moderation on desktop-devel-list

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hey,
	Goodness, what a hullabaloo ...

	I knew that moderation on d-d-l was going to offend/upset someone
someday. The odds of that happening were greatly increased this morning
given my grumpiness. That said, I've endured abuse from Ali in the past
that I'm not inclined to think I owe him anything - least of all an
apology[1].

	We're all worried about how to make GNOME more inclusive and less
daunting to new developers but it was clear we had a problem with
desktop-devel-list when developers no longer felt they could effectively
communicate with one another because of the noise. The solution I heard
suggested most often was that we go back to using a private
developers-only list. Clearly, though, this would be even worse for
GNOME's inclusiveness.

	Active moderation seems like the only reasonable alternative to me. If
people have better ideas, do speak up - comments are very welcome.
Otherwise, I hope other people start actively moderating off-topic posts
to d-d-l (you don't need to be a list admin) because I've certainly now
lost whatever little appetite I had for it. Nobody enjoys doing it, but
perhaps if its more obvious that its the will of the entire community
rather than a single person then there will be less risk of people
taking offence.

	Oh yes, it keeps coming up that we do need a place to have noisey
discussions with everyone throwing in their ideas. I, for one, tend to
agree - a gnome-discussion-list would take some of the strain off the
developers list. Bryan Clark came up with a great name for it instead of
gnome-discussion-list but I can't for the life of me remember what it
was ...

Good Luck,
Mark.

[1] - If anyone deserved an apology for my rudeness today it was Luis. I
had apologised to him even before this uproar got going ...