Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [Tech-board-discuss] TAB non-nomination

Frank Rowand
2018-11-11T03:18:04Z

On 11/10/18 11:15 AM, Chris Mason wrote:
>
>
> On 9 Nov 2018, at 11:54, Frank Rowand wrote:
>
>> On 11/8/18 7:30 PM, Chris Mason wrote:
>>> On 8 Nov 2018, at 16:04, James Bottomley wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hind sight, though is always perfect. At the time, as a TAB member,
>>>> all you saw was a panic driven by both Linus and the Linux
>>>> Foundation
>>>> that we needed an updated Kernel CoC ASAP, like today.
>>>
>>> I think panic is the wrong word to attach to Linus' response,
>>> especially
>>> around the code of conduct.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> The second mistake was picking the wrong CoC. [ ... ]
>>>>
>>>> The third mistake was dumping the fully formed CoC and a later
>>>> update
>>>> into the tree with little to no community input
>>>
>>
>>> The update was entirely based on community input.
>>
>> I am going to try to parse that sentence very carefully and narrowly.
>>
>> If you are saying that the update (that is,
>> code-of-conduct-interpretation.rst)
>> then I would agree that the document appears to have been created
>> based on community input. But that is merely a conjecture on my part
>> since the document was created in a small closed group.
>>
>> If you are saying that the creation of
>> code-of-conduct-interpretation.rst
>> was done in a process that was open and visible to the community, then
>> I would disagree. I don't know if this is what you meant to convey,
>> but it is very easy to interpret the sentence in this way.
>>
>
> Ted's earlier reply has a good summary, but the part I want to underline
> is that we sought out people who strongly disagreed with us, and we did
> our best to understand their concerns. It was important to me that we
> give people a private channel to express themselves, especially
> considering that the topic at hand was behavior on public lists.

OK. So the update was done in an opaque closed fashion, which involved
soliciting input from some unknown fraction of the community. Do I
understand that correctly?

And I think it would be fair to say that the people who created the
update were probably aware of the comments of a much larger group of
people who had participated in the threads on various email lists,
and also I suspect the comments threads on the related lwn articles.
So likely also based on input from a (probably) larger fraction of
the community who had been willing to publicly comment.

So based on community input, but the document was not reviewed by the
broader community, or accepted by the broader community.

Note that my opinion is that code-of-conduct-interpretation.rst is
a step in a positive direction. I'm just disappointed that it was
not submitted through the normal process of review (and no, sending
a patch to the mail list on Saturday and merging the patch two days
later on Monday is not normal review, especially when some people
were traveling to OSS Europe, ELC Europe, and the Maintainers
Summit that weekend).

-Frank

> It was a tradeoff, but I was really happy with the number of people who
> participated who might otherwise have stayed out of the discussion
> completely.
>
> -chris
>