Quoting Jaromil (jaro...@dyne.org): > On Mon, 22 Apr 2019, Rick Moen wrote: > > > Dan, it is _not_ time for you to leave. Please stay. > > Well Rick, at this point considering all the dust Dan is kicking up in > public, apparently now intentionally, I'd say he better leave. All his > past three actions in Devuan damaged the project. I doubt there will > be recovery and start thinking we'll be better off. I am still in > favor of listing CenturionDan among the professionals supporting > Devuan for enterprise support, but I don't believe this is a useful > caretaking attitude, since he seems to put his own interests and > concerns before the project's health.
I have great respect for your good judgement, Jaromil, and IMO your words to Dan about ci.devuan.org recovery were judicious and wise, even though they included (justifiable) annoyance. I'm definitely _not_ going to say you're mistaken, in the above. In particular, yes, sure, IMO Dan really should _not_ have escalated to two project mailing lists (Dng + devuan-dev) without working more in private to resolve metters, first, and you're certainly right that caretakers not doing that is a problem. Mostly what I'm saying is that the previously detailed interactions are fixable: I believe I'm seeing a communication antipattern familiar to me from my _own_ past errors. And I'm pleading for some tolerance while seeing if that might be fixed, recognising that we're all flawed and sometimes fall into avoidable pitfalls, where we have difficulty heeding the First Rule of Holes. ('If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.') I'm going to tell a story, and, just to make sure I don't commit the sin of assigning myself a heroic role, I'll confess to a damning flaw that was very damaging in this story: I tend to (in a rhetorical sense) corner people, by which I mean mercilessly highlight in public their having taken an unreasonable position and confront them, heedless of the human tendency to 'double-down' when confronted, and go transrational. For almost two decades, I was a member of the Board of Directors of my local guild of system administrators, a non-profit corporation named BayLISA (created in the 1990s as the San Francisco Bay Area independent group inspired by USENIX's Large Installation System Administration Conference). Around 2005, which if memory serves was during my second two-year term, one of BayLISA's ongoing irritations was a person on our mailing lists named Richard Childers, who first kept posting impassioned attacks against Oracle Corporation and then started demanding admission to the baylisa-women mailing list, claiming BayLISA would be violating (uspecified) anti-discrimination laws if he were denied membership to a forum for female system administrators, particularly since (he asserted) this was his entitlement as a BayLISA member. The other members of the Board, including BayLISA's President, whom I'll anonymise (using cryptography's naming convention) as 'Alice', were inclined to give in to Childers's blustering. I wrote to them, though, and said 'Hang on, let me have a go at this.' I wrote a polite note to Childers, CC'ed to the Board, asking what specific legal obligation he believed BayLISA to be under that obliged us to give him admission to a mailing list deliberately open only to women. I gave him a succinct four-paragraph summary of all the USA and California anti-discrimination statutes I'd researched, showing that none of them applied to BayLISA. Last, to close that e-mail, I mentioned that, in my capacity as BayLISA's Treasurer, I had reviewed our records for the past ~15 years of BayLISA's existence, and found no evidence that he'd at any time been a dues-paying BayLISA member. Was this correct, or had I missed something? Mr. Childers, being what one would technically call a 'nutcase', exploded quite wonderfully with non-sequitur personal attacks, which I considered to have made my point perfectly. However, at this point, the real trouble began. A fellow Board member, whom I'll pseudonymise following cryptography's naming convention as 'Bob', suddenly seemed very upset on the Board of Directors mailing list. And this is where my damning personal flaw became a problem. At this point in the story, I must also briefly describe a legal problem BayLISA then had, that I'd recently discovered and brought to the Board's attention: BayLISA had entrusted (without checking) to a professional accountant doing its tax filings to government regulators. Having (unlike everyone else on the Board) a background in accounting and finance, I'd double-checked our corporate status with the state of California, and found our corporation had been _suspended_ for lack of required filings. So, I was in the middle of repairing that lapse, and had strongly advised the Board to be careful to exercise legal caution while our corporate 'liabiiity shield' was non-existent during that suspension of our corporate status. With that background, and the Childers matter in the very recent past, Board member 'Bob' now expressed extreme unhappiness with the (unspecified) recent conduct of (unnamed) 'Board members', was weirdly vague about who exactly he was talking about and what conduct he had in mind, and proposed to hold a special Board of Directors meeting to consider a motion of censure against them. In fact, he proposed to have the Board meeting immediately via the Board of Directors mailing list. This is where I made my judgement error, although it seemed perfectly sensible at the time. I reminded 'Bob' that we all needed to be particularly careful about legal complications pending restoration of BayLISA's corporate status, until which time any of us could be fully personally liable. I said I really had no idea which Board members he had a problem with, but advised the same basic caution I'd mentioned before, since we were vulnerable, and pointed out that a vote censure against Board members within the scope of their profession as system administrators would risk (depending on the complaint) litigation for committing not just libel but specifically 'libel per se' (where plaintiff wouldn't even need to prove damages). Which would be A Bad Thing. However, I stressed, if Bob were conviced there was a serious matter needing our immediate attention despite these concerns, there was a right way to do it, and I was prepared to help: I pointed out that the BayLISA corporate Bylaws required that any Board meeting have at least three days' notice, and that it must be real-time interactive, and therefore it was not in accordance with our Bylaws to hold any Board meeting via a mailing list. However, I would be glad to pay for a voicemail bridge for 'Bob's' special Board meeting, which _would_ satisfy the Bylaws. Just to drive home my point about why this move would be reckless absent an _extremely_ compelling justification, I said I'd be making a motion to hold any censure vote as a 'roll-call' vote, i.e., requiring that the Secretary record who voted 'aye' and who voted 'nay', because, I said, I wanted to be able to escape being a defendant if the person(s) being censured sued us. My intent was to cluebat 'Bob', to say, as politely as possible, that whatever emotional problem he had with unnamed 'Board members' over unspecified actions, that this was the worst possible time to to indulge them through the Board. My implicit assumption was that 'Bob' was rational, and able to take a broad hint. Oops. There was an incredibly important thing in the background of all this, that nobody had bothered to tell me: 'Alice's' husband was having an extramarital affair with 'Bob's' wife. Two entire marriages were being broken up, and 'Bob' was, in consequence, about as far as imaginable from being rational and able to respond with equanimity when pushed hard. He merely perceived me as having pushed hard -- so he did the one thing I didn't antiicipate: He escalated. He posted back, also newly CC'ing the public BayLISA 'members' mailing list, claiming that the unnamed 'Board members' he had intended to censure were me and my wife Deirdre (also then a Board member), not explaining why, but now claiming that I had threatened litigation against BayLISA, and demanding now that I and Deirdre be expelled from the Board. I belatedly realised that I'd misjudged the situation and had backed 'Bob' into a figurative corner, leaving him only escalation as the likely next step. The specific reasons for 'Bob' being likely at that moment to respond badly to being pushed were not made clear to me until months later. Given the extreme stress 'Bob' was under, that particular situation might not have been repairable once I challenged him, but certainly these days I'd be more empathetic and sensitive to emotional nuance and have said 'Bob, I'm not totally sure what you're talking about, but this sounds like something a bunch of us should meet face to fact to discuss' -- and cease responding in e-mail, as it had starting to become apparent that the drawbacks of the medium were being a problem. All I ask is that Devuan Project learn from my error, and remember to shift to synchronous communication when there are people problems. Otherwise, we risk avoidably losing people. (I regret alienating even 'Bob', and Have tried to learn to stop backing people into corners.) _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng