Re: What do you think of the foundation?

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> May I add to this:
>
> Dave's ten steps mean that as soon as you refuse to publicly apologize
> for <insert something undefinable>, his foundation board will kick you
> and your project out of GNOME. 

"My ten steps" were, as I pointed out, a list of measures which I feel 
te boad should have at its disposition, in cases where they are 
warranted. I also clearly said that "to get beyond 4 or 5, you would 
need to be an aggravated and repeat offender" - that is, you would need 
to be repeatedly and aggressively behaving in a manner which the board 
finds unacceptable.

> The items underneath item number two: imagine an actual situation. His
> procedure will always end up at step ten. Every next step worsen the
> problem. 

With a certain type of person, perhaps - the type of person who refuses 
to acknowledge any wrongdoing, even when an ombudsmanly body of his 
peers *repeatedly* asserts that he has.

> Maintainer of competing project X tries to get maintainer of project Y
> to become angry, succeeding he now sends some silly mail to the board
> and then, enacting Dave's ten steps, the board will ask for an apology.

Yes, because the board is an automaton who will exercise no judgement at 
all on receipt of a complaint. Let's say, for argument's sake, that 
someone from the board contacts the maintainer of project Y asking him 
for his side of the story, and the board looks at both sides of the 
story, and decides that while there was some provocation by the 
maintainer of project X, the reaction from the maintainer of project Y 
was uncalled for, and should not be condoned. What do you think would 
happen at that stage?

I imagine that the maintainer of project X and Y bothh get told to grow 
up a bit, and the maintainer of project Y gets an extra rebuke from the 
board for his language & behaviour. If the maintainer of project Y 
protests, a short "don't aggravate your situation, drop it, don't do it 
again" would be what I would expect. Think of it as the ref having a 
word with a player after a tackle.

> You kicked him out STARTING the public embarrassment. Why did you even
> execute the seven other steps? That's even a waste of time.

If someone sends hate mail to another member of the project (this is the 
impression I've got from your hypothetical example), then if they don't 
recognise that they've done anything wrong, surely the board and the 
project owes it to ourselves to say "here's what happened, we will not 
stand for this" - and let the facts speak for themselves. You call that 
public embarrassment. So be it. You know the archives of these lists are 
mostly public too? Is it public embarrassment if we point to a publicly 
accessible email in a list archive and say "this kind of behaviour is 
uncalled for, and the board does not approve of it"?

To my mind, the person is embarrassing themselves by behaving in a way 
that is rude.

Dave.

--
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org