Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes: > Russ Allbery writes:
>> That seems to be exactly what happened. > No. My reading of Moray's message is that some members of the Debconf > teams used the existence of the donation as an argument in favour of > selecting Le Camp as the site. At least for some period of time, assuming that the 46K refers to this donation, I can see where you're seeing that. However, Holger has already said directly that this was not conclusive and has stated a number of other reasons for favoring Le Camp, which seems like the important part. > Moray writes: > Certainly at the time many people within the DebConf team were > uncomfortable that this "anonymous donation" was used to argue > that we didn't need to worry about the high prices at Le Camp, and > to argue that we should definitely choose Le Camp since this money > was only available if we went there. > I read Moray's "used to argue" as referring to arguments from people > within Debian or Debconf. Obviously it would be entirely inappropriate > for anyone within Debian or Debconf's decisionmaking structures to argue > that we should make a particular decision because an anonymous donor > makes it a condition that we do so. Which is why, when the situation became clear, everyone stopped, no? What remedy or action are you looking for here? I don't think breaking the anonymity of a donation that never happened really makes sense. Are you looking for site selection to be re-opened? Further reassurance that the selection of the site was not influenced by the donation that didn't happen? I guess I'm still not seeing the correctable impropriety. I understand that you're unhappy that this donation was ever used as an argument, but to me that seems like a solved problem going forward, and we've already had some reassurance that the site selection decision was not influenced by that donation even though it temporarily surfaced as an argument in favor of Le Camp. Do you want more reassurance on that score? Given the fallout and the understanding shared among the DebConf committee expressed here, it seems very likely to me that people will be even more sensitive about this sort of donation in the future. I guess the other possibility is that people might be concerned someone involved in governance arranged this whole thing in a deliberately manipulative way and has not been uncovered, and therefore may continue to do so in the future. Certainly, that would prompt a high level of concern. But I'm not really seeing signs of that in the discussion so far. Also, at least from the outside, that strikes me as much less plausible than most alternative explanations. It would require assuming a lot of malice in a situation that can be adequately explained by well-intentioned but misguided offers by excited people. I guess where I'm coming from here is that at some point one has to trust the process. I've been in governance situations with conflicts of interest before, and they're very hard to avoid entirely. That's *why* there's a process so that there are lots of checks and balances along the way. Please note: as difficult as this sort of discussion is, I actually agree with Ian that this sort of discussion is valuable and helps keep a volunteer organization healthy. Ethics are hard. They're tricky and complicated, and they can always, *always*, be handled better. There's no perfect way of handling situations, and always possible improvements, and the way that one works out those improvements is through public discussion. Having this sort of public discussion of one's decisions is really painful, since it can feel personal and feel like an attack on one's honor, but I really don't think it is. Rather, it's an acknowledgement that this stuff is really hard, and lots of brains together are sometimes required to find the best ways of handling various situations, particularly unprecedented ones. That said, the flipside of that observation is that it's almost impossible to achieve a perfect decision-making process. Every process is going to have some flaws in retrospect, but that doesn't mean the process is invalid. That's exactly why it's so important to have a process with a variety of steps that tend to fail independently. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> _______________________________________________ Debconf-discuss mailing list Debconf-discuss@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-discuss
