Re: What do you think of the foundation?

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Fri, 2009-05-29 at 10:45 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote:

> So I'm hearing Dave say we need more policing and Philip saying
> everything is ok. What do others think?

That's basically indeed what I'm saying:

Let's just do normal. There's nothing fundamentally going wrong. Why are
we trying to fix a bug that isn't a bug?

> Does the community think everything is ok? Or if not, do they want to
> self police or delegate taking action to the board? (Or both.)
> 
> Philip, I agree that your blog is yours, but supposedly you write blog
> posts, emails, IRC chats to tell people something. 

About the blogs and the planet I propose to adopt what planet.maemo
does: each and every blog post is elected for inclusion on the planet.

But indeed, don't ask people to change their blogs.

> So if you are offending them and responding angrily, are you
> communicating what you want to be saying to them? For example, if you
> think people are too politically correct, the way to persuade them of
> that is probably not to swear at them. 

People who disagree sometimes become passionate. There's nothing
fundamentally wrong with passionately defending one's opinion.

Sure I agree that you should be careful if you want to persuade, too.

The debate Dave and I have is whether there's a necessity of a higher
authority that decides on what we can and can't say. That's quite
excessive in my opinion. And potentially dangerous for our fragile
community.

Merely enacting the procedure almost certainly has consequences.

And again, there's nothing fundamentally going wrong.

> I think you have the right to freedom of speech. I even think you have
> the right to say it any tone and with any words you want to. But if
> you want people to listen, you need to speak to them in a way *they*
> don't find offensive.
> 
> And this is often really hard to do. I dread some conversation topics,
> like politics, because people are so emotionally involved they end up
> "yelling" at each other and neither side convinces the other of
> anything. 
> 
> Hopefully in the GNOME community we can stick to the topic and keep
> out offensive language or behaviors so that we can have productive
> conversations.

I think everybody agrees with this. This doesn't mean that we need to
make ten commandments that basically make it possible to kick somebody
out of the project.

Which is something that doesn't make sense anyway. Those people are
often leading a project. Kicking them out means kicking out the project
too.

Much better would be if there's maybe somebody, like you Stormy, who
picks up the task to bring the two guys together and talk about it.

I would think something like that would indeed be good. An ombudsman
(ombudswoman, to be politically correct :-p).

> For example, some of my SO's friends tend to swear a lot more than I'm
> used to. It doesn't offend me, but I don't do it. I've noticed that
> they don't swear when they talk directly to me. They're socially aware
> and they've adapted to my social norm. 
> 
> I suppose the question is what is our social norm? That's what Dave
> and Philip seem to be debating.

Social norms are both culturally and personally defined. There's just no
common line in this. It's human to sometimes have disagreements.

What you do is talk about it after a calming down period. 

Let's just do normal.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be