On Sat, 29 Sep 2018 at 08:31, Yury Selivanov <yselivanov...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 10:16 AM Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> > wrote: > [..] > > Well, I could announce it, but nobody would pay any attention. Why > > should we pay attention to this announcement? No offense to Łukasz, but > > how did he get put in charge of this? > > You could and everybody would pay attention. > > As for Łukasz and Discourse: > > (1) I remember asking Brett, Łukasz, Victor, Guido and few other core > devs if we can do something to "fix" python-ideas at the previous core > devs sprint (2 years ago). I also remember Guido saying that PEPs > discussions on mailing lists are super hard to manage, and that he > wishes we can do that on GitHub. A frustration with our mailing lists > has been a known issue for many core devs for a long time. > > (2) Brett has previously expressed that moderating and enforcing CoC > on our mailing lists isn't a pleasant experience. Discourse provides > way more tools to make discussions more manageable. Hopefully it will > allow to diffuse heated discussions before anyone needs to even think > about CoC. > I'll take this further and say that I've now reached burn-out and will be taking my annual month off from volunteering starting sometime today (I still need to write the announcement and then email all of my fellow admins on the various lists I'm in charge of before I declare my break officially on). But these past three weeks have been hell for me. I now dread checking my email because of what's going to be there. And the fact that fighting these CoC fires on multiple mailing lists with the tools they provide have not helped to improve my situation. The difficulty in locking down threads, the fact that there is no shared burden on each of these mailing lists because they are each viewed as independent entities when it comes to administration, and the barrier for people to feel comfortable in sending an email notifying admins when they feel a post has crossed a line has shown me that we have a problem. So I definitely would like to try Discourse out so we can potentially centralize and share the burden of out-of-control threads and have it be a click of a button to report disturbing posts so we can catch problems before they spiral out of control. Basically I'm worried we have simply gotten too big for email. > > (3) We want to try Discourse now because discussions on python-ideas, > python-dev, and python-committers became *unbearable* to many core > devs (including myself). Most of the time I find it inconvenient to > even read them, left alone engage. > Another way to think about this is if we wait until after our governance discussions and try this experiment the volume quite possibly won't be at a level to stress test how the interaction on Discourse works. And while I personally find day-to-day stuff manageable via email (but definitely not ideal), it's when the volume spikes horribly that I typically find email falls over the most. And I don't know about the rest of you, but I have not been looking forward to the governance discussions _because_ of the volume and I am too familiar with how difficult those discussions become difficult to manage via email. Now maybe we will call this experiment quits in a month instead of three because it fails that badly, but I personally would still like to give Discourse a solid try under load to help prevent us from prematurely saying "this is no better or worse than email, so I want to stick with what I'm used to" because we are all human beings who (understandably) like the familiar, especially when it comes to something we do in our spare time. > > (4) E-mail is clearly more convenient to *follow* the discussion to a > lot core devs in this threads. Discourse, hopefully, will enable many > other core developers to *want* to follow and feel *safe* to engage. > > Given all the above, Łukasz *volunteered* his own time to help setup > Discourse and help everyone to migrate to it so that we can all try > it. When he announced that we want to try Discourse at the sprints, > out of all people there I remember only Barry asking questions about > email integration. Everybody else including Guido, Brett, Raymond, > Victor, Mariatta, and many others were OK to try Discourse. As I can > see, Łukasz himself doesn't have any interests in this migration > besides trying to make our communication more enjoyable and welcoming. > > Lastly, I understand everybody who likes e-mail and their e-mail > clients. I'm such a person myself. Learning a completely new tool > and using browser to access it isn't easy for me either. But I'm > willing to try to sacrifice some of my convenience in order to see if > the new medium can enable us to have more polite discussions and if > core developers who don't want to engage now become comfortable to > join us again. > I also want to point out that we ask the same things of new contributors when we ask them to learn how to manage email volume that we produce. In my PyCon US keynote ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzFWz5fiVKU&list=PL4S0lvhXvdhIV2C28Ia_DeIeloBrsQBOW&index=20&t=2936s) I make the point that a project survives by attracting new members and retaining the current ones. This can get tricky, though, when the current ones have a practice that new ones simply are not attracted to or used to. My worry is that email is continuing to become less and less something kids, recent graduates, etc. use which means we are asking them to not only start using email seriously but be also be adept at managing a massive volume of it very abruptly. And in turn I'm worried that mailing lists are a turn-off that is going to cost us more and more potential future contributors. (I would actually be curious to know how many of us have children that are teenagers or older that are active users of email for any group-level discussions instead of e.g. Slack, WhatsApp, etc. compared to those that don't.) Now that isn't to say we should ignore what all of us current members want, and if Discourse doesn't work out because it doesn't suit our needs then I expect that will kill the idea. But I personally plan to give it a solid try, and under load if possible, so it's given a proper try under the conditions we are trying to solve for.
_______________________________________________ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
