[opensuse-project] Questions for the candidates [Public statement from the Board...]

I would like to know the opinion of the candidates about the recent action of the board presently discussed on this list. if you had been in the board, would you have supported this action or not and why? thanks jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://pizzanetti.fr -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 5:43 PM, jdd <jdd@dodin.org> wrote:
I would like to know the opinion of the candidates about the recent action of the board presently discussed on this list.
if you had been in the board, would you have supported this action or not and why?
Hi JDD, I take very serious the base line on this discussion. If we have someone which is being accused of something, I would never allow such an extreme measure to be applied without granting the right of the person being accused of defending himself. In this case and others, I would have a 'Solomonic' position. During my experience on online gaming communities (World of Warcraft being the last, for nearly 5 years), I've played in some top level guilds. We never lack player applications by several motivations, but we knew which players we wanted. Someone who gives a lot of time to WoW is usually dubbed a no-lifer, and often the best players have really crappy social skills and are much ego based persons. This kind of situations happened a lot (insults, fights, etc). At first we used Administrative punishment for this... No raids for a given time frame (we loss the player). Kicked/Banned of the Guild, we loss the player and encourage others to eliminate competition by providing in increasing number of accusations. We started being Solomonic on this and we found out most of the times there weren't really any innocents... just players managing their situation and looking for a better shot to get gear. How did it stopped? We stopped taking action on most cases... and we encouraged everyone to ignore in-game the people which they were having problems with. It worked out like a charm... The accusations number decreased... people started focusing more on their role for the Guild and the fight suddenly stopped. There were exceptions which were handled mercilessly, but only when everything else failed. People still interacted on the collective in the areas where they had to work together, but stopped with all the dramas... Drama was nearly reduced to 0% and we lived some of the best days and brought Glory to the Horde with more server first kills and Faction first kills. Everyone on the server (Grim Batol Europe) wanted to play with us because we had a drama-free environment. This particular has a very strong in-game position of Elitism, which attracted a lot of troubled people... but we handled it. Based on this and on my interaction with gnokii, I can say that if I had problems with gnokii and muted/blocked/ignored him, I could still make my stuff, he could still make his stuff and we had no reason for coalitions because there was mainly no communication between us. This should've been the first choice amongst the parties... Yes I would preach and try to make them realize that it could become a nice solution and reduce the drama to zero. If that failed, then I would do what most people do everywhere... 3 strikes... strike #1 > Private Warning strike #2 > Public Warning strike #3 > You are out (membership removal). I have some very serious doubts if I would ever vote 'yes' on a total boot of a contributor, specially when it's one that I see in him lack of confidence (Iv'e noticed the need of having others approval on his work). If a project wants to be open to the community and wants to live from the stream of the community, are we actually entitled to ban someone? I mean, in the worst case if everyone pops blocks/ignores on someone, at some time that person will realize that he/she is alone and that no one cares anymore for it. Much of this 'bullying' issue is motivated by the lack of attention (statistically). If no one cares about repeated insults, eventually the person will stop or even walk away by it's own initiative. I mean, this looks like pretty much common sense ? I do leave though a stronger warning for the future and for whoever goes to the Board. If your goal is to expand the community, specially through a wider audience, more people sharing this symptoms will appear. We better start to learn how to live with them.... and how to turn bad output into good inputs... It's not the first time on this community that I see some people taking the worst that others have to attack them. Gnokii isn't the only. Unfortunatly, I try to take best people have and motivate them even for greater deeds. But that's just me. I hope it's answered. NM -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

2011/1/15 jdd <jdd@dodin.org>:
I would like to know the opinion of the candidates about the recent action of the board presently discussed on this list.
if you had been in the board, would you have supported this action or not and why?
I don't like hypothetical questions and I believe is wrong to answer it for many reasons. But I will try to give you my point of view on that,because I think that is the true meaning of your question. Actions like this should not be happening, but sometimes are the only thing to do. I believe that we should work on all that as a community and make a decision on subjects like that. There are no problems just solutions, all we all have to do is sit down and talk about that as what we are, people who care about the community. My starting point at a conversation like that would be Ostracism. find it in Wikipedia and you will get a clear view on my opinion about all that. If we don't respect the board there is no reason to elect them, on the other hand if we thing that the board made a mistake we try to show them were they did it by making a statement to them,in our community to the board ML probably. We must all start thinking that if the board made a mistake under someones opinion it did not became to harm anyone but to protect the community. The greatness of Democracy is not in doing what most people want, the greatness of Democracy is respecting the less people's opinion. If you have any more questions about my answer of about anything else please feel free to ask. Kostas Koudaras
thanks jdd
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Le 16/01/2011 09:54, Kostas Koudaras a écrit :
If you have any more questions about my answer of about anything else please feel free to ask.
you are - of course! - free to answer what you want :-) thanks doing so jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://pizzanetti.fr -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 11:13 PM, jdd <jdd@dodin.org> wrote:
I would like to know the opinion of the candidates about the recent action of the board presently discussed on this list.
if you had been in the board, would you have supported this action or not and why?
Sorry for the late response. I was out of the reach of internet for a while. Now onto your question, Regarding the current situation: I do not have the full details of all the incidents and complaints. I know about somethings that has happened in my timezone and it is inappropriate to comment about the board's data with my partial knowledge. In a hypothetical scenario of this happening in future, and if I were a board member, Few things that I analyze will be: -> Is the person behaving bad with everyone or just one [set of] people ? -> Is the behavior recurring even after warnings ? -> Can someone mediate and get things neutral ? -> Is it okay for the person to contribute in an area, which does not overlap with the people, with whom he have problems ? And most importantly: -> The severity of the problems. (Racial attacks are more severe than "You suck at your job" style attacks and deserve less leniency) Quoting from my election manifesto (http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_2010_platform_psankar ) + Eliminate Poisonous people who are unskilled and causes splits. Disinfect the people who are skilled but affected. This may not be an extensive covers-all-scenarios answer. Some of the people issues could be very unique and will require some kind of personal context understanding. Not all problems can be predicted and a policy be documented to react to it :-) Every distro spends millions of dollars and euroes, to increase the contributor count and the community size. It is in nobody's agenda to reduce the size of the community even if it is by one count. Sometimes we need to make decisions even if it is bitter in a short term, for longevity and health. -- Sankar P http://psankar.blogspot.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 12:43 PM, jdd <jdd@dodin.org> wrote:
I would like to know the opinion of the candidates about the recent action of the board presently discussed on this list.
if you had been in the board, would you have supported this action or not and why?
thanks jdd
JDD, I fully support the actions of the board, why. As stated there were no guide lines on how to handle this issue. The problem was one that just didn't happen over night. I too don't know the full details of the isssue. I do know the part that happen with me and the part that I saw happen to others. Because from I understand that there aren't any rules govern the removing of a member. So the board stepped up and took upon themselves to protect the community. Now that it has happen, I think the Board and the Membership Group should sit down and update the Principal Guidelines to cover such actions that a member can lose there membership. I know that the community is very divide by this, but I for one stand between the Board with the tough action that they took. Everyone should understand that this wasn't taking lightly. The person that we lost did do good work and will be a lost, but with that said, that doesn't excuse his actions toward other members of the community. No one person should treat another member of this community or other community in a way that not they way they would treat themselves. I have stated on my platform, I want to work with community to make a place that all want to work and share in. I know to some it not the answer they want, but I really can give a full answer with out knowing all the facts. Pup
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On Saturday, January 15, 2011 18:43:16 jdd wrote:
I would like to know the opinion of the candidates about the recent action of the board presently discussed on this list.
if you had been in the board, would you have supported this action or not and why?
I think this is a good question, because ideally it shows how a board candidate would act in a similar situation in the future. I'll try to focus my answer on this, since I am not privvy to details of the situation, and feel that I don't have even remote enough information about the history of this specific case as I'd need to make a conscious personal judgement call. Whether or not this is handled well, is I think a matter of the following topics: Mandate: is the board in the position to remove a member from the community? Or, put differently did this all happen within existing community processes. This of course quickly begs the question: how do you define the community? Is the role of the board defined as such that it can take the kind of action involved with removing a person from the community. The issue at hand is peculiar though, it involves privacy, has a long, heated history and has likely been a sore point in the community for a long time. Moral and Practicality: Is removing someone from the board appropriate? Removing someone from the community is a very severe measure, it goes against important community values such as openness, inclusiveness, friendliness and growth. It might also backfire, making things worse. Justification for any such decision is difficult, because it touches privacy matters and can be interpreted as throwing mud or washing dirty clothes in public. Another point is if it will work at all, assuming there's not "one person who has all the passwords", if these people will actually execute the decision by the board, by for example blocking someone's IP, removing someone from a mailinglist, etc. Communities, being volunteer-driven rely a lot on motivation. A large part of that motivation is that it's fun to contribute. Being an open community (as in Open Source ;)), also means being a vulnerable community because with the wrong motivation, it's easy to penetrate a community and do harm. It's basically only a matter of statistics when a clearly badly motivated or someone simply incapable of functioning in a community and turning destructive turns up. Unfortunately, communities tend to have "pissing in the pool" characteristics" when it comes to someone not being nice, in other words, one person can affect the motivation and fun for many other people, most of this effect is hardly measurable, it's just that a lot less good things will happen due to the detrimental effect of one poisonous person. The above gives a rough overview of what I'd would check my acting in a similar case in the future, as board member. -- sebas http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org | GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org
participants (6)
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Chuck Payne
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jdd
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Kostas Koudaras
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Nelson Marques
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Sankar P
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Sebastian Kügler