[OT] Noise filter, was: For Approval: GPLv3

[Chris Travers]

Russ Nelson wrote:
> Luis Villa writes:
>  > If OSI really wants to become relevant again,
>
> Implications that the OSI is not relevant, made on OSI mailing lists,
> are not credible.
>   

Agreed.  Who really believes that the OSI is *not* credible anyway?

Now, I do believe that we could further increase or decrease our 
credibility, but that is another matter.

>  > maybe step 1 would be 'make license-discuss useful for/usable by
>  > those who don't have procmail installed.' If OSI is happy to have
>  > license-discuss be what one friend called a 'cesspool', then I
>  > agree wholeheartedly that passing around procmail recipes is a
>  > great way to do it.
>
> Well, there are several possibilities:
>
>   o Full moderation of the mailing list, wherein only the worthy are
>     allowed to post.  Who defines the worthy?
>   

I don't think questions such as "who defines worthy" make the problem go 
away.  The issue to my mind is a structural one and I see two different 
problems:

1)  there are not many people who are credible when it comes to asking 
people to stop talkng about something

in part because OSI isn't committing management effort to this, but also 
(and more importantly)

2)  There is not a clear and common understanding about the nature of 
the list, and its scope fo discussion which is made prominently made 
available to everyone who joins.

Issue number 2 is the *big* one.  If it were taken care of, then I 
believe the rest would probably take acre of itself.

I see the following options:
1:  Hands-on management of the list.

The current discussion is handled with absolutely no management from 
OSI.  This is a blanket "get involved" list but with no discussion on 
the limits of the scope of the mailing list.  Hence a newbie doesn't 
have a document to refer to which states where the limits are.

I would propose more management of the list discussions in the following 
ways:
1)  Discourage personal attacks, encourage substantive discussion of 
license approval issues (regardless of point of view).
2)  Use "authority" in a soft way, reminding people when they step over 
lines.  Only people who continuously and willfully cross the lines get 
booted/moderated.
3)  Have a document which defines the scope of the discussion of the 
list mailed out to new members.  If this is to be limited to license 
approval issues, let us make sure everyone knows it and that it is 
prominantly stated.

II:  Community-developed Response:
1)  Create a document which states what the community expects the scope 
of the discussion to be.
2)  Send that out to new members when they join.
3)  Agree that discussions about problematic behavior will reference 
that document in some way (either-- we have generally agreed to do 
such-and-such according to this document.... or maybe we should add this 
issue to the document/

>   o We can turn the list discussion inwards, and instead of talking
>     about licenses, we can talk about who can talk about licenses.
>   

No.  I think we need to clearly state what aspects of the license 
discussion are allowed on the lists.  Having a common understanding of 
how the discussion is *supposed* to work will help a lot.

>   o If it becomes clear that someone's opinion is an outlier, then
>     list participants should stop responding to them.  No judgment
>     that they are 'trolling' is needed.  Someone might be wrong and
>     incorrectible without needing to be a troll.
>   

Reasonable position.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
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