Scott Kitterman <deb...@kitterman.com> writes: > On Sunday, February 20, 2022 10:13:03 PM EST Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I guess the other possibility is that people really want warnings to be >> way more serious than any meaning I personally would ascribe to the >> word "warning" and are thinking of them as formal project censure or >> something akin to that. In that case, my argument is that we need a >> warning that's actually just a warning, and the thing we've got is much >> too strong and the real problem is that we don't have something lighter >> touch. > Currently a DAM warning is a suspension/expulsion with deferred > execution. We have wildly different understandings of what a DAM warning is. Which clearly points to a problem that needs to be solved! > I think every non-government job I've had had a discipline process that > went: > 1. Verbal warning. > 2. Written warning. > 3. You're fired. > No, Debian isn't an employer, but I think the sense that DAM warnings > are used is similar. That seems like a mistake to me. Anything that makes Debian seem more like an employer seems like a mistake to me. We just aren't; we're a voluntary association that doesn't have any of the same requirements and does not have the employees or facilities to have the same type of formal process. We should actively avoid creating spurious parallels to employment processes that we are not following, going to follow, or are capable of following. > I agree with the idea that more feedback with a lighter touch would be a > good idea, but I think anything with a lighter touch doesn't need DAM to > do it. We are all empowered to provide other developers feedback when > we see concerning behavior. People just need to do it. It doesn't take > any new rules. We do need DAM to do it sometimes because sometimes people refuse to change their behavior unless someone with perceived authority tells them they need to. Otherwise, they just counter-attack and escalate with the person who tried to give them feedback. I'm not calling out anyone specific here. I truly don't have anyone specific in mind. This is just standard human stuff; in any sufficiently large group of people, and Debian is more than large enough, there are going to be a few people like that. It would be nice if peer feedback were always sufficient, but this isn't how humans work. Given that, and given that we clearly don't want to boot everyone who does that (even apart from the fact that the project is loathe to boot anyone for almost any reason, sometimes people really do change behavior once someone they can't just ignore points out the rules of the community), some sort of ability for someone with perceived authority to give a warning that's actually just a warning, not an "expulsion with deferred execution," is useful. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
