in reply to Re^4: Moderation of Open Source projects
in thread Moderation of Open Source projects

No, you misunderstand me. I agree that sometimes a semi-impartial 3rd party can help. Especially in the case of major, project destroying conflicts between core developers, like what happened with Catalyst a little while ago. In that case a third party was brought in and helped to resolve things and the project survived. But honestly it is pretty rare for a conflict to get as out of hand as that one did and even still I really think that a 3rd party moderator is an absolute last resort. But seriously, moderators are not needed for heated arguments on mailing list, those happen 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year, they are just part of how things are here on the internet.

What I am objecting too is your idea that this is the business of "respected Perl leaders" or the TPF at all. Just because my project is built with Perl doesn't mean that either of those two parties has the right to come in and throw their weight around. Honestly if you ever did use this to "put pressure on the project leader" it would likely blow up in your face, I know personally I would be pretty upset of that was done to me on my project.

I cannot stress enough the idea that open source work is volunteer labor, so authors and contributors are beholden to nothing. Sure a good author will treat his users well and be open to suggestions and such, but there is no law or contract that says they have to do that. If you don't like this fact, then you should not use open source software.

-stvn
  • Comment on Re^5: Moderation of Open Source projects

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Re^6: Moderation of Open Source projects
by zby (Vicar) on Feb 06, 2008 at 21:37 UTC
    I did not specify the circumstances when the third party moderation should be brought in - I agree that it's all matter of weighting the benefits and the work required to do it right. But I don't agree that the constant email flamewars are the best of the possible communication and I would expect that the mere possibility of this mediation would inspire people to cool down and think a bit more broadly.

    Once again I don't say that TPF should have "the right to come in and throw their weight around" - but rather I say that project leaders should have the possibility of inviting a third party moderator when they need to.

    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.

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

[reply]
      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
[reply]

        If you think the age of flamewars is long over, look back to 2007-11, when OS Wars returned to perl5-porters. I would have imagined people there to know at least a bit about operating systems other than Unix and how they are used, but such knowledge is obviously less widespread than I believe. But then again, I wonder about the myths being spread about Windows too, and they are spread by people developing for that platform.

[reply]
        You are right that an argument similar to this one caused me to write this meditation - and more accurately the fact that people start using "typographical flourish" or other pure rhetorics (like suggesting that I am immature just for thinking about possible ways to improve communication in projects) to force their points. This destroys the conversation, it polarizes and it closes people ears.

        I don't agree with the way you are argumenting but I really appreciate your critics and this conversation is important for me.

[reply]

In Section Meditations