On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 10:23:15PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> I think the question we should be asking ourselves is exactly the one
> Tina posed to Christian:
>
> Tina> How do you see mediation helping draw that line? (Not a rhetorical
> Tina> question, I am honestly curious). Also, there are different ways to
> Tina> interpret the word mediation, what is your interpretation in this
> context?
> [The line of which she speaks is the line around ambiguous areas in the
> code of conduct.]
I'll write about the reason I would like a team that can intervene in
conflicts with something different than enforcement.
On the enforcement side, the entities that I can see in Debian now are
DAM, and the teams responsible for various bits of infrastructure
(listmasters, bts admins, DSA, planet, and so on).
On DAM side, we tend to be contacted when issues are thoroughly
escalated already, and I would like people who got entangled in a
conflict to be able to get help[1] earlier.
As DAM we also do not intervene at the first problem, and look more for
repeated, established patterns. The gap between the first problem and
the establishment of a pattern of behaviour that makes work in Debian
harder is pretty wide, and I'd like the project to be able to do
something earlier, possibly avoiding that the pattern is established in
the first place.
At DAM we also don't have the energy to intervene early to ask people
"Ehi, what happened there? Are you ok?"[1]. I think it would require a
large team. In fact, this should be the responsibility of every member
of Debian: making a shared space good to work with is a responsibility
shared by everyone who is in the space.
I would be interested in investing in increasing the average skills of
Debian members as a whole in helping in a conflict, for example by
collecting and sharing links one can read, or working out suggestions on
how to join in safely if something happens, like who has my back if a
bully turns on me when I ask them to stop, or who has my back if I wrote
a single email in a bad day and suddenly I get 20 harsh emails from self
righteous people pointing their fingers at me[2].
Then I see a gap between "everyone can intervene" and "DAM intervenes":
what if nobody intervenes[3]? What if I need help and I don't know whom
to ask[4]?
I'd like to document a number of points of contact for "who to ask if
you don't know whom to ask". I'd like to document some contact addresses
for most teams in Debian[5]. I'd like a healthy diversity team to
contact for issues related to discrimination. I'd like a fallback
address to contact when all the previous did not work. That fallback
currently tends to be the DPL, although it's not documented as such, and
many good people might not feel entitled to bother the DPL for what
seems like a personal problem, and the DPL is only one person, and
usually very very busy indeed.
For that gap I'd like something like a Debian community fallback team,
some people who volunteer to be a safety net for when the community
itself didn't manage to help.
That is one need.
Another need is some peple who are trusted enough (and possibly
delegated) to interpret the Code of Conduct.
I have seen a few people going "you harassed me!" "no! you harassed me
by telling me that I harassed you!" and I agree we need someone who can
have a say on which things they believe were or weren't constructive or
respectful or acceptable.
Possibly the same people could help me with preemptive questions like
"To get $FOO done I can only think of doing $BAR, but I'm not sure about
it, do you think it's acceptable? If not, would you have a better idea
of how I can get $FOO done without getting people hurt?"
So, someone who could speak usefully for the Code of Conduct, to have a
better workflow than "try to do something and see if you get away with
it"[6].
I think such a team should be generally trusted, delegated, and so able
to get away with having the final say on controversial interpretations,
so that tricky situations at least would get, if not a sense of complete
satisfaction for everyone involved, at least a sense of closure.
Another need I have is some address that I can contact that gives some
serious guarantees of confidentiality: that would document who would get
to read my message, how it is archived, who could be able to see it in
the future, how it can or cannot be disclosed to others if needed. I
think that would also require delegation.
Another need I have is for someone doing moderation: intervening to wind
down a thread that has drifted off-topic, to move a thread from -private
to a public list, to poke a person who is flooding a discussion
repeating their point over and over again[7].
The tradition in Debian is to do as little moderation as possible. I
think it's because we identify the people who are running a service with
the people who we expect to moderate it, and generally those people are
too busy keeping the service running to also deal with
