Re: Updated account policies document

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Yanko Kaneti <yaneti declera com> writes:

> hi
> 
> (the following is a brief look from a total layman point of view)
> 
> looking at the mail aliases section of the policy
> http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/docs/gnome-org-policies/mail.html
> 
> it seems to me that the whole section concerning revocation of an alias
> does not fit in this document and should be part of the foundation
> membership policies.
> in other words: if you are a foundation member you get an alias,
> engaging in an inappropriate action using this alias should be enough
> ground for canceling your membership
> 
> the text i have in mind is
> "The GNOME Board has the right to revoke aliases at any time for any
> reason. Types of mail that it is inappropriate to use a gnome.org alias
> in include:
> 
>     *      Mail sent for commercial purposes.
>     *      Mail that reflects badly on the GNOME project, including, but
> not limited to harassing mail, offensive mail, personal attacks, and
> attacks on competing projects.
>     *      Mail that misleadingly attempts to portray the official
> positions of the GNOME project."
> 
> considering the "innapropriate" action that might lead to canceling the
> membership i believe the part "Mail that reflects badly on the GNOME
> project" should be removed because it is too vague. Instead of that the
> board should have a policy of looking at specific cases of misconduct
> brought to its attention by the foundation members.
> 
> i am sorry for jumping late into this.
> i might be on crack ;) beg for your pardon if that is the case

I don't think you are on crack, however, I don't really agree with you.
(since I wrote that section, I guess that's not a suprise)

 * I think guidelines for using a gnome.org email account will be
   _useful_ to people. This language is not meant to say "fall in line
   our your alias will be executed", it is to give people ideas of
   what is appropriate to do with such an alias.

 * The language is deliberately vague because I really don't think it
   would make sense to go on for 4 pages trying to list every possible
   thing someone could say in a email that would be inappropriate. And
   that would be inviting people to find the things we left out. But I
   think it _is_ useful to list general categories of things that are
   inappropriate, because we all know people do get into nasty
   personal flamewars and so forth, and giving some general guidelines
   will hopefully make somebody think "Hmm, I'm about to call this
   guy's mother an aardvark sympathizer, maybe I should tone down my
   language or do it from my hotmail.com account."

 * If we ever have to revoke an alias, there will no doubt be
   differences of opinion on whether it was appropriate or not. For
   this reason, I like the smaller step of revoking an alias rather
   than revoking membership ...  revoking only the alias gives the
   party a chance to get the policy or the people who decided the
   issue changed - by voting in the next election, running for the
   board, etc.

 * I believe that we should have "guidelines for using your email
   alias" not "guidelines for responsible conduct for GNOME foundation
   members" because I find the latter much more problematical. In one
   case, we are asking people to use a resource owned by the GNOME
   project in a certain manner.  In the other case, we are saying "you
   aren't a contributor to GNOME unless you behave as we like".

   That is not to say that it would be inappropriate to refuse to
   renew someone's membership if they had been going around giving
   GNOME a bad name, but I don't think we would want to do that
   unless it was an absolutely clear-cut case. 

Regards,
                                        Owen