On 2022/02/21 07:06, Scott Kitterman wrote:
Currently a DAM warning is a suspension/expulsion with deferred execution.
I don't believe that's quite accurate, a DAM warning isn't necessarily
meant as a final warning, it's a larger prod for an individual to course
correct their behaviour.
If an individual chooses to continue being disrespectful to other people
after general requests and then also from one or more formal warnings
from DAM, then I have little sympathy for them if they are kicked out of
the project after they continue with abusive behaviour.
The technical issues we take on in Debian is already challenging enough
that the last thing we need to do is to enable abusive people to stick
around and hijack our causes and continue to distract from the actual
issues we collectively care about.
That doesn't mean that there isn't problems to fix, some people have
expressed concern that concentration of power with DAM is too much, DAM
themselves have expressed that they have too much responsibility and
don't want it, and want to focus on account management itself rather
than having to be responsible for community management in addition to that.
So we do need to discuss and figure out what our ideal community
processes should look like and who should be responsible for things like
warnings. Should it be from the community team? A newly formed team? I'm
against it being a DPL responsibility and it should really be delegated
to a team instead of just resting on one person.
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.
Perhaps that could be used as a starting point. A process needs to be
fair, but it also needs to be efficient, and the action taken should be
in line with the offense. If someone, for example, starts issuing death
threats and starts physically hurting people, we would need to have a
process available to take quick action.
Also, I do think that people can improve, and I like to think that I've
improved in many ways even just as a human being since becoming involved
with free software 20 years ago. I hope that our processes will also
take that into account and have some leeway for people to grow and
improve over time, but there is a hard line that gets crossed when
transgressions get in the way of people doing their work and they feel
unsafe participating in the community, and when that happens, swift
action will continue to remain necessary.
-Jonathan
