[moving to -project; please drop CCs on follow-ups] Hello Ximin,
Thank you for writing this. On Mon, Aug 21 2017, Ximin Luo wrote: > I don't think using the opportunity of in-person meetings to judge > consensus is such a great thing. This has been a common theme recently > cropping up in FOSS environments, pushed by certain groups and > justified by the observations that "only strong opinions are visible > [in email threads]". Much of the time, these groups overlap greatly > with people that are used to doing things in a physical setting, > including making decisions by judging crowd consensus. > > Debian is primarily an online organisation as Bill says, these are its > roots, this is how it became so big, and this is where the vast > majority of productive work is done. I think discrediting all of that > simply because "some people are loud on mailing lists" is really > short-sighted and distorted. [...] Russ didn't discredit "all of that" -- he just pointed out that /sometimes/, online discussions can obscure a consensus that is quite obvious in person. > Personally, and I'm sure many people are similar, I prefer to have > long technical discussions like this in writing via email, and not > face-to-face. I'm a very slow thinker, I don't make very good > decisions in the fast-paced context of a normal physical > conversation. If I sometimes seem like I do, it's usually only because > I've thought about the problem beforehand and have my main points > decided. > > Physical discussions encourage non-technical interactions - if you can > pick the right words and presentation, you can make a crowd empathise > with you for largely non-technical reasons. I don't think this is a > good thing, we should recognise that this happens and not allow it to > take over Debian's decision making processes. > > Online technical discussions are safer against these sorts of > effects. [...] Right, I agree that these effects could do a lot of damage to Debian. In this case, the discussion /did/ occur online, in the bug. Only two things happened offline: - some brainstorming of the patch I initially proposed - the judgement that consensus existed The first one of these is not itself part of the decision-making process; my posting of the patch to the bug is. The second was based on offline interactions, but it was a judgement of a consensus that existed /before/ DebConf. It wasn't that anyone used non-technical interactions to /create/ the consensus. > Indeed in this thread there were lots of good points brought up > criticising the wording of this policy, that nobody thought about > during physical discussions at DebConf (which I didn't participate in > for these reasons). I agree that online discussion was best for bringing out all these points. But bringing out those points was not about judging consensus. -- Sean Whitton
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