Hello, On Monday, May 29th, 2023 at 9:00 AM, Simon Lees <sflees@suse.de> wrote:
On 5/29/23 07:09, Wouter Onebekend wrote: Hi, Just clearing up some specifics.
2) Enforcement is intransparent and arbitrary. There's a moderation team with "processes in place". Processes that are not even public! Determining and sanctioning violations is at the sole discretion of the executive (moderation team and openSUSE board - I'm not sure if these two are even separate/overlap free). 3) There is no appeal to an independent authority. The executive is judge, jury, executioner and authority for appeals.
Currently as far as i'm aware none of the email moderators are on the board, although there are former board members within that group, so if you believe an email is wrongly rejected you can raise it with the board who is a separate entity of 6 people.
I can only speak for myself, but so far what did get rejected was a version of the post with rather pointed (let's make that razor pointed) language commenting on the situation at hand, so I guess that's fair enough as long as it applies to both sides of the debate. And while, on that basis I trust the current moderation, I wouldn't trust the board with an appeal, given the rather strong political attitudes they showed on that other thread. Moderation that bl**ps o*t sw**r w*rds I can live with, barely (I do like my cussing, after all). What I'm worried about is going beyond that, i.e. moderation that censors opinions like the ones I sketched in the start of this thread.
The Board itself is elected by the members with half the positions being up for election each year and a maximum consecutive term of 4 years. If the community really feels the need to replace the board there is also means to do so. This is all documented at [1].
Now that is something, sure. But independent of who sits on the board, I'd like to see stronger protections of free speech. And sanctions on the kind of smear campaigns commonly referred to as cancel culture. I.e. a strong statement of "What happens here stays here, and if we ever find anybody reporting someone to their employer or an organization they are a member of for something they said here we exclude them." This kind of thing has been happening a lot to people disagreeing with any tenets of woke political ideology, even though the perpetrators like to deny it (just google "there is no cancel culture"). This makes for a very toxic social environment and it needs to stop.
I agree that mailing list moderation is not well documented, this is partly because its not something we generally do especially on a large scale. Generally the lists are unmoderated and if there is an issue someone simply raises a complaint to the board.
Privately and without any risk to themselves.
The board does sometimes choose to place certain members under moderation for a period if there has been complaints about their behavior at which time the moderation team will just review those posts.
With the number of complaints that have been raised by a number of people about a significant number of people in the past week,
Yes, that is one of the problems with private complaint mechanisms that have absolutely no repercussions for somebody leveling a complaint in bad faith. If you can rally 20 people to all voice the same complaint (and you absolutely can if you are organized) you can get someone you like into deep trouble. Especially if the arbiter of wrongdoing has got vague criteria for wrongdoing to work with and happens to be on your own side of the political fence.
combined with the fact the original thread was off topic for the factory list, we decided the simplest solution for now was to put the whole list under moderation and once the board has worked through the complaints and decided which individuals should be placed under moderation for a period of time or just warned about there behavior the lists will go back to an "unmoderated" state other then for the specific members that the board may or may not decide to place under moderation.
Yeah. The process outlined in these two my main gripe. The decision rests with the board which is on one side of the political dividing line that runs through this community. There is no balance of powers. The board is not accountable and there is no oversight beyond the board. Who watches the watchers?
Finally thank you for your well written email, while personally I may not agree with parts of it as others in the community also may not I feel like it lays out your concerns well and maybe there are some places we can improve the current code of conduct and our processes
Thank you for responding in the same spirit. Regards, An Anonymous Techie