But I don't agree that the constant email flamewars are the best of the possible communication

Nor do I, but honestly the perl community has largely outgrown flamewars, as has much of the OSS communities out there too. Yes, some of this still goes on in some of the basic "user help" mailing lists and IRC channels, and the occasional trolls break on through, but it you ask intelligent questions and are willing to work for your answers, there is plenty of places you can go where you will find flamewars are almost non-existent.

However, this does not mean there is no possibility for heated discussions or reasonable people to get annoyed with other reasonable people. These things happen, people get upset and then things calm down and people go back to their daily business. Any time you have 2 or more people together the possibility exists for disagreement and conflict, thats just human nature.

I would expect that the mere possibility of this mediation would inspire people to cool down and think a bit more broadly.

I think you could not be more wrong here. If a project leader were to bring in mediators for every disagreement, things would never get solved and people would just elsewhere, it would not be worth the trouble. Even if they only brought someone in occasionally, it could discourage some people from joining the community, because they knew any controversial ideas that they might have would be too much trouble to propose. I think that the "mere possibility of this mediation" would be a shadow over the community which could eventually be it's downfall.

Community is about having things in common - it can be a volunteer community - but that does not mean that there is no place for negotiation.

Who said anything about no negotiations? We are talking about bringing in 3rd party moderators here. My point (which obviously does not seem to be getting through) is that reasonable and mature adults should be able to negotiate between themselves and not need that 3rd party.

And shouting at me with your big fonts does not add any validity to your straw man arguments.

First of all, I wasn't shouting, that IS WHEN YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPS, what I did was just typographical flourish ;)

Secondly, if you want to start throwing the "straw man" thing around, then I might as well just invoke the Nazis and kill this thread right now, cause honestly I don't really have the patience for this anymore. I suspect you whole problem is that you simply don't listen well, which is why you got into the argument you go into which caused you to write these meditations. But really, I must get back to building my straw man nazi army if I am going to take over the internet before the world ends in 2038!

-stvn

In reply to Re^7: Moderation of Open Source projects by stvn
in thread Moderation of Open Source projects by zby

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