On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 10:01 AM, Anne Schilling <a...@math.ucdavis.edu> wrote: > On 11/18/14 7:55 AM, Harald Schilly wrote: >> >> On Monday, November 17, 2014 3:26:18 PM UTC+1, kcrisman wrote: >> >> What if instead of a "code of conduct" there was a "community >> expectations" SHORT document that just say what we expect? >> >> >> I'm a little bit late to this thread, but I've read all the mails. This >> "expectations" document sounds interesting to me, whereas I'm a bit hesitant >> to this "code of conduct" thing. In my eyes, it is >> stating a lot of obvious things, and doesn't solve immediate problems. I >> agree that it could be abused in some way, just because it exists and hence >> it is a leverage point. e.g. phrases like "poor >> behavior" are a bit hollow for me. (*) > > Saying that discussions that get out of hand can be relegated to sage-flame > is, I think, important. > For example, I did not know that we could do that until very recently. > Stating explicitly how this can > be done might be good. > >> We should not forget, that most of us here (as mathematicians & researchers >> in general) are trained to be (a) very picky and (b) long-term persistent. >> Those ingredients do not help if a discussion >> derails into lengthy substitution-arguments to just make a point in a >> time-consuming thread. What would actually help in such situations is to >> step back and look at the bigger picture. Maybe there >> should be an intervention team of "senior" community people to sort this >> out: e.g. just posting "DRAMA MODE" as a signal for everyone to stop it? But >> who are those and how do they gain authority? > > One problem with this is that the intervention team might not be reading all > threads. > So having a way to say where there is a problem might still be useful. > I agree deciding who the intervention team is is an important question. > Probably William > would be a good choice.
Here is I think a concrete, apolitical proposal. Given the potentially political nature of such a choice, one possibility is to do something apolitical, and select based on ownership. In particular, based on lines of code contributed to Sage, which is an (imperfect!) but non-politicial measure of how much ownership people have in Sage (with legal value, since people do not contribute their copyright). By this definition: https://github.com/sagemath/sage/graphs/contributors?from=2006-02-05&to=2014-11-18&type=a the top 12 all time list of contributors to Sage, in order, are: - William Stein - Mike Hansen - Volker Braun - Jereon Demeyer - Nathann Cohen - Robert Bradshaw - Robert Miller - Simon King - John Palmieri - Jason Grout - Nicholas Thiery - David Kirkby We could: 1. Create a private mailing list called sage-abuse with these people as members. 2. Make a clear statement on the sagemath.org website, etc., that if people think a thread should be on sage-flame, send a message to the sage-abuse list. 3. The sage-abuse list members will have a quick discussion and if what to do isn't clear, they will vote (which means a quick on-list vote that must be completed within one day). If a majority votes to move the discussion should move to sage-flame, they ensure it moves. For now, the sage-abuse group would have exactly one duty, which is to ensure that discussions get moved to sage-flame when requested. That's it. We would give this a try for 6 months, and only then revisit whether the group should expand its duties or be dissolved. -- William -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
