Gunnar Wolf <gw...@debian.org> writes: > It's easy to reach a technically sound decision, but it's hard to uphold > it without someone somehow getting sore about it. I don't know how > inevitable this is, but I recognize it happens in many different > areas. And a few sore people "hurt" more than a silently sympathetic big > crowd.
I think there are several principles that I suspect most people bring to TC decisions. Certainly, I did. I think it may be helpful to look at them and realize that they're *inherently* in conflict. In other words, it's clearly possible to find cases (and we have found cases) where it is literally impossible to satisfy all those principles at the same time. Off the top of my head: 1. Make timely decisions so that tense situations that are causing social and technical friction are resolved as quickly as possible. 2. Ensure that every party in the conflict is completely heard and understood before making a decision. 3. Avoid forcing people who are already burned out on a problem to do *significant* emotional and mental work to write up their positions, arguments, rebuttals, and defenses. I cannot overstress just how much energy and time this requires to do properly, particularly for volunteers. Being a party to a TC bug can easily start to feel like you need to take time off work to respond properly. 4. Make a decision in a way that doesn't drive any party away from Debian (on either side of the conflict). 5. Make the decision that leads to the most technically correct distribution and the best and most usable result for our users. 6. Avoid letting someone's heartfelt unhappiness not force an incorrect decision when they are (however sincerely) in the wrong (either socially or technically or both). 7. Be transparent to the rest of the project and available and responsive for questions from other project members who have concerns about the process or outcome. 8. Make a decision that upholds the aspirational, ideological, and ethical standards of the project. If one thinks through all the ways in which these principles can come into direct and painful conflict, I think it becomes clearer just why this can be so hard. I think it's also worth remembering that *every* community finds this hard. I think it's safe to say that every legal system, appellate process, or conflict resolution mechanism known to humans fails at one or more of those principles much of the time. We should always try to do better. We should avoid expecting ourselves to be superhuman. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>