On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Luke Kanies <l...@madstop.com> wrote: > > Hi all, > > The underlying assumption of membership in any community is that your > participation is at worst neutral, and if possible positive. > Communities, online or off, generally do what they can to protect > themselves from detrimental influences, which is where policies, > politeness, moderators, and all that come into play. > > Puppet's community has been both fortunate and awesome, in that it > requires almost no moderation or control; we've only had to kick a > couple of people out of our IRC channel and they were clearly just > insane or spammers, and we've never had to remove anyone from our > mailing list other than spammers. > > We've recently had some problems where one or two people are > maintaining their presence in the Puppet community solely as a way to > recruit people out of Puppet and into their community, at the expense > of ours, and I think we need a straightforward community policy on this. > > Overlapping communities are awesome, and I'm all for your encouraging > Puppet community members to join other communities *in addition to > ours*, but it seems a bit insane for us to support people coming into > our community just to evangelize competing products and communities. > > My take is that if your participation in our community is *solely* for > purposes of shrinking it by drawing people into your community at the > expense of ours, then you should be kicked from our community. > > What do others think? Should it be acceptable to privately contact > members of our community, encouraging them to leave? >
The free speech side of things could say that it is a basic right because its up to the person being contacted to choose to leave or not. Throwing people out without solid evidence is too prone to lawsuits, bad publicity for the people throwing, and can easily be made into a "They just don't want competitors on their lists" kind of game.. Also who decides, what evidence is it based off? Hearsay, emails that could have been forged [been done before].. it can devolve quickly into High School cliques of who's in and not. And that worst of all drives away potential customers who are looking for professionalism before they would want to use or be part of the community. Calling people on their behavior seems to be much more effective in that it inoculates the community that they will be aware of it. In the end it is still up to the individuals to leave/stay in a community. -- Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice" --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
