Dear all, I would like to propose a system for mediation that can be used before or during expulsion processes, and for other purposes.
Please note that while I use the word "mediation", there may be a better one. Thus, it is not needed to reply to me that what I propose is not a real mediation if this is the case. Please focus on what I propose and not on how I named it ! ### Goal The goal will be to help all parties or their proxies to prepare fact-driven synthethic position statements that can be presented to others, in particular to the decision makers, both to help them to take their decision and to help announce it in a way that is the most resilient to misunderstanding and the criticisms that it triggers. It is also hoped that the mediation process may also sometimes help both parties to settle their disagreement, although it will not be considered a failure when settlement is not reached. ### Who I think that the mediator should not be doing this task on a regular basis, to avoid burn-out, to avoid being in contact with too many private information, and to avoid being perceived as partial. In order to ensure that the mediators are available and have demonstrated some williness to communicate with others, I propose to select them randomly among the Developers who have been the application maintainer of at least one person. A call would be valid one day; in case of no answer, another mediator would be called, and so on (better strategies using further filtering could be done if it does not look realistic that a volunteer could be found after 10 calls). The call would be initiated by the decision makers, when they feel that this mediation process would help them. ### How The mediator will contact both sides separately and will never connect them nor request or suggest direct communication between them. The mediator will minimise the volume of communication, aiming at addressing each issue only once. The mediator will ask each party to sort the points they want to make in order of relevance (I hope that this process will help to reduce the number of points), summarise them, and ask if the summary is clear and accurate (I think that when somebody can recognise one's views in the words of another person, it is a good indication that there is mutual understanding). The mediator will then present the views of each side to the other side, and ask if there is agreement, disagreement, and recommend to avoid lengthy rebuttals. The mediation is only part of the conflict resolution, and it is already a great achievement to agree to disagree. Lastly, even when clear action points emerge from the discussion, the mediator will never propose an implementation, leaving that choice to the decision makers. ### Privacy Communication will be written, encrypted and kept confidential. It may be given to the decision makers if needed and must be destroyed after a reasonable delay (advice welcome). The mediator will never disclose the contents of the messages and information exchanged. ### Limitations To avoid any legal consequences and to avoid damage that could be caused by improper consideration of a victim's suffering, this mediation system should never be used when the facts being discussed are so grave that they could be punished by a justice court. ### Summary In light of the expulsion being discussed at the moment, my impression is that such a process could, or even still can, be useful to underline what are the points considered most important by each side, and which action of the other side can solve them (I am not going to speculate here). I also hope that this proposal may be more broadly useful, especially for the issues at the inteface between behaviour and technique (typical examples are when an NMU are a commit revert trigger a latent conflict). ### Next step I personally would prefer to avoid long point-to-point discussions on the weakest parts of what I wrote above. How about reacting on what you liked (if you liked some part), and just sending the rest to /dev/null ? Thank you for reading so far, and have a nice day ! Charles PS: please pardon my English, it might betray my thoughts. -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Akano, Uruma, Okinawa, Japan
