gauge intent - we're focused on what was said and trying
to improve how we communicate.

* Proctors doesn't make value judgments regarding the people making
statements, just what was said.

* Proctors warnings do not have any cumulative effect, or any direct
effect at all.  This is intended to try to encourage good behavior,
not to punish.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[desultory]

On 06/20/19 14:24, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 7:41 AM Thomas Deutschmann <whissi@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> During council meeting from 2019-05-12, we, the current running council,
>> tried to make it very clear that we are really concerned about
>> undertaker project's attitude expressed in pre-meeting talk in
>> #gentoo-council on 2019-05-08, 2019-05-09 and during meeting. And it
>> looks like you still haven't understand our point:
>>
>> You are lacking humanity.
> 
> The Proctors have decided that this post/message/etc is in violation
> of the Gentoo Code of Conduct and are issuing this warning.
> 
> While we recognize that a language barrier may have resulted in this
> statement being made more strongly than intended, it is still a
> personal attack in nature.  When discussing application of policy it
> is better to focus on the policy itself and its application, and less
> on the individuals making the decisions.  If there are concerns with
> how an individual is interacting with others on a personal level, this
> should be raised in private with Comrel, if direct communication
> fails.
> 
> The fact that the discussion involves current/former council members
> makes it important to try to set an example.
> 
> Since Proctors is still a fairly new concept we wish to clarify that:
> 
> * Proctors doesn't get involved in trying to resolve interpersonal
> conflict or gauge intent - we're focused on what was said and trying
> to improve how we communicate.
> 
> * Proctors doesn't make value judgments regarding the people making
> statements, just what was said.
> 
> * Proctors warnings do not have any cumulative effect, or any direct
> effect at all.  This is intended to try to encourage good behavior,
> not to punish.
> 
Just so everyone is clear on this, exactly how is it bad to explain how
someone appears to demonstrate a lack of empathy? Especially after the
individual who posted the message in question apologized for any offense
caused before proctors stepped in?

Does the proctors project acknowledge that posting such a warning very
much appears to just be flagging something to complain to comrel about
later, and that by excluding the apology this appears to be all the more
biased?

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Rich Freeman]

Speaking only for my personal opinion:

On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 12:12 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Just so everyone is clear on this, exactly how is it bad to explain how
> someone appears to demonstrate a lack of empathy?

It isn't.  It is bad to state that they demonstrate a lack of empathy
on a public Gentoo forum.

This is a negative statement about an individual - that simply is
off-topic for all public Gentoo forums.  If anybody has a concern that
somebody lacks empathy they should discuss it with the individual, or
bring it up with Comrel and resolve it in private.

> Especially after the
> individual who posted the message in question apologized for any offense
> caused before proctors stepped in?

If I thought that offense was intended I (again, speaking personally)
might have probably recommended a temporary ban, and not a warning
(well, maybe after the election period so as not to interfere).  I
never thought that offense was intended, and even said as much on the
list before the apology was even issued, or even before I became aware
that a proctors bug had been opened.

However, I'll note the apology didn't really apologize for making a
personal statement about an individual in the first place, and only
seemed to clarify its meaning.  Again, the concern isn't that the
statement was worded poorly (though it was), but that the whole issue
with language would have been avoided entirely if we had avoided
making personal statements about individuals in the first place.  This
wasn't a discussion about whether a particular individual was
qualified to be in a particular role.

> Does the proctors project acknowledge that posting such a warning very
> much appears to just be flagging something to complain to comrel about
> later, and that by excluding the apology this appears to be all the more
> biased?

I'm not sure what comrel has to do with this.  I have no personal
insight into their thinking but I'm skeptical that they would be
concerned with one CoC warning unless it were a part of a larger
pattern of behavior.

Nor do I see bias.  Surely saying somebody demonstrates lack of
empathy is a negative statement about an individual person.  That
makes the statement a CoC violation.

A complaint was made to proctors, and the proctors evaluated the
statement and determined it was a violation.  Dismissing a complaint
without taking action when it pertained to a Council member would
probably have been the worse outcome, IMO.

I'll agree that this was a somewhat borderline situation, and I was
personally concerned that a warning would itself lack empathy which
would of course be ironic.  However, we were asked for a decision and
made one, and in my proposed wording I did try to depersonalize and
contextualize the nature of Proctors actions.

The goal here is to try to get everybody to focus on the issues and
policies and less on criticizing people personally on public mailing
lists.  That is all.

Again, speaking personally for myself only...

-- 
Rich

[gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Wulf C. Krueger]

On 6/24/19 12:55 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> This is a negative statement about an individual - that simply is
> off-topic for all public Gentoo forums.  

Just to understand this: The Gentoo CoC disallows for public negative
statements about individuals?

Because I can't find any regulation like that on either
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/Code_of_conduct or
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Proctors

What am I missing?

Regards, Wulf

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 10:49 AM Wulf C. Krueger <philantrop@exherbo.org> wrote:
>
> On 6/24/19 12:55 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > This is a negative statement about an individual - that simply is
> > off-topic for all public Gentoo forums.
>
> Just to understand this: The Gentoo CoC disallows for public negative
> statements about individuals?
>

Speaking personally (and a warning that I'm going to preface this with
general comment to address issues being raised in private before
answering your direct question):

So, based on some private reaction I've gotten (from several people),
I think that there is some misunderstanding of what Proctors is
intended to be.  Perhaps some of that misunderstanding is within
Proctors themselves so I certainly invite discussion around how our
CoC ought to be enforced.  IMO overall policy around this ought to be
up to Council, and I would certainly defer to any policy guidance that
comes from Council in acting in my role as a member of Proctors.

We didn't have functioning Proctors for a long time, and now that is
back we haven't had many actions.  It isn't surprising that a LOT is
being read into the first significant warning given to somebody who is
actually part of the community (and not just list spam/etc which was
an issue we previously dealt with without much controversy).

Proctors is intended to have a much lower bar for action than Comrel.
It is about trying to keep our lists on-topic and improve how we
discuss things.  It isn't about trying to figure out who the good guys
are or who the bad guys are.  I suspect that MANY of us have violated
the CoC at one point or another, and that is why we issue things like
warnings or short-term bans, and not long-term actions.  The goal is
to try to nudge us in the right direction.  If we're making an
example, it is about what was said, and not who said it.  We don't
want to drive people away.  If anything we want to try to help people
communicate in a way that makes it easier for everybody to stay.  In
this case, focusing on the issue (how QA policy is enforced) and not
the individual (who is doing the enforcing) makes it easier to talk
about outcomes without individuals getting defensive.

Much as is the case with your criticism, which I think was a
constructive way to raise a concern.  There are GOING to be concerns,
and I'm happy to see them discussed (maybe in separate thread though).
Proctors creates some of its own internal processes/policies, but
we're subject to our overall charter from Council/Comrel and are happy
to stay within it.  We are here (IMO) to serve.

Some post had to be the first to get a warning.  It doesn't mean that
it was the most serious violation in history.  We're not picking
winners/losers.  We were asked (via bug) to take action, and decided a
warning was appropriate.  Speaking personally I can only say because
it was that I felt that a warning was better than simply declaring
this to be fine.

Now, getting to your question:

* Using the correct forum for your post
Negative statements about individuals are NOT on-topic for our mailing
lists.  We have other forums, like Comrel, where these are
appropriate.  And of course it is always best to work things out
directly, but Comrel isn't my area of responsibility.

That doesn't mean that you can't criticize decisions or processes.
Let's just try to focus on what is being done, and not who is doing
it.  At least in public.

IMO some of the email threads around the Council elections are good
examples of how this sort of thing can be handled.  Invite candidates
to freely state their opinions.  Offer your own opinion on what
is/isn't a good way to do something.  Don't focus on individuals and
how they stack up against your criteria - let people decide for
themselves.

* Being judgmental, mean-spirited or insulting.
I won't repeat the above, but statements about the qualities held by
individuals are judgmental by their very nature, and perhaps are
insulting (again, just by their nature, regardless of intent).  I do
not (personally) think that there was any intention to be
mean-spirited or to cause harm.  Again, this isn't about judging the
individuals, just to point out that things could have been done
better.

So, while we shouldn't be just ignoring CoC warnings from Proctors, we
should focus more on how they can help us to think about better ways
to engage with each other.  The intent here isn't to be a blemish on
somebody's "record."  We should be looking forward, not backwards.

And I do regret that this came up around the timing of elections
insofar as it might cause people to judge the individual negatively
(or at least without stopping to consider similar behavior by other
candidates).  That was NOT my intent at least nor do I think it was
anybody else's.  If it causes open discussion around the role of CoC
and/or Proctors in Gentoo then I welcome that.  Ultimately the CoC
belongs to all of us, and I do not see Proctors as being some kind of
source of virtue.

As far as I'm aware nothing I've said about CoC contradicts anything
decided by Council, but some of this is my personal view as to how I
think things ought to work.  Council can of course set policy as they
see fit.  I doubt we'll ever completely agree as a community on any of
this, but hopefully we can find a balance that works.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[desultory]

On 06/24/19 06:55, Rich Freeman wrote:
> Speaking only for my personal opinion:
> 
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 12:12 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> Just so everyone is clear on this, exactly how is it bad to explain how
>> someone appears to demonstrate a lack of empathy?
> 
> It isn't.  It is bad to state that they demonstrate a lack of empathy
> on a public Gentoo forum.
> 
> This is a negative statement about an individual - that simply is
> off-topic for all public Gentoo forums.  If anybody has a concern that
> somebody lacks empathy they should discuss it with the individual, or
> bring it up with Comrel and resolve it in private.
> 
So, even ignoring the rather more expansive take some have on the
statement in social contract regarding bugs being public [GSC:hide], by
your espoused reasoning even filing a bug requesting ComRel intervention
due to demonstrable violation of the CoC would not be a suitable venue
for arguably negative comments regarding an individual, as (per ComRel
[ComRel]) there is no indication that such bugs would necessarily be
private. Think about that for a moment: according to your logic it is an
actionable violation of community standards to formally request action
regarding actionable violations of community standards. Even when the
reasoning is laid out and it is expressly meant to me informational not
offensive.

By decreeing all arguably negative comments to be verboten, you have
essentially instituted a policy of radicalization. If this seems hard to
grasp, follow the logic for a moment. The mere act of telling a
developer that they are acting badly is, by your logic, forbidden as it
would be a statement which would arguably negatively reflect on an
individual. Thus marginally bad actors either do not get public feedback
on their behavior and become increasingly convinced that they are acting
in a wholly acceptable manner and their behavior gets reinforced, or
they do get public feedback and promptly file a complaint because
someone dared to tell them that they were not perfect and that is wrong
and must be quashed (though they would need to file the request in
private, obviously). Over time, people increasingly attempt to avoid the
bad actors, and when they are unavoidable become ever more demoralized
by their behavior which they still cannot comment on because negative
comments about people are forbidden, and citing a list of instances of
misbehavior, does at some point end up reducing to an argument against a
person and their behavior, and it thus forbidden. So you have people
being generally rude or abrasive, even without expressly meaning to be,
but they never get communal feedback since that has been forbidden. And
you have other people who increasingly simply try to avoid them because
they have simply had enough of whatever the problem is. What you end up
with is the people who are forbidden to respond either seeking alternate
ways in which to respond, thus forming insular cliques which
increasingly echo "bad person is bad", or open violation of your
interpretation of the CoC, or indeed of any interpretation of the CoC as
social norms in the project break down and the project essentially dies
under the weight of overly enforced politesse.

This seems suboptimal.

>> Especially after the
>> individual who posted the message in question apologized for any offense
>> caused before proctors stepped in?
> 
> If I thought that offense was intended I (again, speaking personally)
> might have probably recommended a temporary ban, and not a warning
> (well, maybe after the election period so as not to interfere).  I
> never thought that offense was intended, and even said as much on the
> list before the apology was even issued, or even before I became aware
> that a proctors bug had been opened.
> 
> However, I'll note the apology didn't really apologize for making a
> personal statement about an individual in the first place, and only
> seemed to clarify its meaning.  Again, the concern isn't that the
> statement was worded poorly (though it was), but that the whole issue
> with language would have been avoided entirely if we had avoided
> making personal statements about individuals in the first place.  This
> wasn't a discussion about whether a particular individual was
> qualified to be in a particular role.
> 
This standard, as noted above, is at best silly in practice and in theory.

>> Does the proctors project acknowledge that posting such a warning very
>> much appears to just be flagging something to complain to comrel about
>> later, and that by excluding the apology this appears to be all the more
>> biased?
> 
> I'm not sure what comrel has to do with this.  I have no personal
> insight into their thinking but I'm skeptical that they would be
> concerned with one CoC warning unless it were a part of a larger
> pattern of behavior.
> 
Search engines are a things which exist. Bookmarks as well. Citing prior
incidents is common practice when filing virtually any manner of
grievance. By your espoused logic any arguably negative comment about
anyone constitutes a violation, making a pattern of behavior trivial to
establish as inoffensive arguably negative comments are not exactly hard
to come by when one is set on taking feedback as actionably negative.

> Nor do I see bias.  Surely saying somebody demonstrates lack of
> empathy is a negative statement about an individual person.  That
> makes the statement a CoC violation.
> 
Aye, and ducks weigh as much as ducks and are therefore witches.

Do pray tell why, by your logic comments regarding negative aspects of
individuals are forbidden, but analogous comments regarding entire teams
are not.
> A complaint was made to proctors, and the proctors evaluated the
> statement and determined it was a violation.  Dismissing a complaint
> without taking action when it pertained to a Council member would
> probably have been the worse outcome, IMO.
> 
Quite the interesting stance there as well: any complaint at all against
a member of the council should, by your logic, merit a public warning to
the council member, no exceptions.

> I'll agree that this was a somewhat borderline situation, and I was
> personally concerned that a warning would itself lack empathy which
> would of course be ironic.  However, we were asked for a decision and
> made one, and in my proposed wording I did try to depersonalize and
> contextualize the nature of Proctors actions.
> 
It was indeed ironic. It was also badly supported by logic. And a rather
dramatic shifting of established norms.

> The goal here is to try to get everybody to focus on the issues and
> policies and less on criticizing people personally on public mailing
> lists.  That is all.
> 
> Again, speaking personally for myself only...
> 

[GSC:hide]
https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/philosophy/social-contract.html#we-will-not-hide-problems
[ComRel] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:ComRel

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 12:24 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On 06/24/19 06:55, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > Speaking only for my personal opinion:
> >
> by
> your espoused reasoning even filing a bug requesting ComRel intervention
> due to demonstrable violation of the CoC would not be a suitable venue
> for arguably negative comments regarding an individual, as (per ComRel
> [ComRel]) there is no indication that such bugs would necessarily be
> private.

There is also no indication that such bugs would be public.  IMO the
ComRel policy should define expectations of privacy because this has
been a problem in the past with Council appeals, which I believe I
have commented on the lists about previously.

In any case, Comrel can handle its own bugs, and unless somebody says
otherwise I'd probably consider them out of scope for proctors.

> By decreeing all arguably negative comments to be verboten, you have
> essentially instituted a policy of radicalization.

Your whole post is basically a negative comment about how the CoC is
being enforced, and does not contain personal attacks.  We can talk
about issues.  We can talk about policies/processes.  Just don't talk
about individual people.

> The mere act of telling a
> developer that they are acting badly is, by your logic, forbidden as it
> would be a statement which would arguably negatively reflect on an
> individual.

We only enforce the CoC on public lists.  If you are having this
discussion in private it would not be within the scope of proctors.
If somebody feels they're being harassed in private they can always go
to Comrel, but if you try to work constructively with an individual
and they are ignoring you it is better to just go to Comrel if the
matter is serious (assuming this is an interpersonal issue - if it is
a technical/quality issue QA would be more appropriate).

And talking about ISSUES is again fine.  If you notice a bug in an
eclass/ebuild that is causing problems then open a bug and talk about
it.  You can talk about it on the lists if appropriate.  QA can
connect the dots if there are trends involving individuals, or you can
privately suggest that they look for dots.

This isn't about suppressing issues.  This is about HOW we deal with them.

While it isn't Gentoo's policy I'd suggest taking a look at the FSF's
CoC.  It does a decent job (IMO) of explaining why personal attacks
are counterproductive even if you think they should be allowed, which
they are not (at least not unless Council says otherwise).

> > I'm not sure what comrel has to do with this.  I have no personal
> > insight into their thinking but I'm skeptical that they would be
> > concerned with one CoC warning unless it were a part of a larger
> > pattern of behavior.
> >
> Search engines are a things which exist. Bookmarks as well. Citing prior
> incidents is common practice when filing virtually any manner of
> grievance. By your espoused logic any arguably negative comment about
> anyone constitutes a violation, making a pattern of behavior trivial to
> establish as inoffensive arguably negative comments are not exactly hard
> to come by when one is set on taking feedback as actionably negative.

Sure, and if somebody says 3 mildly-negative things about somebody
over their 20 year dev career, I suspect that Comrel will probably
weigh the passing of time.

I mean, it isn't like they're kicking people out left and right...

The fact that search engines and archives exist is part of why we
don't attack people personally in the first place.  I mean, who wants
to work on a project which requires operating with your real name
where people non-professionally have at each other regularly?  To err
is human, and interpersonal conflict will always happen.  Professional
conduct is about handling these situations in a more effective manner
that reflects the realities that we all mess up from time to time.  It
isn't about ignoring issues, it is about recognizing that hitting
people with a bat doesn't necessarily inspire them to fix issues
either (again, read the FSF CoC for more elegant argument).

> Do pray tell why, by your logic comments regarding negative aspects of
> individuals are forbidden, but analogous comments regarding entire teams
> are not.

It isn't about the team either.  It is about the policies/processes/outcomes.

For example, we're discussing whether negative personal criticism
should be allowed on the lists.  That is just a policy decision.

If people are implementing a bad policy, the issue isn't with the
people, either individually or as a team.  That doesn't mean we need
300 commandments - just feedback.
If people aren't implementing a policy correctly, then the issue is
with the people, but if the people aren't already being dealt with
then there is also a problem with the process.

So, you can talk about outcomes and get those fixed.

Now, keep in mind that we're still a small organization and always
labor-constrained, so sometimes we're just stuck with the people
willing to do the work.

> > A complaint was made to proctors, and the proctors evaluated the
> > statement and determined it was a violation.  Dismissing a complaint
> > without taking action when it pertained to a Council member would
> > probably have been the worse outcome, IMO.
> >
> Quite the interesting stance there as well: any complaint at all against
> a member of the council should, by your logic, merit a public warning to
> the council member, no exceptions.

You skipped part of my statement, "proctors evaluated the statement
and determined it was a violation."

We obviously don't issue warnings when we determine there aren't violations.

Do you REALLY want us ignoring violations by individuals in senior
positions when there has been a complaint?

> > I'll agree that this was a somewhat borderline situation, and I was
> > personally concerned that a warning would itself lack empathy which
> > would of course be ironic.  However, we were asked for a decision and
> > made one, and in my proposed wording I did try to depersonalize and
> > contextualize the nature of Proctors actions.
> >
> It was ... a rather
> dramatic shifting of established norms.

Well, of course.  Proctors basically didn't exist for a decade.  ANY
action we take is a dramatic shifting of established norms.

Proctors has been existence for basically a full year.  Aside with
dealing with some spam/etc this is really the only significant action
it has taken in one year, and it was a warning.

I don't think it is realistic to have a Code of Conduct that we
actually intend to be followed and not expect to have at least a
warning issued once a year.

> [ComRel] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:ComRel

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[desultory]

On 06/26/19 08:36, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 12:24 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 06/24/19 06:55, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>> Speaking only for my personal opinion:
>>>
>> by
>> your espoused reasoning even filing a bug requesting ComRel intervention
>> due to demonstrable violation of the CoC would not be a suitable venue
>> for arguably negative comments regarding an individual, as (per ComRel
>> [ComRel]) there is no indication that such bugs would necessarily be
>> private.
> 
> There is also no indication that such bugs would be public.  IMO the
> ComRel policy should define expectations of privacy because this has
> been a problem in the past with Council appeals, which I believe I
> have commented on the lists about previously.
> 
So no ComRel needs to clean house in order to avoid running afoul of a
new (unilaterally conceived) policy that runs distinctly counter to
existing practice.

> In any case, Comrel can handle its own bugs, and unless somebody says
> otherwise I'd probably consider them out of scope for proctors.
> 
The proctors project wiki page [proctors] explicitly states that it
considers bugzilla to be under its direct purview; not just some bugs,
all bugs. Which would make this yet another new policy spawned for no
evident reason other than having not thought through the implications of
an existing policy, and not bothering to consult with affected parties,
again.

>> By decreeing all arguably negative comments to be verboten, you have
>> essentially instituted a policy of radicalization.
> 
> Your whole post is basically a negative comment about how the CoC is
> being enforced, and does not contain personal attacks.  We can talk
> about issues.  We can talk about policies/processes.  Just don't talk
> about individual people.
> 
Yes, it is, because the specific instance in question was badly handled
and the newly espoused (and unilateral) policy is perverse, draconian,
and generally ill-conceived.

>> The mere act of telling a
>> developer that they are acting badly is, by your logic, forbidden as it
>> would be a statement which would arguably negatively reflect on an
>> individual.
> 
> We only enforce the CoC on public lists.  If you are having this
> discussion in private it would not be within the scope of proctors.
> If somebody feels they're being harassed in private they can always go
> to Comrel, but if you try to work constructively with an individual
> and they are ignoring you it is better to just go to Comrel if the
> matter is serious (assuming this is an interpersonal issue - if it is
> a technical/quality issue QA would be more appropriate).
> 
Again, contrary to how the proctors wiki page defines the scope of the
project.

> And talking about ISSUES is again fine.  If you notice a bug in an
> eclass/ebuild that is causing problems then open a bug and talk about
> it.  You can talk about it on the lists if appropriate.  QA can
> connect the dots if there are trends involving individuals, or you can
> privately suggest that they look for dots.
> 
> This isn't about suppressing issues.  This is about HOW we deal with them.
> 
If if were my impression that proctors was directly attempting to quash
discussion of bugs in general, I would already have sent mail to all
current council members and the project mailing list requesting an
immediate dissolution of the proctors project as it was acting directly
counter to productive work and against any semblance of mandate it might
have. As it is, the project as a whole has not reached that threshold.

> While it isn't Gentoo's policy I'd suggest taking a look at the FSF's
> CoC.  It does a decent job (IMO) of explaining why personal attacks
> are counterproductive even if you think they should be allowed, which
> they are not (at least not unless Council says otherwise).
> 
The most obvious problem with that is what was warned about was not a
personal attack. There is a difference between "$person lack empathy"
and "$person is an inhuman monster" which seems to have been lost in
this action by proctors.

>>> I'm not sure what comrel has to do with this.  I have no personal
>>> insight into their thinking but I'm skeptical that they would be
>>> concerned with one CoC warning unless it were a part of a larger
>>> pattern of behavior.
>>>
>> Search engines are a things which exist. Bookmarks as well. Citing prior
>> incidents is common practice when filing virtually any manner of
>> grievance. By your espoused logic any arguably negative comment about
>> anyone constitutes a violation, making a pattern of behavior trivial to
>> establish as inoffensive arguably negative comments are not exactly hard
>> to come by when one is set on taking feedback as actionably negative.
> 
> Sure, and if somebody says 3 mildly-negative things about somebody
> over their 20 year dev career, I suspect that Comrel will probably
> weigh the passing of time.
> 
Interesting how you draw a distinction between mildly negative comments
and personal attack s here, but not in the "warning" itself, despite
acknowledging in that warning that it was not evidently meant to be
offensive.

> I mean, it isn't like they're kicking people out left and right...
> 
This is yet another occurrence of a fallacy which is distressingly
common in various media: since one does not think that a system is being
overly abused now, why should anyone be at all concerned about abuses in
the system? Especially when that system is, in the instance in question,
being abused.

> The fact that search engines and archives exist is part of why we
> don't attack people personally in the first place.  I mean, who wants
> to work on a project which requires operating with your real name
> where people non-professionally have at each other regularly?  To err
> is human, and interpersonal conflict will always happen.  Professional
> conduct is about handling these situations in a more effective manner
> that reflects the realities that we all mess up from time to time.  It
> isn't about ignoring issues, it is about recognizing that hitting
> people with a bat doesn't necessarily inspire them to fix issues
> either (again, read the FSF CoC for more elegant argument).
> 
And yet here we are back to having no distinction between mildly
negative comments and personal attacks.

>> Do pray tell why, by your logic comments regarding negative aspects of
>> individuals are forbidden, but analogous comments regarding entire teams
>> are not.
> 
> It isn't about the team either.  It is about the policies/processes/outcomes.
> 
So smearing groups of people is acceptable, so long as none are
isolated. Pray tell, what of instances where an individual smears
another by associating them with a smeared group?

> For example, we're discussing whether negative personal criticism
> should be allowed on the lists.  That is just a policy decision.
> 
Do kindly enlighten me: exactly what would you personally or the
proctors generally consider to be positive personal criticism?

> If people are implementing a bad policy, the issue isn't with the
> people, either individually or as a team.  That doesn't mean we need
> 300 commandments - just feedback.
If people are making bad policy for questionable reasons, either
individually or as a team, there is something amiss with their
perspective, their data, their logic, or their value judgments.
Sometimes reeducation is not worth the cost, especially when there are
ongoing costs incurred and no guarantee that such education would be
effective.

> If people aren't implementing a policy correctly, then the issue is
> with the people, but if the people aren't already being dealt with
> then there is also a problem with the process.
> 
It is entirely possible to make policies which are unclear, or
inexplicit on some point, which are then taken, incorrectly, to imply
something which is itself then made policy and enforced. Which is indeed
what I consider to have happened here. Given that proctors process was
implemented questionably regarding the warning, and there was no evident
process at all regarding the newly espoused policy, are you telling me
that the problem is the people involved?

> So, you can talk about outcomes and get those fixed.
> 
> Now, keep in mind that we're still a small organization and always
> labor-constrained, so sometimes we're just stuck with the people
> willing to do the work.
> 
Sometimes, it is better to leave a job undone than to have it done
improperly.

>>> A complaint was made to proctors, and the proctors evaluated the
>>> statement and determined it was a violation.  Dismissing a complaint
>>> without taking action when it pertained to a Council member would
>>> probably have been the worse outcome, IMO.
>>>
>> Quite the interesting stance there as well: any complaint at all against
>> a member of the council should, by your logic, merit a public warning to
>> the council member, no exceptions.
> 
> You skipped part of my statement, "proctors evaluated the statement
> and determined it was a violation."
> 
No, I did not skip that part. I disagree with there having been any
actionable violation of the CoC in the first place, but your espoused
standard is that a comment could be interpreted as being negative in
regards to an individual. Given your espoused standard, merely claiming
the potential for offense is sufficient grounds for, at the least, a
warning.

> We obviously don't issue warnings when we determine there aren't violations.
> 
That much has become distinctly questionable in light of recent actions.

> Do you REALLY want us ignoring violations by individuals in senior
> positions when there has been a complaint?
> 
Following your espoused standards, I should file a proctors bug over
that, as it arguably violates the code of conduct [CoC], specifically:
"
Unacceptable behaviour
...
* Being judgmental, mean-spirited or insulting. It is possible to
respectfully challenge someone in a way that empowers without being
judgemental.
* Constantly purveying misinformation despite repeated warnings.
"
Indeed, it even arguably fits both of the other descriptions for
unacceptable behavior, at very least as well as what proctors have
actually issued a warning over. Is that seriously the path being sought
for discourse on the lists? Are rhetorical questions to be banned as well?

As I have already noted, I do not believe that the comments in question
warranted any disciplinary response, certainly not an official public
warning. I do not care whether the person making them is a member of the
council or up for election to the council. A trumped up complaint
drawing an overreaction is not better for having been in response to
someone on the council, it is merely more visible.

>>> I'll agree that this was a somewhat borderline situation, and I was
>>> personally concerned that a warning would itself lack empathy which
>>> would of course be ironic.  However, we were asked for a decision and
>>> made one, and in my proposed wording I did try to depersonalize and
>>> contextualize the nature of Proctors actions.
>>>
>> It was ... a rather
>> dramatic shifting of established norms.
> 
> Well, of course.  Proctors basically didn't exist for a decade.  ANY
> action we take is a dramatic shifting of established norms.
> 
While it is true that there was no proctors project for quite some time,
claiming that any action by any proctor would necessarily be a dramatic
shift in established norms is utterly, blatantly, false. There have been
numerous personal attacks on the lists in the time since the proctors
project was started (restarted, if you prefer), none received a warning
for months, then a critique of how someone handles one of their roles
was treated as an actionable violation. By your logic, there is
absolutely no reason to believe that proctors will, or will not, do
literally anything at literally any time, because it has "only" been
embodied for a year, and is making radical changes to its policies for
reasons which have yet to be articulated. Yes, you have stated that you
seek to enforce "professional conduct", but the reason for the rather
dramatic policy shift has gone without mention.

Whether the new policy even provides for "professional conduct" is an
other question entirely, though as one might infer I very much doubt
that it does, will, or indeed can.

> Proctors has been existence for basically a full year.  Aside with
> dealing with some spam/etc this is really the only significant action
> it has taken in one year, and it was a warning.
> 
It has issued a warning which it should not have, and not issued dozens
which were distinctly more warranted, I would consider that to be a
rather unimpressive track record.

> I don't think it is realistic to have a Code of Conduct that we
> actually intend to be followed and not expect to have at least a
> warning issued once a year.
> 
I think that it is distinctly unrealistic to treat a personal critique
as an actionable personal attack when personal attacks are regularly
ignored by proctors. I think it is distinctly unrealistic to claim that
the CoC is being followed when it is demonstrably not.

>> [ComRel] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:ComRel
> 

[proctors] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Proctors
[CoC] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/Code_of_conduct

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Rich Freeman]

Again, only speaking personally.  Also, on many of these issues we're
just going to disagree on what the policy is and how it ought to apply
- ultimately policy is up to Council.  Proctors just tries to apply
the little guidance that exists in this area and accept whatever
direction it is given.

I'm just replying where something hasn't already been said..

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 1:23 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On 06/26/19 08:36, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 12:24 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 06/24/19 06:55, Rich Freeman wrote:
> >>> Speaking only for my personal opinion:
> >>>
> >> by
> >> your espoused reasoning even filing a bug requesting ComRel intervention
> >> due to demonstrable violation of the CoC would not be a suitable venue
> >> for arguably negative comments regarding an individual, as (per ComRel
> >> [ComRel]) there is no indication that such bugs would necessarily be
> >> private.
> >
> > There is also no indication that such bugs would be public.  IMO the
> > ComRel policy should define expectations of privacy because this has
> > been a problem in the past with Council appeals, which I believe I
> > have commented on the lists about previously.
> >
> So no ComRel needs to clean house in order to avoid running afoul of a
> new (unilaterally conceived) policy that runs distinctly counter to
> existing practice.

I was saying that ComRel needed to document expectations of privacy
back when I was on Council, which was a while ago, and long before
Proctors was restarted.

People share all kinds of sensitive stuff with Comrel.  It absolutely
should be clear whether they can expect it to remain private.  Having
heard Comrel appeals I can tell you what is wrong with the current
state.

A few witnesses share sensitive concerns with Comrel about some dev
with the understanding that it will be kept private (likely given by
private assurance). Comrel ends up taking action against the dev.  The
dev appeals to Council.  The Council gets a dump of all the evidence,
much of which is sensitive, and where promises about privacy have
already been made.  What does Council do?

Council could decide that we don't act on private info, but then what
was the point in soliciting it in the first place?  Also, Council has
good reason to think that somebody bad is going on, which they are now
ignoring.

Council could decide to uphold the Comrel action, and keep the private
info private.  Now you get the usual conspiracy theories about secret
cabals running Gentoo, and no official policies one way or another.

Council could uphold the Comrel action, and then publish the private
info.  Now you get people really upset about broken promises on
sensitive issues.

No matter what the policy is set to, somebody will be upset.  However,
we should still have a published policy.

This is why Proctors has a published policy.  Proctors deals with
stuff done in public on Gentoo communications media, on lists, bugs,
IRC, etc.  Proctors doesn't deal with stuff that happens in private,
anywhere.  Proctors doesn't accept private evidence - anything
submitted will go in a public bug.  Anybody with a concern about what
Proctors is doing can go search on bugzilla and see the same things we
see.  The most ephemeral stuff we deal with would be unlogged but
official IRC channels, but usually plenty of people have personal logs
they can look at for these, and even then we rarely get involved
because most are already moderated.

Bugzilla in general is within scope of Proctors.  We would generally
not deal with Comrel bugs because:
1. Comrel already has all the powers Proctors has to deal with CoC
issues.  We don't add value.
2. Most of these bugs are generally hidden, and stuff that isn't
public generally isn't our scope.
3. Comrel IS an appropriate forum for frank discussion of a lot of
stuff that would violate the CoC in public, so it requires a different
approach, which is what Comrel already specializes in.

> Which would make this yet another new policy spawned for no
> evident reason other than having not thought through the implications of
> an existing policy, and not bothering to consult with affected parties,
> again.

I don't hear Comrel complaining.  I'd be shocked if they had concerns
over what we're doing, and have a liason on our team for just that
reason.  It isn't like we make stuff up in a vacuum.

> > While it isn't Gentoo's policy I'd suggest taking a look at the FSF's
> > CoC.  It does a decent job (IMO) of explaining why personal attacks
> > are counterproductive even if you think they should be allowed, which
> > they are not (at least not unless Council says otherwise).
> >
> The most obvious problem with that is what was warned about was not a
> personal attack. There is a difference between "$person lack empathy"
> and "$person is an inhuman monster" which seems to have been lost in
> this action by proctors.

So, I think we're arguing over the definition of "personal attack" -
either statement is not appropriate on our lists.

And we certainly do make distinctions, which is why only a warning was issued.

> This is yet another occurrence of a fallacy which is distressingly
> common in various media: since one does not think that a system is being
> overly abused now, why should anyone be at all concerned about abuses in
> the system? Especially when that system is, in the instance in question,
> being abused.

If Council feels that our action was inappropriate they can take
whatever action they feel is necessary.  We enforce the CoC as we
believe it was intended to be enforced.  A few people have voiced
disagreements, which is to be expected.  That is why we elect Council
members.

All Proctors actions and bugs (whether action is taken or not) are
public.  Anybody can review what we're doing and raise whatever
concerns they wish, as you have done.

IMO it is a good system.  There will be disagreements, but I think
this is about as transparent a system as I can think of, and
suggestions for improvement are always welcome.

> It is entirely possible to make policies which are unclear, or
> inexplicit on some point, which are then taken, incorrectly, to imply
> something which is itself then made policy and enforced.

Of course.  And that is why we have the opportunity for feedback.  All
policies need refinement over time, and Council is the appropriate
place to bring concerns about the meaning of the CoC.

> There have been
> numerous personal attacks on the lists in the time since the proctors
> project was started (restarted, if you prefer), none received a warning
> for months, then a critique of how someone handles one of their roles
> was treated as an actionable violation.

True.  I do not claim that this was the worst violation since Proctors existed.

In general we avoid opening bugs every time a minor issue comes up.
However, we didn't open this bug.  Once a complaint was submitted to
us our options were basically to close it without action, or close it
taking some kind of action.  You might disagree with the decision we
made in this case, but IMO it was the right one.

I'm not suggesting that I want everybody to go opening up Proctors
bugs everytime somebody does something you don't like.  However, if
bugs are opened, we're going to follow our process to resolve them,
and we will generally do so quickly.  Over time I'm sure we'll both
get better at it, and people will become more used to how these are
being handled, and maybe we'll have fewer CoC violations in the first
place.

> I think that it is distinctly unrealistic to treat a personal critique
> as an actionable personal attack when personal attacks are regularly
> ignored by proctors.

So, you can't get out of a speeding ticket by arguing that the police
failed to pull over EVERY car that was speeding.  No CoC enforcement
will be perfect, nor is it intended to be really.  The goal is to
steer things in the right direction, and nudges over time will
hopefully get things going in the right direction.  This is why I am
emphatic that warnings should not be seen as reflecting on the
individual.  Getting a warning doesn't mean that you're the worst
person in Gentoo - it just means that you did something wrong, and you
should try not to do it again.  That's it, and if we actually heed the
warnings maybe it will be a nicer community to participate in.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[desultory]

On 06/27/19 10:15, Rich Freeman wrote:
> Again, only speaking personally.  Also, on many of these issues we're
> just going to disagree on what the policy is and how it ought to apply
> - ultimately policy is up to Council.  Proctors just tries to apply
> the little guidance that exists in this area and accept whatever
> direction it is given.
> 
> I'm just replying where something hasn't already been said..
> 
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 1:23 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 06/26/19 08:36, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 12:24 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 06/24/19 06:55, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>>>> Speaking only for my personal opinion:
>>>>>
>>>> by
>>>> your espoused reasoning even filing a bug requesting ComRel intervention
>>>> due to demonstrable violation of the CoC would not be a suitable venue
>>>> for arguably negative comments regarding an individual, as (per ComRel
>>>> [ComRel]) there is no indication that such bugs would necessarily be
>>>> private.
>>>
>>> There is also no indication that such bugs would be public.  IMO the
>>> ComRel policy should define expectations of privacy because this has
>>> been a problem in the past with Council appeals, which I believe I
>>> have commented on the lists about previously.
>>>
>> So no ComRel needs to clean house in order to avoid running afoul of a
>> new (unilaterally conceived) policy that runs distinctly counter to
>> existing practice.
> 
> I was saying that ComRel needed to document expectations of privacy
> back when I was on Council, which was a while ago, and long before
> Proctors was restarted.
> 
> People share all kinds of sensitive stuff with Comrel.  It absolutely
> should be clear whether they can expect it to remain private.  Having
> heard Comrel appeals I can tell you what is wrong with the current
> state.
> 
> A few witnesses share sensitive concerns with Comrel about some dev
> with the understanding that it will be kept private (likely given by
> private assurance). Comrel ends up taking action against the dev.  The
> dev appeals to Council.  The Council gets a dump of all the evidence,
> much of which is sensitive, and where promises about privacy have
> already been made.  What does Council do?
> 
> Council could decide that we don't act on private info, but then what
> was the point in soliciting it in the first place?  Also, Council has
> good reason to think that somebody bad is going on, which they are now
> ignoring.
> 
> Council could decide to uphold the Comrel action, and keep the private
> info private.  Now you get the usual conspiracy theories about secret
> cabals running Gentoo, and no official policies one way or another.
> 
> Council could uphold the Comrel action, and then publish the private
> info.  Now you get people really upset about broken promises on
> sensitive issues.
> 
> No matter what the policy is set to, somebody will be upset.  However,
> we should still have a published policy.
> 
Saying something as a member of the council does not mean implementing
something as a member of the council, though only little effort
separates them. Blaming ComRel for what others did not do and for not
setting policy for the council, from which it draws its mandate and to
which it reports (not dictates), are both absurd.

> This is why Proctors has a published policy.  Proctors deals with
> stuff done in public on Gentoo communications media, on lists, bugs,
> IRC, etc.  Proctors doesn't deal with stuff that happens in private,
> anywhere.  Proctors doesn't accept private evidence - anything
> submitted will go in a public bug.  Anybody with a concern about what
> Proctors is doing can go search on bugzilla and see the same things we
> see.  The most ephemeral stuff we deal with would be unlogged but
> official IRC channels, but usually plenty of people have personal logs
> they can look at for these, and even then we rarely get involved
> because most are already moderated.
> 
Having "a published policy" tends to imply something more than literally
[proctors] :
"Note: All proctors matters will be tracked in public bugs, including
all communications sent in the request. The scope of proctors actions is
limited to activities on public communications media, so there is no
expectation of privacy around the handling of these issues."
embedded in a document, it seems entirely fair to describe that as more
akin to "the fine print" than "a published policy" as there is indeed no
reference to having everything related to all proctors decisions kept
public in the policy description itself. Rather the *contrary* in fact
given that the note claims that *all* proctors matters will be tracked
in public bugs while an "important" highlighted section of the section
describing disciplinary actions indicates that the proctors will not
necessarily have any record at all of instances where they were asked to
intervene:
"Before applying any of the following disciplinary policies, the
Proctors team will try to discuss the problem with the offender in order
to solve it in a more peaceful way. However, it is possible for the
Proctors to apply the penalty without further discussions in severe CoC
violations (direct attacks, insults, name-calling etc)."
Thus by the implication of proctors own published policy the publication
of all proctors data is less important than contacting the subject of a
complaint to resolve the matter before disciplinary action is taken,
curiously there is no indication that this was carried through in the
instance which spawned this discussion.

> Bugzilla in general is within scope of Proctors.  We would generally
> not deal with Comrel bugs because:
> 1. Comrel already has all the powers Proctors has to deal with CoC
> issues.  We don't add value.
If proctors do not add value in areas in which ComRel operates and
ComRel operates everywhere that proctors do, how is the existence of
proctors justified? Is a theoretically neutral party valueless in regard
to helping keep tempers in check in the very circumstance in which one
would expect them to be most strained? Is maintaining civil discourse
outside of the purview of proctors?

> 2. Most of these bugs are generally hidden, and stuff that isn't
> public generally isn't our scope.
Given that you have repeatedly noted that proctors sole area of
responsibility is public media, something which is only mentioned in the
note I quoted above, how would a hidden bug fall within proctors scope
at all?

> 3. Comrel IS an appropriate forum for frank discussion of a lot of
> stuff that would violate the CoC in public, so it requires a different
> approach, which is what Comrel already specializes in.
> 
Given the list of unacceptable behaviors enumerated in the CoC [CoC],
specifically:
 * Flaming and trolling.
 * Posting/participating only to incite drama or negativity rather than
to tactfully share information.
 * Being judgmental, mean-spirited or insulting.
 * Constantly purveying misinformation despite repeated warnings.

What productive value, exactly, would any of that add to a discussion of
disciplinary action or policy?

>> Which would make this yet another new policy spawned for no
>> evident reason other than having not thought through the implications of
>> an existing policy, and not bothering to consult with affected parties,
>> again.
> 
> I don't hear Comrel complaining.  I'd be shocked if they had concerns
> over what we're doing, and have a liason on our team for just that
> reason.  It isn't like we make stuff up in a vacuum.
> 
I find it distinctly curious that you infer that ComRel would
necessarily be the aggrieved party in regards to comments made in ComRel
bugs, as opposed to individuals subject to them, filing them, or
otherwise involved in them. Indeed, ComRel not having any concerns here
could itself raise concerns about how ComRel.

As for the statement that proctors do not "make stuff up in a vacuum",
that seems dubious given the freshly espoused "no arguably negative
comments regarding individuals" policy which had no advance notice prior
to it being enforced.

>>> While it isn't Gentoo's policy I'd suggest taking a look at the FSF's
>>> CoC.  It does a decent job (IMO) of explaining why personal attacks
>>> are counterproductive even if you think they should be allowed, which
>>> they are not (at least not unless Council says otherwise).
>>>
>> The most obvious problem with that is what was warned about was not a
>> personal attack. There is a difference between "$person lack empathy"
>> and "$person is an inhuman monster" which seems to have been lost in
>> this action by proctors.
> 
> So, I think we're arguing over the definition of "personal attack" -
> either statement is not appropriate on our lists.
> 
One is constructive feedback, the other is not. Banning constructive
feedback is definitionally not constructive. To treat such a ban as
being in effect prior to announcing such a ban is absurd.

> And we certainly do make distinctions, which is why only a warning was issued.
> 
A warning for violating a policy which did not exist prior to that warning.

>> This is yet another occurrence of a fallacy which is distressingly
>> common in various media: since one does not think that a system is being
>> overly abused now, why should anyone be at all concerned about abuses in
>> the system? Especially when that system is, in the instance in question,
>> being abused.
> 
> If Council feels that our action was inappropriate they can take
> whatever action they feel is necessary.  We enforce the CoC as we
> believe it was intended to be enforced.  A few people have voiced
> disagreements, which is to be expected.  That is why we elect Council
> members.
> 
Duly noted. Apparently, I will need to inquire with the council.

> All Proctors actions and bugs (whether action is taken or not) are
> public.  Anybody can review what we're doing and raise whatever
> concerns they wish, as you have done.
> 
By the proctors own published policy, cited above, that claim is false.
Yes, the bugs are, by policy public, but all actions taken and not
cannot possibly be documented, please do not overgeneralize.

> IMO it is a good system.  There will be disagreements, but I think
> this is about as transparent a system as I can think of, and
> suggestions for improvement are always welcome.
> 
Consistency in enforcement actions and publishing policies before
enforcing them would be a start, but considering that the proctors
project has been running for roughly a year at this point "a start"
seems rather late.

>> It is entirely possible to make policies which are unclear, or
>> inexplicit on some point, which are then taken, incorrectly, to imply
>> something which is itself then made policy and enforced.
> 
> Of course.  And that is why we have the opportunity for feedback.  All
> policies need refinement over time, and Council is the appropriate
> place to bring concerns about the meaning of the CoC.
> 
And enforcing bodies are, or at least should be, suitable points of
contact for concerns regarding their handling of the CoC.

>> There have been
>> numerous personal attacks on the lists in the time since the proctors
>> project was started (restarted, if you prefer), none received a warning
>> for months, then a critique of how someone handles one of their roles
>> was treated as an actionable violation.
> 
> True.  I do not claim that this was the worst violation since Proctors existed.
> 
Yet it was the only enforcement action. Why?

> In general we avoid opening bugs every time a minor issue comes up.
> However, we didn't open this bug.  Once a complaint was submitted to
> us our options were basically to close it without action, or close it
> taking some kind of action.  You might disagree with the decision we
> made in this case, but IMO it was the right one.
> 
Your argument appears to be essentially that you were bound to act
because a bug was filed, while proctors policy explicitly states that it
has the option to not enforce it own policies even when it considers a
violation to have occurred:
"The following disciplinary actions may or may not be enforced when the
Proctors become aware of a direct CoC violation."
Please explain.

> I'm not suggesting that I want everybody to go opening up Proctors
> bugs everytime somebody does something you don't like.  However, if
> bugs are opened, we're going to follow our process to resolve them,
> and we will generally do so quickly.  Over time I'm sure we'll both
> get better at it, and people will become more used to how these are
> being handled, and maybe we'll have fewer CoC violations in the first
> place.
> 
Given that you left out my question which you appear to be tangentially
addressing there, allow me to further clarify: I was not addressing
whether or not I "liked" your question, I was addressing whether or not
it complied with the CoC. By your own stated standards it would appear
to not comply. Thus my question stands: is filing a proctors bug about
such questions an intended effect of your newly espoused policy? Would
it be handled as the newly espoused policy and recent warning would
indicate?

Further, would having a warning issued by proctors constitute failure to
comply with the prerequisites for proctors membership? Specifically:
"A Proctor must be a Gentoo developer for at least 1 year and during
this time must have demonstrated good behavior."

>> I think that it is distinctly unrealistic to treat a personal critique
>> as an actionable personal attack when personal attacks are regularly
>> ignored by proctors.
> 
> So, you can't get out of a speeding ticket by arguing that the police
> failed to pull over EVERY car that was speeding.  No CoC enforcement
> will be perfect, nor is it intended to be really.  The goal is to
> steer things in the right direction, and nudges over time will
> hopefully get things going in the right direction.  This is why I am
> emphatic that warnings should not be seen as reflecting on the
> individual.  Getting a warning doesn't mean that you're the worst
> person in Gentoo - it just means that you did something wrong, and you
> should try not to do it again.  That's it, and if we actually heed the
> warnings maybe it will be a nicer community to participate in.
> 
Conversely, the police cannot argue that they are enforcing speed limits
effectively if they ticket only one car per year, and when asked about
why they only ticketed that one car instead of the dozens of others that
went past, uncited, at much higher speeds proclaim that they could not
catch the cars they photographed and logged as having more flagrantly
violated the speed limit but they could catch this car that was just
barely exceeding the speed limit, thus speed limits are enforced
effectively. The populace in general would also, rather likely and quite
rightly, be rather taken aback if the police upon ticketing this one
driver announced that speed limits would thenceforth be enforced such
that if any part of a vehicle exceeds the posted limit, the driver would
be fined for traveling at the speed of the fastest part of the vehicle.

You keep arguing that the proctors project has only been around for a
year and that it is somehow just starting out, the very idea of the
proctors rather strongly implies the opposite: members of the team
should have some sense of what they are to be doing before they ever
become proctors. Furthermore, proctors should not act in a capricious
manner with regard to their duties, to do otherwise is to destroy, or at
very least debase, the value of the role.

[proctors] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Proctors
[CoC] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/Code_of_conduct

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 1:39 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On 06/27/19 10:15, Rich Freeman wrote:
> >
> > No matter what the policy is set to, somebody will be upset.  However,
> > we should still have a published policy.
> >
> Saying something as a member of the council does not mean implementing
> something as a member of the council, though only little effort
> separates them. Blaming ComRel for what others did not do and for not
> setting policy for the council, from which it draws its mandate and to
> which it reports (not dictates), are both absurd.

Nobody is blaming anybody for this.  I simply said that we ought to
have a published policy.

Heck, I'll blame myself: I could have filed a bug or brought the issue
up in an agenda call.  I'll file a bug now and Comrel/Council can
figure out what they want to do.

> Thus by the implication of proctors own published policy the publication
> of all proctors data is less important than contacting the subject of a
> complaint to resolve the matter before disciplinary action is taken,
> curiously there is no indication that this was carried through in the
> instance which spawned this discussion.

No disciplinary action was taken in this case (you'll note that the
section you quoted said nothing of warnings - a warning is a decision
to not take action over a violation).  However, I'll agree that the
page could probably be cleaner.  It was written in stages, with
general content not actually being written by the Proctors themselves,
and then it was implemented in actual procedure further down.  The end
result is that you get stuff that is more general at the top and stuff
that is more procedural at the bottom.

> If proctors do not add value in areas in which ComRel operates and
> ComRel operates everywhere that proctors do, how is the existence of
> proctors justified?

Comrel and Proctors are two different approaches to a somewhat similar problem.

Proctors are intended to take action quickly, but on a small scale.
We issue warnings, or short-term bans.  The goal is to try to moderate
our communications and improve the general atmosphere.  We don't deal
with serious issues.

Comrel is much more deliberative and take a much longer time to make
decisions (at least from what I've seen).  They tend to deal with more
serious issues, and sometimes ones where the only solution is to expel
somebody from the community.

Proctors operates fairly publicly - all our decisions are public, and
we only deal with things that happen in public.  This allows a lot
more transparency.  Comrel tends to operate more in private, dealing
sometimes with interpersonal issues that are not public, which hinders
transparency.

I can't speak for everybody on Council who approved resurrecting
Proctors, but in general I would say that one of the goals was that
Proctors would triage a lot of smaller issues so that they don't bog
down in Comrel, and that faster responses might help to provide
feedback to our lists/channels/etc so that the overall tenor of
conversation improves.

Put more simply: Proctors is a flyswatter, and Comrel is more of a
sledgehammer; when you're dealing with insects, the flyswatter is more
agile and tends to leave fewer holes in the wall.

> > All Proctors actions and bugs (whether action is taken or not) are
> > public.  Anybody can review what we're doing and raise whatever
> > concerns they wish, as you have done.
> >
> By the proctors own published policy, cited above, that claim is false.
> Yes, the bugs are, by policy public, but all actions taken and not
> cannot possibly be documented, please do not overgeneralize.

Read our resolution process (which granted is only a few months old,
so it wasn't followed exactly the first few months after we were
reconstituted).  The first thing we do when cases are opened is open a
public bug.  All actions will be documented in these bugs.

In any case, the process speaks for itself and is on our webpage.
Anybody can read exactly what is done and search bugzilla for our
alias.  Arguing over what is or isn't an "action" is silly - the
process is there to read.

> > Of course.  And that is why we have the opportunity for feedback.  All
> > policies need refinement over time, and Council is the appropriate
> > place to bring concerns about the meaning of the CoC.
> >
> And enforcing bodies are, or at least should be, suitable points of
> contact for concerns regarding their handling of the CoC.

Sure, and I've explained my reasoning in applying the CoC.  If you're
unsatisfied with my reading of the CoC, the Council has ultimate
responsibility, and we respect their decisions.

Ultimately though no policy around human interaction will ever be
completely precise in its formulation.  At best you end up with
principles and guidances that evolve over time.

And that is why Proctors is designed to be more like a flyswatter than
a sledgehammer.  It WON'T be perfect.  However, it also won't leave
holes in the wall.  A few seem to be expressing great concern over a
warning, and even if a ban had been issued it would be over already.
I get that it is a somewhat new operation, but it isn't intended that
anybody who receives a Proctors warning will fall on their sword in
disgrace.  If anybody has suggestions for how warnings can be worded
so that people take them seriously and improve how they communicate,
but don't feel like they're being driven out of Gentoo, I'm certainly
interested.

> Your argument appears to be essentially that you were bound to act
> because a bug was filed, while proctors policy explicitly states that it
> has the option to not enforce it own policies even when it considers a
> violation to have occurred:
> "The following disciplinary actions may or may not be enforced when the
> Proctors become aware of a direct CoC violation."
> Please explain.

Sure.  None of those disciplinary actions were enforced in this case.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[desultory]

On 06/28/19 06:32, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 1:39 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 06/27/19 10:15, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>>
>>> No matter what the policy is set to, somebody will be upset.  However,
>>> we should still have a published policy.
>>>
>> Saying something as a member of the council does not mean implementing
>> something as a member of the council, though only little effort
>> separates them. Blaming ComRel for what others did not do and for not
>> setting policy for the council, from which it draws its mandate and to
>> which it reports (not dictates), are both absurd.
> 
> Nobody is blaming anybody for this.  I simply said that we ought to
> have a published policy.
> 
> Heck, I'll blame myself: I could have filed a bug or brought the issue
> up in an agenda call.  I'll file a bug now and Comrel/Council can
> figure out what they want to do.
> 
>> Thus by the implication of proctors own published policy the publication
>> of all proctors data is less important than contacting the subject of a
>> complaint to resolve the matter before disciplinary action is taken,
>> curiously there is no indication that this was carried through in the
>> instance which spawned this discussion.
> 
> No disciplinary action was taken in this case (you'll note that the
> section you quoted said nothing of warnings - a warning is a decision
> to not take action over a violation).  However, I'll agree that the
> page could probably be cleaner.  It was written in stages, with
> general content not actually being written by the Proctors themselves,
> and then it was implemented in actual procedure further down.  The end
> result is that you get stuff that is more general at the top and stuff
> that is more procedural at the bottom.
>
SO, by your logic: "The following disciplinary actions may or may not be
enforced when the Proctors become aware of a direct CoC violation." does
not apply to warnings because warnings, which are actions by an
enforcement body to promote compliance while avoiding direct
disciplinary action, are somehow not actions, and are therefore by your
logic not subject to the publication requirements... despite having been
done in public.

>> If proctors do not add value in areas in which ComRel operates and
>> ComRel operates everywhere that proctors do, how is the existence of
>> proctors justified?
> 
> Comrel and Proctors are two different approaches to a somewhat similar problem.
> 
> Proctors are intended to take action quickly, but on a small scale.
> We issue warnings, or short-term bans.  The goal is to try to moderate
> our communications and improve the general atmosphere.  We don't deal
> with serious issues.
> 
> Comrel is much more deliberative and take a much longer time to make
> decisions (at least from what I've seen).  They tend to deal with more
> serious issues, and sometimes ones where the only solution is to expel
> somebody from the community.
> 
> Proctors operates fairly publicly - all our decisions are public, and
> we only deal with things that happen in public.  This allows a lot
> more transparency.  Comrel tends to operate more in private, dealing
> sometimes with interpersonal issues that are not public, which hinders
> transparency.
> 
> I can't speak for everybody on Council who approved resurrecting
> Proctors, but in general I would say that one of the goals was that
> Proctors would triage a lot of smaller issues so that they don't bog
> down in Comrel, and that faster responses might help to provide
> feedback to our lists/channels/etc so that the overall tenor of
> conversation improves.
> 
So, it exists to, in theory, provide a patch over perceived
institutional inadequacies in ComRel which is considered to be too slow
to effectively operate in any but the most egregious cases. What about
its practical value, given that by your description proctors provides no
value in areas where ComRel is active?

> Put more simply: Proctors is a flyswatter, and Comrel is more of a
> sledgehammer; when you're dealing with insects, the flyswatter is more
> agile and tends to leave fewer holes in the wall.
> 
I am sure that those subject to proctors actions, whether proctors
considers their actions to be actions or not, all welcome their newfound
status as insects to be swatted, not individuals with which to be reasoned.

>>> All Proctors actions and bugs (whether action is taken or not) are
>>> public.  Anybody can review what we're doing and raise whatever
>>> concerns they wish, as you have done.
>>>
>> By the proctors own published policy, cited above, that claim is false.
>> Yes, the bugs are, by policy public, but all actions taken and not
>> cannot possibly be documented, please do not overgeneralize.
> 
> Read our resolution process (which granted is only a few months old,
> so it wasn't followed exactly the first few months after we were
> reconstituted).  The first thing we do when cases are opened is open a
> public bug.  All actions will be documented in these bugs.
> 
I did read you policies, I have quoted them to you, telling me to read
them again is... unhelpful. Again I ask you: why it has taken a year for
proctors to act when you personally acknowledge that there have been
more significant violations of the CoC?

> In any case, the process speaks for itself and is on our webpage.
> Anybody can read exactly what is done and search bugzilla for our
> alias.  Arguing over what is or isn't an "action" is silly - the
> process is there to read.
> 
So far, the process has spoken for itself by saying that warnings will
be issued for violations of policies which did not exist at the time the
warning was issued. This is not how community is fostered, this is how a
climate of distrust is fostered.

As for `Arguing over what is or isn't an "action"`, do kindly bear in
mind that you made that point, and that you did so with multiple
contradictions, so I guess silly me for seeking clarity.

>>> Of course.  And that is why we have the opportunity for feedback.  All
>>> policies need refinement over time, and Council is the appropriate
>>> place to bring concerns about the meaning of the CoC.
>>>
>> And enforcing bodies are, or at least should be, suitable points of
>> contact for concerns regarding their handling of the CoC.
> 
> Sure, and I've explained my reasoning in applying the CoC.  If you're
> unsatisfied with my reading of the CoC, the Council has ultimate
> responsibility, and we respect their decisions.
> 
At this point, I would consider it entirely fair to state that I am
indeed unsatisfied with the actions in question.

> Ultimately though no policy around human interaction will ever be
> completely precise in its formulation.  At best you end up with
> principles and guidances that evolve over time.
> 
Should such "principles and guidances" not be know to those upon which
they will be enforced before they are actually enforced?

> And that is why Proctors is designed to be more like a flyswatter than
> a sledgehammer.  It WON'T be perfect.  However, it also won't leave
> holes in the wall.  A few seem to be expressing great concern over a
> warning, and even if a ban had been issued it would be over already.
> I get that it is a somewhat new operation, but it isn't intended that
> anybody who receives a Proctors warning will fall on their sword in
> disgrace.  If anybody has suggestions for how warnings can be worded
> so that people take them seriously and improve how they communicate,
> but don't feel like they're being driven out of Gentoo, I'm certainly
> interested.
> 
If you think that I am demanding perfection, allow me to assuage your
concerns, I am not demanding perfection. I am, however, rather
disinclined to accept things being badly handled just because, as you
put it, "we're just stuck with the people willing to do the work", after
all one of the primary implications of being willing to do the work is
being willing to do it properly.

As for "expressing great concern over a warning", I am expressing
concern over failing to react repeatedly, followed by warning over a
policy which did not exist until after someone was warned for having
violated it. That "even if a ban had been issued it would be over
already" is utterly immaterial and, frankly a rather concerning
sentiment as it projects the impression that from your perspective it
does not matter if you handle something badly so long as it times out
all will be well, no harm done. Societies do not work that way.

Proctors is not new, it has been around in more or less its current form
for two days short of a full year, it has had more than enough time to
actually integrate itself into the social fabric of the distribution
which it theoretically serves, without disgracing anyone, or passing out
swords to fall on.

As for suggestions for wording of warnings, actually having a published
policy in place to which to refer, far and away preferably one which was
actually discussed in public beforehand would be beneficial. As would
interacting with people as people

>> Your argument appears to be essentially that you were bound to act
>> because a bug was filed, while proctors policy explicitly states that it
>> has the option to not enforce it own policies even when it considers a
>> violation to have occurred:
>> "The following disciplinary actions may or may not be enforced when the
>> Proctors become aware of a direct CoC violation."
>> Please explain.
> 
> Sure.  None of those disciplinary actions were enforced in this case.
>