Re: On community and conflicts

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

Hi Russ,

I realize I'm very late with this (sometimes one is just delayed with
reading emails), but I wanted to thank you for this mail. I think it
captures quite well how this all works, and why it is difficult to write
down a set of rigid rules (occasionally, that is also why I did not add
such a rigid set of rules to the code of conduct, when I wrote it).

So, thanks!

On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 08:57:33AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Roberto C. Sánchez <roberto@debian.org> writes:
> 
> > I'm afraid that you miss the point.  I specifically chose flat earth, &
> > co., as a contrast.  My position is that we are all adults, capable of
> > deciding for ourselves and that, absent some behavior that is a clear
> > violation of the Code of Conduct and/or mailing list rules (e.g.,
> > harassment), simply uttering something that some people do not like does
> > not form cause for removing someone, or even for issuing any sort of
> > warning.  Else, why bother having a Code of Conduct and mailing list
> > rules?
> 
> Let me propose an alternate way of thinking about this, which I think is a
> bit more accurate description of what happens in practice.
> 
> 1. Someone has something they feel passionately about but which is not
>    very related to the work of Debian.  One can argue some connection (we
>    are people living in the world -- there will always be some
>    connection), but it's not obviously directly relevant to our work.
>    They start using project resources (mailing lists, etc.) to talk about
>    this topic.
> 
> 2. Those discussions upset other people in the project.  Often this is
>    because they directly disagree, sometimes it's just because they don't
>    want to talk about that topic here.  The former is usually what creates
>    the initial reaction, of course, and the latter is more of a fallback
>    position among the vocal people, but I suspect is a more common initial
>    position among the quieter people who just want to do Debian work.
> 
> 3. We reach some sort of rough consensus as a community that this
>    discussion is disruptive and we don't want to have it here.  This is
>    the critical point: for many previous controversial discussions, we
>    *didn't* reach this consensus for one reason or another.  Perhaps
>    there's ongoing disagreement over whether this topic is directly
>    relevant to Debian or not.  But sometimes we reach a pretty
>    overwhelming consensus (by this I mean nearly everyone speaking up is
>    arguing in that direction) that regardless of the merits of the
>    argument we don't want to talk about it on project resources.
> 
> 4. The person who feels passionately about this thinks that consensus is
>    wrong and keeps talking about it anyway.
> 
> 5. Eventually DAM gets involved, judges the consensus about declaring this
>    off-topic, and asks the person to stop.
> 
> 6. The person refuses to stop because this topic is of overwhelming
>    importance to them and for some reason they feel like they have to
>    discuss it in Debian.
> 
> 7. Eventually, DAM takes action to force them to stop.  At this point, I
>    would argue that it doesn't make sense for them to continue as members
>    of the project because they're pretty clearly unwilling to respect a
>    boundary the project is trying to draw (step 3).  That's a fairly
>    irreconcilable difference and it's better for everyone to go their
>    separate ways.
> 
> I think this is a pretty typical process for just about any community
> space where people interact.  I've seen versions of this play out in just
> about every community I've been involved in.  Usually things stop at step
> 2 because discussing something when other people are upset at the
> discussion isn't very fun and usually people don't like to keep doing it.
> Very often the process stops at step 3 because no sufficiently strong
> consensus emerges.  Hopefully the rest of the time the process stops at
> step 5.  Very rarely it runs through the whole list.
> 
> If this is a reasonably accurate model, I think it makes it somewhat
> obvious that you can't have a list of banned topics written down in
> advance because steps 2 and 3 are really important (and step 3 can change
> over time!).  The point isn't that there is a specific set of off-topic
> topics.  The point is that if you talk about something that makes other
> community members actively upset (step 2) *and* they can build a project
> consensus that we want to shut down this specific topic here (step 3),
> then the rest of the process potentially comes into play.
> 
> Nearly all controversial topics in Debian do not get past step 3.  We have
> endless recurring topics that run up to step 3 every year or so, and never
> progress any farther.
> 
> At least in my opinion, having watched this specific incident from the
> start, we passed point 3 fairly clearly with a rather remarkable consensus
> by Debian standards (not unanimity, but a pretty strong consensus).  I
> realize other people may disagree, and that perhaps part of your point in
> getting involved in this discussion is to register your disagreement with
> the conclusion that we reached a step 3 consensus.  But I do think we did.
> 
> This process is *inherently subjective*, because it depends on the people
> in the community and what upsets them and what topics they form a step 3
> consensus about.  It's not a question of absolute right or wrong or any
> generalizable universal moral judgment.  It's a question of self-policing
> and a community's ability to declare what they do and don't want the
> community discussion space to be used for.  And yes, that inherently
> requires someone with power in the community to make a judgment call about
> whether step 3 was truly satisfied, and that judgment call is often going
> to be controversial, and we as a community should guard against making it
> prematurely or too easily, and there may be ongoing disagreements over
> whether that happened.
> 
> But I don't think the process *as such* is inherently unfair; in fact, I
> think it would be hard to have a community of humans that didn't have some
> sort of process similar to this.  Not everything is going to be talked
> about everywhere all the time; people are occasionally going to say "hey,
> please don't talk about this here," and I think that's a reasonable thing
> to want.  And there's really no way to build a comprehensive list of such
> topics in advance.
> 
> -- 
> Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
> 
> 

-- 
     w@uter.{be,co.za}
wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}

I will have a Tin-Actinium-Potassium mixture, thanks.