Re: [Ksummit-discuss] TAB non-nomination

Theodore Y. Ts'o
2018-11-09T19:03:05Z

On Fri, Nov 09, 2018 at 10:52:55AM -0700, Shuah Khan wrote:
> >> The third mistake was dumping the fully formed CoC and a later update
> >> into the tree with little to no community input
>
> It is unfortunate it had to start that way. I also understand at times it
> might be necessary to do so based on my experience with the Linux Kernel
> Community Enforcement Statement process. What should TAB do as a body if
> it needs to take action without an option to initiate an open discussion?

As Chris mentioned, there was a large amount of community input on the
update. It just didn't happen in an open fashion. One of the
challenges with e-mail discussion is that it can end up get dominated
by a small number of people who send a large number of messages. In
an in-person meeting, a good moderator can say, "Alexis, you've been
talking a lot; perhaps we should hear from some other people who have
been quiet. Drew, what do you think?" It's a lot harder to do this
on a mailing list.

The second challenge is that we were getting trolled by people who
were *not* members of the kernel development community. I was able to
track down one such troll to their social media presence on gab.ai.
(Yeah, that same lovely "free speech absolutists' site, for when
Twitter considers you too toxic" which got deplatformed after the
shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.)

So what was done with the update to the CoC was that a proposed set of
changes was sent out to the top 200 or so contributors to the kernel,
by git statistics over the past year, asking for their comments and
their sign-offs. So there *was* community input, and that input did
result in changes to the CoC update.

Could there be a better process? I think we're all open to input. If
someone would like to suggest a better way to handle things, that
would be great. I will disclose upfront, though, that I will have to
politely disagree with the proposition that completely free and open
discussion is always the magic bullet solution.

Regards,

- Ted