All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
If somebody is behaving badly, don't let them do their damage. Realize that by not stepping up you are partially responsible for the damage being done to the motivation of whoever is being abused. I'm assuming you care about your community? Then speak up! Often, people who are being rude don't even realize that. It is learning for them too. And if they DID realize it and keep doing it, moderation is a mail or ping away.
Yes, openSUSE has moderation. At the conference it was decided to have a reminder of that on our mailing lists. They now feature a footer which tells you how to contact our mods. We have the guiding principles and if people cross the line, you can refer to them. If whoever crosses the line is new to our community, mail or ping them privately. If they keep doing it, feel free to tell them in public they should stop. If they still don't, ask a moderator...
Yes, we have freedom of speech. But this is our corner of the web and if people want to be assholes, well, let them get their own blog to rant. This also applies to bikeshedding: it does damage, so do something if it happens!
Thank you for reminding all those moderators and admins to be thoughtful. While using free software is sometimes a challenge big enough to get in the way of getting work done, noone of course wants to hate KDE or FOSS in general.
ReplyDeleteKDE is always lagging behind, there is always outstanding issues, features that wasn't yet implemlemented, so updating to latest release always promises improvement. So when updating strikes with regression, life as a *user* of the softwarer becomes troubled beoynd understanding.
So moderaters, do not forget to be comforting to haunted users.
The response to complaints is very often "you are free to fix it, or use the bug reporting system".
Developers, do not forget to respond to bug reports, so that reportes at least know that you read them. And if you only write software for developers, state that clearly!
You probably meant Gnome instead of KDE. Yours last sentence is an essence of Gnome devs mentality.
ReplyDelete"Realize that by not stepping up you are partially responsible for the damage being done to the motivation of whoever is being abused."
Right, remember gnome foundation and their ignorance to MSOOXML?
Personal advice, free of charge: invest more on prevention, it's cheaper (even from a psychological level cost) than damage control.
ReplyDeleteIf you apply such rules it only means one thing, input/outputs from community -> contributors are not being well managed. You are a person with a education level superior to most of us in the field of Psychology, you should know this better than any of us.
As for quotes, take one from Thomas Jefferson:
"The tree of freedom must be refresh from times to times with the blood of tyrants and patriots"
“Yes, we have freedom of speech. But this is our corner of the web and if people want to be assholes, well, let them get their own blog to rant.”
ReplyDeleteThis is really a poor argument (though often used), you can defend media monopolies with it etc., being able to set up your own website does not prevent suppression of some opinions, it does not help at all for real freedom of speech, if everybody does only notice one, central opinion, I hope you get my point, it is like people should only be allowed to criticise others in their own home. Unfortunately this not well-thought-out “own blog” argument seems to be a default argument for those issues.
However, I totally agree that some discussions can be useless and even bad for mailing lists and that it is good if there are people calling attention to it.