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Scope of "Mozilla" and Planet Mozilla

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Mitchell Baker

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Mar 8, 2012, 7:30:59 PM3/8/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
This week has seen heated discussion about the scope of materials
syndicated to Planet Mozilla. Here's my view.

Mozilla is a community unified around the Mozilla mission and manifesto.
We agree on these things, but we are extremely diverse on almost every
other topic. In fact, Mozilla is remarkable in how many people with
otherwise differing views we gather around our mission.

How do we handle this?

First, we should be very clear that being a "Mozillian" is about
supporting the Mozilla mission. If we start to try to make "Mozilla"
mean "those people who share not only the Mozilla mission but also my
general political / social / religious / environmental view" we will
fail. If we focus Mozilla on our shared consensus regarding the
Mozilla mission and manifesto then the opportunities before us are
enormous.

Mozilla's diversity is a success condition. Our mission and our goal is
truly global. Our mission taps into a shared desire for respect and
control and user sovereignty that runs across cultures and across many
other worldviews. We may even offend each other in some of our other
views. Despite this, we share a commitment to the Mozilla mission.
This is a remarkable achievement and important to our continued success.

What does this mean for how we handle planet.mozilla.org?

We could say that Planet Mozilla focuses on our mission and related
work. This view means getting to know the full personality of
Mozillians will take more work and happen in other areas for those who
want to do so.

We could say that Planet Mozilla reflects the general worldview of
Mozillians, including areas outside of the Mozilla consensus. This
view expresses a larger slice of each Mozillian's life, but means we'll
spend more time reacting to areas where we disagree or even offend each
other.

I believe the former is the best path. It's a path based on the
promise of the web, of inclusion, and of user sovereignty. It's the
path of the Mozilla Manifesto, and its adoption by people of all sorts
of different views. It allows us to focus on issues, such as SOPA and
ACTA, that are directly related to our mission. It allows Mozillians
to have divergent views on other topics without tearing ourselves apart
and damaging our ability to fulfill our unique mission.

In the past we've chosen the latter for planet.mozilla.org. I believe
we need a core information flow and gathering space that is focused on
what we all came to Mozilla for -- how to move our particular mission
forward.

Proposals have been made to change planet, or to start a similar
planet.mozillians.org. I'm personally learning towards the idea of
remaking planet to be the gathering place for updates about Mozilla
activities. I'll talk with the planet module owners and peers, as well
as monitor the discussion forums. I'm not sure of the particular
solution yet, but in my mind I'm clear that we need a forum focused on
the thing we all agree on -- Mozilla and our mission.

Mitchell

Axel Hecht

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Mar 8, 2012, 8:25:22 PM3/8/12
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Hi Mitchell,

I agree that the Mozilla Mission should be the anchor to what planet is.

OTH, I don't think that it should be the *consensus* around the Mozilla
Mission that constitutes planet.

As an example I'd take your key note at MozCamp in Berlin, which was
challenging that very consensus, and opening up the mission to places
that are uncomfortable and new.

That belongs on planet, and any community member should feel free to
challenge our perception of the mission and where we can apply it.

Axel

Tim Chevalier

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Mar 8, 2012, 7:37:15 PM3/8/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Mar 8, 4:30 pm, Mitchell Baker <mitch...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Proposals have been made to change planet,  or to start a similar
> planet.mozillians.org.  I'm personally learning towards the idea of
> remaking planet to be the gathering place for updates about Mozilla
> activities.

In my opinion, the name "mozillians" is too close to Mozilla and
implies endorsement by Mozilla. We as Mozilla contributors may
understand that such a forum would represent the sum of the
individuals involved in it -- not the Mozilla community -- but the
rest of the world doesn't necessarily appreciate such fine
distinctions. I think that Mozilla's reputation is too important to
give a single individual the power to damage it the way that has
happened over the past couple of days.

I'm sure there are creative people in the project who are good at
thinking up interesting names, and could choose a name that does not
sound like "Mozilla".

More broadly, I must say I'm disappointed that this post does not
acknowledge that what happened was an attack on a marginalized group
by a member of a privileged group, in which Mozilla resources were
used to tell a subset of Mozilla contributors that we are unwelcome.
It is more than a mere "difference of opinion". It is a false
equivalence to say that expressing bigoted views and being called out
on the bigoted nature of those views is just as terrible an experience
as being told in your own workplace that legislation should be passed
to make you a second-class citizen. Pragmatically, though, I think
that making planet.mozilla.org focused on Mozilla-related content is
the right answer, and sets clear expectations for everyone.

Cheers,
Tim

Stuart Parmenter

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Mar 8, 2012, 7:42:05 PM3/8/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I agree entirely that we don't want to try and have everyone conform
to the same thinking, however I think that we should look at this
slightly differently.

The first problem seems to be that people don't want so much noise on
Planet, however I find that problem is fairly unique to *our* planet
and not to others such as Planet GNOME. Planet has problems of
readability due to its theme, the poor formatting of the automated
meeting notes, etc. Planet GNOME seems pretty easy to read and easy to
skip over things that I'm not interested in and seems to have a
similar # of updates to our Planet. I believe there is huge value in
being able to see the whole of the community and things that aren't
just "Project X did Y today" updates. A better theme and removal of
some of the automated note posts (or making them more readable) seems
like it would address a large number of the problems people have
today. That said, enough people have said they want a filtered feed of
"project specific" updates that I don't see why we wouldn't also
provide that.

The second problem is that people don't like people posting about a
narrow set of certain very controversial topics. I don't have a
problem with people posting interesting things they're doing that
aren't necessarily related to Mozilla (how do you want to define
Mozilla? The projects, the people...?). I enjoy knowing what is going
on with people and the other things they might be doing (side
projects, photography, travel). Really, I'm pretty OK with people
posting just about anything they want to their blogs. However, people
need to realize they are responsible for what they write and say. They
need to understand certain things they say can and will destroy
relationships and their own credibility. Things you say can hurt the
community and divide people in completely unproductive ways. People
should self-censor. If your beliefs and your need to express them to
such a wide audience outweigh the consequences, then I don't think we
should stand in the way.

stuart


On Mar 8, 4:30 pm, Mitchell Baker <mitch...@mozilla.com> wrote:

Mike Connor

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Mar 8, 2012, 8:37:35 PM3/8/12
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My own view:

Mozilla is more than a company, and more than a software project. It is a rich and diverse community with a shared mission, focused on choice and freedom on the Internet. We have many challenges and many competitors, and it has only been through trusting each other and working incredibly hard that we've reached the point where we are today. Without both that trust and that passion, Mozilla cannot continue to scale, and cannot continue making a difference. I believe that as a community, we must focus on that which unites us, and leave aside all that could and will divide us.

While it has always been a venue for controversy, the events of this week have clearly highlighted Planet as a potential source of damage and division within the community. I believe that the amount of anger and hurt I have read and heard this week is far beyond anything I have seen in nearly nine years working on the project. I personally feel that we must learn from this and ensure that this type of incident cannot be repeated.

It brings me no joy or happiness to say this, but at this point I believe that the current Planet Mozilla cannot continue to exist, at least as a Mozilla-supported or Mozilla-branded site. Mozilla is not about religion, or politics, or morality, and as currently constituted we are providing a platform (in the form of orders of magnitude more readers) for any or all of these issues, in a way that is inevitably associated with both our brand and our community. I simply do not believe this is in the best interests of the project, or of the community, to continue to provide this platform, with a module policy defending the use of this platform to advance goals separate from those of Mozilla.

I don’t expect anyone to be happy about this, on either side. No situation like this will ever be happy. But I believe that we, as a community, must collectively decide to move on from this and find a new way forward.

-- Mike

On 2012-03-08, at 7:30 PM, Mitchell Baker wrote:

> This week has seen heated discussion about the scope of materials syndicated to Planet Mozilla. Here's my view.
>
> Mozilla is a community unified around the Mozilla mission and manifesto. We agree on these things, but we are extremely diverse on almost every other topic. In fact, Mozilla is remarkable in how many people with otherwise differing views we gather around our mission.
>
> How do we handle this?
>
> First, we should be very clear that being a "Mozillian" is about supporting the Mozilla mission. If we start to try to make "Mozilla" mean "those people who share not only the Mozilla mission but also my general political / social / religious / environmental view" we will fail. If we focus Mozilla on our shared consensus regarding the Mozilla mission and manifesto then the opportunities before us are enormous.
>
> Mozilla's diversity is a success condition. Our mission and our goal is truly global. Our mission taps into a shared desire for respect and control and user sovereignty that runs across cultures and across many other worldviews. We may even offend each other in some of our other views. Despite this, we share a commitment to the Mozilla mission. This is a remarkable achievement and important to our continued success.
>
> What does this mean for how we handle planet.mozilla.org?
>
> We could say that Planet Mozilla focuses on our mission and related work. This view means getting to know the full personality of Mozillians will take more work and happen in other areas for those who want to do so.
>
> We could say that Planet Mozilla reflects the general worldview of Mozillians, including areas outside of the Mozilla consensus. This view expresses a larger slice of each Mozillian's life, but means we'll spend more time reacting to areas where we disagree or even offend each other.
>
> I believe the former is the best path. It's a path based on the promise of the web, of inclusion, and of user sovereignty. It's the path of the Mozilla Manifesto, and its adoption by people of all sorts of different views. It allows us to focus on issues, such as SOPA and ACTA, that are directly related to our mission. It allows Mozillians to have divergent views on other topics without tearing ourselves apart and damaging our ability to fulfill our unique mission.
>
> In the past we've chosen the latter for planet.mozilla.org. I believe we need a core information flow and gathering space that is focused on what we all came to Mozilla for -- how to move our particular mission forward.
>
> Proposals have been made to change planet, or to start a similar planet.mozillians.org. I'm personally learning towards the idea of remaking planet to be the gathering place for updates about Mozilla activities. I'll talk with the planet module owners and peers, as well as monitor the discussion forums. I'm not sure of the particular solution yet, but in my mind I'm clear that we need a forum focused on the thing we all agree on -- Mozilla and our mission.
>
> Mitchell
> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance

Majken "Lucy" Connor

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Mar 8, 2012, 9:02:23 PM3/8/12
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> > governa...@lists.mozilla.org
> >https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance

I've actually been thinking about planet lately, and I'm sorry to see
it came up in this manner. However, I think if we address planet's
shortcomings as they already existed, we also solve the specific
problem we've hit here. Back when it was last decided that planet
should contain a person's personal posts, Mozilla and planet were much
smaller than they are now. Also twitter has taken over much of the
"getting to know you" work that planet used to do. I don't think we're
losing out at this point in time the way we would have in the past, by
making planet project only.

Many teams are having their own planets now, interns had one, mozilla
reps has one, womoz etc. I propose that we make this standard
practice. Team planets aggregate blog posts from their community
members (on topic only) and planet itself aggregates from that. I
think at this point if people want to know more about a specific
person they should use planet to find the person's full feed and
subscribe to each individually.

I was already going to propose this simply to make it easier to
follow Mozilla itself and for community members to find tasks that
they want to get involved in. It also makes it much easier for people
who only want to follow specific teams, they can follow the team
planet rather than trying to make sure they get everyone by hand.

Mitchell Baker

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Mar 8, 2012, 9:17:32 PM3/8/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Axel

Yes, i agree. I was trying to use "consensus" to mean the thing that we
agree is Mozilla -- the mission, etc. Perhaps it is too tricky a word.
I do think we have an expression of our mission -- open,
participatory, individaul-focused, choice, innovation, opportunity in
online life. that's big but there are a lot of thing it doesn't cove.
so probably we're talking about how we fulfill the mozilla mission, but
that's getting further than we need for this discussion.

mitchell

Mitchell Baker

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Mar 8, 2012, 9:19:09 PM3/8/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/8/12 6:02 PM, Majken "Lucy" Connor wrote:
Lucy
this is an interesting idea, various planets aggregating up so one could
follow a part of planet. thanks for raising it

mitchell

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 8, 2012, 9:33:30 PM3/8/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I am the original Planet Mozilla Module Owner and currently support the
Module as a Peer. These are my thoughts alone; I expect other Planet
leaders will share here when they finish their day jobs. (The Module
Owner and other two Peers are project volunteers.) That being said, I am
confident that these views are in mostly line with those of the rest of
the team and well represent the mission and purpose of the Planet
Mozilla Module.

I think it's very important that people in this discussion get the
opportunity to understand what the Planet Module has been trying to
accomplish for the last half a decade before we all dive into "how to
change it" discussion.

Mozilla is a large and growing community of people spread out all over
the world. We don't all share offices and a neighborhood pub. We don't
all have the opportunity for hallway conversations and grabbing a beer
after work. As a widely distributed group, we face challenges getting to
know each other, being able to build the camaraderie and trust that
direct social interaction facilitates for traditional (not open-source)
companies.

A big part of the Mission of the Planet Module is to aid in that
challenge, to facilitate communication among a community of human beings
-- people who share more than just a work product.

Mozilla is more than just some lines of code. It's more than a few
websites. Mozilla is all about *people*. Our Mission and Manifesto are
about *people*. Our work is in support of *people*.

We create change in the world by organizing *people* and our forums for
discussion and interaction, from IRC to Planet, all carve out space for
*people* to relate to each other as human beings -- rather than simply a
bunch of automatons in a factory cranking out products Foxconn style.

And we are not alone in this. Many of the most successful open source
projects have set up Planets for this very same purpose. They realized
as we have, that a healthy open source community is about people more
than it is about code or products or anything else. Take a look at the
excellent Gnome Planet for what this looks like when it works. It's
inviting, and inspiring.

I realize that the recent events at Planet have caused many people a
great deal of strife and wasted time. I empathize with those who feel
wounded by some of the content that's made it into the Planet feed.

Some have said that we're just too big, that our community is of a size
that requires giving up the rich and empowering diversity that we share
across our various communications channels.

Others have said that they're simply not interested in the non-work
lives of our global community. They are only interested in reading about
what code others are writing or status updates on projects Mozilla is
sponsoring.

I appreciate all of those views and concerns, and I would like Planet to
address them. I believe that the Planet Module should address them. I
have confidence that we can address them.

But I reject the idea that our community has somehow outgrown its
ability to share as a group of human beings. I reject the idea that
Planet requires an editorial regime to filter and censor or that
participation in Planet should demand self-filtering and self-censoring
of content. I reject the idea that our primary communications must be
limited to only the technical and work related.

The Planet team has been working to make Planet more usable. We have
pulled the robot-powered status updates and the project blogs into their
own feed. http://planet.mozilla.org/projects/ We are also beginning
work to create a sub-feed at Planet that will be exclusive to content
about our mission and related work.

Planet has served us well over the 5 years since the formation of the
Planet Module and it will continue to serve our amazing community going
forward. To do that it will grow and evolve. But Planet should not
devolve into sterile reports of only the lowest common denominator content.

Mozilla is more than just “a job” and I hope that Planet will continue
to make that more obvious, not less.

- Asa

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 8, 2012, 9:35:36 PM3/8/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/8/2012 5:37 PM, Mike Connor wrote:
> My own view:
>
> Mozilla is more than a company, and more than a software project. It is a rich and diverse community with a shared mission, focused on choice and freedom on the Internet. We have many challenges and many competitors, and it has only been through trusting each other and working incredibly hard that we've reached the point where we are today. Without both that trust and that passion, Mozilla cannot continue to scale, and cannot continue making a difference. I believe that as a community, we must focus on that which unites us, and leave aside all that could and will divide us.
>
> While it has always been a venue for controversy, the events of this week have clearly highlighted Planet as a potential source of damage and division within the community. I believe that the amount of anger and hurt I have read and heard this week is far beyond anything I have seen in nearly nine years working on the project. I personally feel that we must learn from this and ensure that this type of incident cannot be repeated.
>
> It brings me no joy or happiness to say this, but at this point I believe that the current Planet Mozilla cannot continue to exist, at least as a Mozilla-supported or Mozilla-branded site. Mozilla is not about religion, or politics, or morality, and as currently constituted we are providing a platform (in the form of orders of magnitude more readers) for any or all of these issues, in a way that is inevitably associated with both our brand and our community. I simply do not believe this is in the best interests of the project, or of the community, to continue to provide this platform, with a module policy defending the use of this platform to advance goals separate from those of Mozilla.
>
> I don’t expect anyone to be happy about this, on either side. No situation like this will ever be happy. But I believe that we, as a community, must collectively decide to move on from this and find a new way forward.
>
> -- Mike

"We can't have nice things" :(

- A

Benoit Jacob

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Mar 8, 2012, 10:23:24 PM3/8/12
to Mitchell Baker, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I just wanted to say that I agree 100% with this. So I'm not sure if I can contribute anything to this conversation; the below turns out to be a mere paraphrasing of what Mitchell already said, feel free to skip.

I understand the counterargument about diversity, but it seems to me that precisely, diversity is better served by restricting the scope of Planet Mozilla. The Mozilla mission unites us, but other beliefs that we have can easily divide us. Therefore, a narrow focus on the Mozilla mission allows us, a very diverse group of people, to work with each other.

In fact, even from the sole point of view of sharing more of our personalities with each other, this is still beneficial, because we share more in the course of working with each other, than we otherwise would.

Therefore, I don't see any downside to restricting the focus of Planet Mozilla to the Mozilla mission.

Benoit
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>

Deb Richardson

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Mar 8, 2012, 11:01:58 PM3/8/12
to Benoit Jacob, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Mitchell Baker
"Therefore, I don't see any downside to restricting the focus of
Planet Mozilla to the Mozilla mission."

I concur.

~ d

Majken Connor

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:47:56 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Benoit Jacob, Mitchell Baker
Asa,

I don't think any of us are talking about throwing out any of those goals.
Certainly I'm not. The way people use planet, and the size, and the
constitution of the community means that how to achieve those goals
changes. I have stopped following planet, it's too much for my routine. So
how does that meet your goal of enabling me to be better connected to
people?

Do you know what mconnor and I talk about when we see each other to
exchange the kids? Mozilla. People in this community are passionate about
it and when they talk about Mozilla you *are* seeing them. If you want to
know their thoughts and dreams, and how their ears are doing (still hasn't
popped btw, getting an xray for my sinuses and a referral to an ENT not
being able to hear properly for a month sucks!!), then you can follow the
planet link to their full blog.

There is nothing wrong with getting to know the rest of the Mozilla
community through their involvement and passions with Mozilla. For instance
I <3 sunbird, and talking about sunbird involves talking about my personal
life, my kids, my ex, our travel. Including everything on planet has a cost
of making planet unusable, and making people unsure of what to post or not.
I certainly wouldn't post rants about my ex to my blog and I don't even
have the full feed streamed to planet. It's a big part of my life and it
would definitely help people get to know me but is this actually a good
idea to have on planet?


-Lucy

n.neth...@gmail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:58:56 AM3/9/12
to mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Thursday, March 8, 2012 4:37:15 PM UTC-8, Tim Chevalier wrote:
> Pragmatically, though, I think
> that making planet.mozilla.org focused on Mozilla-related content is
> the right answer, and sets clear expectations for everyone.

That's a common viewpoint, it seems. It's not quite clear to me what it means.

Imagine that today we all agree that Planet should be for Mozilla-related content only. What happens if I violate that? How is the rule enforced?

What happens if I post something horrible but Mozilla-related, e.g. if I say something discriminatory about several Mozilla contributors. I won't have violated the new rule, but damage will be done, just as it was done earlier this week.

If our goal is to prevent this week's actions happening again, it seems to me that the policy should not be "no non-Mozilla content on Planet" but rather "no horrible (discriminatory, etc) content on Planet". And without some kind of pre-moderation of posts (which seems impractical) it's always possible that someone will violate that policy. So there need to be clear rules on how violations are dealt with -- who decides whether a post represents a violation, and what the follow-up action is.

Nick

n.neth...@gmail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:58:56 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Thursday, March 8, 2012 4:37:15 PM UTC-8, Tim Chevalier wrote:
> Pragmatically, though, I think
> that making planet.mozilla.org focused on Mozilla-related content is
> the right answer, and sets clear expectations for everyone.

Majken Connor

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Mar 9, 2012, 1:03:54 AM3/9/12
to n.neth...@gmail.com, mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:58 AM, <n.neth...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, March 8, 2012 4:37:15 PM UTC-8, Tim Chevalier wrote:
> > Pragmatically, though, I think
> > that making planet.mozilla.org focused on Mozilla-related content is
> > the right answer, and sets clear expectations for everyone.
>
> That's a common viewpoint, it seems. It's not quite clear to me what it
> means.
>
> Imagine that today we all agree that Planet should be for Mozilla-related
> content only. What happens if I violate that? How is the rule enforced?
>
> What happens if I post something horrible but Mozilla-related, e.g. if I
> say something discriminatory about several Mozilla contributors. I won't
> have violated the new rule, but damage will be done, just as it was done
> earlier this week.
>
> If our goal is to prevent this week's actions happening again, it seems to
> me that the policy should not be "no non-Mozilla content on Planet" but
> rather "no horrible (discriminatory, etc) content on Planet". And without
> some kind of pre-moderation of posts (which seems impractical) it's always
> possible that someone will violate that policy. So there need to be clear
> rules on how violations are dealt with -- who decides whether a post
> represents a violation, and what the follow-up action is.
>
> Nick
> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>

If it's about the contributors and not their work then I think it's very
easy to define that as personal and not mozilla related. The problem here
is that if there is a policy people can be politely told that they violated
it and then have the content pulled. Mistakes happen, people get upset, I
don't think anyone has been intentionally malicious. In this case, gerv's
post didn't violate the current policy so rather than being able to just
take it down and remind him of the policy there has to be a huge
discussion. If someone does something overt to upset or offend another
member of the community then it is also very easy to pull their feed.

Majken Connor

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Mar 9, 2012, 1:06:26 AM3/9/12
to n.neth...@gmail.com, mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 1:03 AM, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:58 AM, <n.neth...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, March 8, 2012 4:37:15 PM UTC-8, Tim Chevalier wrote:
>> > Pragmatically, though, I think
>> > that making planet.mozilla.org focused on Mozilla-related content is
>> > the right answer, and sets clear expectations for everyone.
>>
Which is to say you raise some valid points that I agree with!!

think I'd better give up for the night, my reading comprehension is slowing
down.

Mike Hommey

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Mar 9, 2012, 2:11:22 AM3/9/12
to Mitchell Baker, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 04:30:59PM -0800, Mitchell Baker wrote:
> We could say that Planet Mozilla focuses on our mission and related
> work. This view means getting to know the full personality of
> Mozillians will take more work and happen in other areas for those
> who want to do so.

Even defined like this, what content may or may not go to Planet Mozilla
is ambiguous. What is "related work"? Would posts about e.g. MemShrink
fit the bill? MemShrink is not really about Mozilla's mission, and not
really a related work. It's merely a technical detail of Firefox.

Anyways, I agree with Nick, that neither your proposals are adressing
what actually started this attempt at an overhaul. I'll go further,
though. I think the whole debate that has been going on for three days
now is misplaced, out of line, and pointless.

Yes, there was *one* problematic blog post on Planet Mozilla. According
to my RSS reader, there's an average of 140 posts a week. That's twenty
a day. More than 7000 a year. Now let's put this in perspective. How
often do we have problematic content? Do we really need to disrupt
what Planet Mozilla is because of that?

And more importantly, do we really need to comment so much about it?
IMHO, the real problem this week was not so much about the content of
that blog post, but about the publicity that was made of it. The
problematic blog post is not on the planet web page already. However,
there are still 5 posts talking about it 3 days later.

Finally, we better ourselves by trial and error. Someone made a mistake
this week, and I think the response made it pretty clear that it was a
mistake. I'm convinced that someone won't repeat the same mistake in the
future. How about we just cut him and everybody else some slack, and...
do nothing more?

Mike

Tim Chevalier

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Mar 9, 2012, 2:47:46 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Mar 8, 11:11 pm, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
> Finally, we better ourselves by trial and error. Someone made a mistake
> this week, and I think the response made it pretty clear that it was a
> mistake. I'm convinced that someone won't repeat the same mistake in the
> future. How about we just cut him and everybody else some slack, and...
> do nothing more?

Attacking a vulnerable group in the name of Mozilla is not just
"making a mistake". Gerv should have known better. No adult should
need to be told that it's not okay to use your employer's resources to
undermine other employees.

We can't just "do nothing more" because "doing nothing more" doesn't
repair the damage that has been done to Mozilla's reputation and to
the morale of a significant percentage of Mozilla contributors, who
have been told -- though the organizational and institutional
responses to the incident -- that our contributions just aren't valued
as much as those of heterosexual people.

Cheers,
Tim

da...@illsley.org

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Mar 9, 2012, 3:09:44 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
+1

Tim Chevalier

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Mar 9, 2012, 2:45:14 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Mar 8, 9:58 pm, n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote:
> Imagine that today we all agree that Planet should be for Mozilla-related content only.  What happens if I violate that?  How is the rule enforced?
>
> What happens if I post something horrible but Mozilla-related, e.g. if I say something discriminatory about several Mozilla contributors.  I won't have violated the new rule, but damage will be done, just as it was done earlier this week.
>
> If our goal is to prevent this week's actions happening again, it seems to me that the policy should not be "no non-Mozilla content on Planet" but rather "no horrible (discriminatory, etc) content on Planet".  And without some kind of pre-moderation of posts (which seems impractical) it's always possible that someone will violate that policy.  So there need to be clear rules on how violations are dealt with -- who decides whether a post represents a violation, and what the follow-up action is.
>

Yes, I also think we should have community standards. Communities
establish norms for good behavior. It worries me that I see (even in
this very thread) Mozilla community leaders insisting that norms are
harmful. When people don't come together to set norms, the right thing
doesn't magically happen -- what happens is that bullies use power and
violence to dominate discussions. I don't think we want the Mozilla
community to be driven by bullying.

I don't think that having a code of conduct (something that, I
understand, has been in progress for a while) is at all opposed to
having Planet be focused on work. If there had been an expectation and
an understanding that Planet is for work-related content and that
purely personal blog posts should remain on individuals' blogs, then
this week's events would never have happened. Certainly, it's possible
for somebody to tie violent or discriminatory speech in with Mozilla-
related content, like the person who suggested that someone should
have their fingers cut off for disagreeing about the Firefox
versioning policy. That is why we need a code of conduct as well.

Cheers,
Tim

n.neth...@gmail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 4:45:03 AM3/9/12
to mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Friday, March 9, 2012 6:47:46 PM UTC+11, Tim Chevalier wrote:
> On Mar 8, 11:11 pm, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
> > Finally, we better ourselves by trial and error. Someone made a mistake
> > this week, and I think the response made it pretty clear that it was a
> > mistake. I'm convinced that someone won't repeat the same mistake in the
> > future. How about we just cut him and everybody else some slack, and...
> > do nothing more?
>
> We can't just "do nothing more" because "doing nothing more" doesn't
> repair the damage that has been done to Mozilla's reputation and to
> the morale of a significant percentage of Mozilla contributors, who
> have been told -- though the organizational and institutional
> responses to the incident -- that our contributions just aren't valued
> as much as those of heterosexual people.

I have a proposal that I think might satisfy both Mike and Tim.

First, let us note the two prime characteristics of Gerv's post:

(a) it was discriminatory;

(b) it was non-Mozilla-related.

Characteristic (a) was the one that caused all the problems. Nonetheless, many people are suggesting that we should ban posts with characteristic (b). Let's not tangle the two characteristics! It's simple: if we want to ban discriminatory posts, then let's ban discriminatory posts. Let's not instead ban non-Mozilla-related posts just because this week's discriminatory post happened to also be non-Mozilla-related.

In order to achieve this ban, I suggest we create a "Planet Mozilla Code of Conduct". It would read something like this.

- Planet Mozilla represents and belongs to the Mozilla community.

- Discriminatory posts will not be tolerated.

- If discriminatory posts are made, the Planet Mozilla module owners will take action as they see fit, such as removing said posts from Planet Mozilla and/or removing the blogs hosting those posts from Planet Mozilla.

This obviously needs some fleshing out, but you get the picture. A link to this code of conduct could be put somewhere prominent at the top of planet.mozilla.org.

And that's it. Good things about this proposal:

- It's extremely simple, and can be implemented very quickly.

- If discriminatory posts are made in the future, the actions that can and will be taken are clear, and the responsibility for who can take those actions is clear.

- It establishes what behaviours are not acceptable. And if a discriminatory post is removed from Planet Mozilla, this serves as an official Mozilla community renunciation of them. I hope these two characteristics will satisfy Tim.

- Although it ends Planet Mozilla's five years of "post anything" rules, in practice it will make no difference to how Planet operates 99.99% of the time. I hope this will satisfy Asa and Mike. (It's very common for new systems and communities to start with few or no rules and then to add rules later in response to bad events. I think it's a testimony to the civility of the Mozilla community that the "post anything" rule worked as long as it did.)

- There's no restriction of free speech. People can still say whatever they want on their own blog. But they cannot expect discriminatory content to be amplified and implicitly endorsed by the Mozilla community.

Now, this proposal does nothing to address the other criticisms of Planet Mozilla -- that non-Mozilla-proposal posts are uninteresting or irrelevant, that the signal-to-noise ratio is to low, that the formatting is bad, and so on. But those issues are *entirely orthogonal* to the issue of discriminatory content. They should be discussed and addressed separately, and in a less urgent manner.

Nick

n.neth...@gmail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 4:45:03 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Friday, March 9, 2012 6:47:46 PM UTC+11, Tim Chevalier wrote:
> On Mar 8, 11:11 pm, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
> > Finally, we better ourselves by trial and error. Someone made a mistake
> > this week, and I think the response made it pretty clear that it was a
> > mistake. I'm convinced that someone won't repeat the same mistake in the
> > future. How about we just cut him and everybody else some slack, and...
> > do nothing more?
>
> We can't just "do nothing more" because "doing nothing more" doesn't
> repair the damage that has been done to Mozilla's reputation and to
> the morale of a significant percentage of Mozilla contributors, who
> have been told -- though the organizational and institutional
> responses to the incident -- that our contributions just aren't valued
> as much as those of heterosexual people.

Zack Weinberg

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Mar 8, 2012, 9:02:53 PM3/8/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I conducted my own little poll about what sorts of arguably off-topic
content I, personally, should continue syndicating to Planet:
http://www.owlfolio.org/administrivia/what-goes-on-planet-mozilla-a-survey/

Responses are roughly evenly split into two groups: people who actively
like "reading posts which tell [them] about the people of Mozilla" (i.e.
content which is not directly related to Mozilla or The Web) and people
who feel there is way too much off-topic chatter and they want a more
focused feed.

I think one feed cannot serve both purposes, and we should have at least
two: one roughly equivalent to what we have now (perhaps minus the
meeting notes, which IMHO should get their own dedicated feed) and one
which is specifically focused on content relevant to the project. I
think we can rely on everyone involved to tag things appropriately.

HOWEVER, I think we should also institute a ban on broadly-construed
political advocacy that is not directly relevant to Mozilla's mission,
on BOTH feeds. So, concretely, anti-ACTA advocacy would be acceptable,
but anti-nuclear-energy activism would not -- both examples
intentionally not things I can recall seeing go by on Planet.

I think this because I agree with Mitchell's statement

> we should be very clear that being a "Mozillian" is about supporting
> the Mozilla mission. If we start to try to make "Mozilla" mean
> "those people who share not only the Mozilla mission but also my
> general political / social / religious / environmental view" we will
> fail.

and I think it is necessary to our collective ability to do that, that
we collectively do not rub each others' noses in our non-mission-related
political/social/etc views.

I would like to think that we can all be trusted to not rules-lawyer a
policy stated in nonspecific terms, and that actual enforcement of this
ban will not be required (but if it ever does come up, I would support
sanctions up to and including permanent removal from Planet, depending
on how egregious the violation is and how often it is repeated).

zw

anthony....@gmail.com

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Mar 8, 2012, 11:21:10 PM3/8/12
to mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Let me start by saying that I agree nearly 100% with everything that is being echoed in this thread.

I personally use Planet as aggregator of all the things which contribute to Mozilla's mission (ideas, projects, discussions, etc) from both paid and volunteer contributors. That said, I understand that this may not be the original intent of Planet.

I also understand that we are a far more diverse community now than when Planet was originally designed. One thing to consider is that our community as it exists today includes a much larger outside audience than it did before (press, friends, family, etc). A person without prior understanding of what "Mozilla" means could have a wildly different reaction to a personal/controversial post than an "outsider".

I'm not sure what the best solution is, what other communities have done to solve this problem, or even if this is a problem that needs solving.

I'm just happy to be part of such a coalesced yet so diverse community; and that we can have these kinds of discussions without fracture.

Joshua Cranmer

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Mar 8, 2012, 9:36:57 PM3/8/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I will admit that in my 4.5 years of interaction with the Mozilla
community, I have (to my recollection) never subscribed to
planet.mozilla.org. The primary reason for this is that, if I find
someone's posts interesting, I want to read everything they say, not
only that which gets syndicated on planet.mozilla.org. Since my RSS
reader is incapable of detecting duplicate posts arising from
aggregation, and I already get a large fraction of planet.mozilla.org
posts anyways, subscribing to planet.mozilla.org never made a lot of
sense to me.

One idea I would like to propose would be to offer a feed for all those
posts written by the community that *do not* get syndicated to
planet.mozilla.org. I think it is valuable to be able to see the full
contents of all the blogs of people who are part of the Mozilla
community without having to do a lot of work to exclude the posts that
would otherwise be seen.

anthony....@gmail.com

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Mar 8, 2012, 11:21:10 PM3/8/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Thursday, 8 March 2012 16:30:59 UTC-8, Mitchell Baker wrote:
> This week has seen heated discussion about the scope of materials
> syndicated to Planet Mozilla. Here's my view.
>
> Mozilla is a community unified around the Mozilla mission and manifesto.
> We agree on these things, but we are extremely diverse on almost every
> other topic. In fact, Mozilla is remarkable in how many people with
> otherwise differing views we gather around our mission.
>
> How do we handle this?
>
> First, we should be very clear that being a "Mozillian" is about
> supporting the Mozilla mission. If we start to try to make "Mozilla"
> mean "those people who share not only the Mozilla mission but also my
> general political / social / religious / environmental view" we will
> fail. If we focus Mozilla on our shared consensus regarding the
> Mozilla mission and manifesto then the opportunities before us are
> enormous.
>
> Mozilla's diversity is a success condition. Our mission and our goal is
> truly global. Our mission taps into a shared desire for respect and
> control and user sovereignty that runs across cultures and across many
> other worldviews. We may even offend each other in some of our other
> views. Despite this, we share a commitment to the Mozilla mission.
> This is a remarkable achievement and important to our continued success.
>
> What does this mean for how we handle planet.mozilla.org?
>

jpr...@gmail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 1:07:06 AM3/9/12
to mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Thursday, March 8, 2012 4:30:59 PM UTC-8, Mitchell Baker wrote:

> I believe the former is the best path. It's a path based on the
> promise of the web, of inclusion, and of user sovereignty. It's the
> path of the Mozilla Manifesto, and its adoption by people of all sorts
> of different views. It allows us to focus on issues, such as SOPA and
> ACTA, that are directly related to our mission. It allows Mozillians
> to have divergent views on other topics without tearing ourselves apart
> and damaging our ability to fulfill our unique mission.
>
> In the past we've chosen the latter for planet.mozilla.org. I believe
> we need a core information flow and gathering space that is focused on
> what we all came to Mozilla for -- how to move our particular mission
> forward.

Mitchell,

First thank you for helping to clarify the issue and focus the discussion.

I have a few questions:

>From various forms of feedback we've had over the years, up to and including posts in response to this incident, Mozilla contributors have repeatedly said they desire a space that is an unedited collection of voices of Mozilla contributors, that may include personal content about those individuals' lives, beliefs, and non-Mozilla-related content.

Do you have a proposal to fill this desire? In such a "new-Planet world," where would people seeking that go?

If we were to move Planet to a Mozilla-only-information format, who would be responsible for content enforcement?

Would there be veto power by certain individuals? (A group?) Do you have a sense of what the chain for resolving such disputes, as we've seen here, might be? Would we expect posts to be queued for review before posting to Planet, or?

(I know these seem like a lot of details, but I'm trying to understand the mechanics of your proposal.)

Who do you envision would write the content policies for new-Planet content?

What would the consequences being for those who break it (either intentionally, or mistakenly, as Gerv has said was the case with this particular post)?

Would content regarding issues related to Mozilla, but not directly to its mission (for instance, the post on my own blog from last night) be considered part of new-Planet?

To be clear, I certainly see the necessity for multiple content feeds. As a Planet Team module peer, I've said before, and will say again: we've largely failed at providing this; I wish that weren't the case. (I know there are some technical issues with the aggregation software we use that we were trying to overcome.)

So I'm definitely on board with _providing the ability_ to easily get at the content you care about (which may be only-technical, or only-about-interns, or only-about-women-in-Mozilla).

Taking a position gets more complex for me when we propose _entirely removing_ the ability to get "the RSS fire-hose" of the Community that we've always had in any form, and starting to try and define what is acceptable to discuss.

Everyone loses a little bit of their own humanity when that happens, we lose the most powerful tool we have to engage, education, and empathize within our own community, and Mozilla loses something too[0].

thanks,
preed

[0] If nothing other than I wouldn't know how to begin explaining to someone that we stand for "An Open Web... that we ourselves only allow our own community to converse about certain things on."[1]
[1] You had to know I'd work a footnote in here somehow ;-)

axel....@googlemail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 4:14:30 AM3/9/12
to mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Friday, March 9, 2012 12:30:59 AM UTC, Mitchell Baker wrote:

>
> Proposals have been made to change planet, or to start a similar
> planet.mozillians.org. I'm personally learning towards the idea of
> remaking planet to be the gathering place for updates about Mozilla
> activities. I'll talk with the planet module owners and peers, as well
> as monitor the discussion forums. I'm not sure of the particular
> solution yet, but in my mind I'm clear that we need a forum focused on
> the thing we all agree on -- Mozilla and our mission.
>
> Mitchell

After delving into the interesting, if somewhat heated discussion on Gerv's blog

"http://blog.gerv.net/2012/03/coalition-for-marriage-petition/#comments"

I agree that moving posts such as these to a new planet (mozillians.org) could be the best way forward. I think mozilla and mozillians should allow personal opinions outside of the Mozilla topical sphere, even if they are controversial or vastly differing from the mainstream, so that an open discussion may continue.

There might be a mechanism that allows posts to be "moved" from one planet to the other, but that in itself might be viewed as a controversial act.

Axel


axel....@googlemail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 4:14:30 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Message has been deleted

Robert Accettura

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Mar 9, 2012, 9:42:27 AM3/9/12
to n.neth...@gmail.com, mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 4:45 AM, <n.neth...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, March 9, 2012 6:47:46 PM UTC+11, Tim Chevalier wrote:
>> On Mar 8, 11:11 pm, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
>> > Finally, we better ourselves by trial and error. Someone made a mistake
>> > this week, and I think the response made it pretty clear that it was a
>> > mistake. I'm convinced that someone won't repeat the same mistake in the
>> > future. How about we just cut him and everybody else some slack, and...
>> > do nothing more?
>>
>> We can't just "do nothing more" because "doing nothing more" doesn't
>> repair the damage that has been done to Mozilla's reputation and to
>> the morale of a significant percentage of Mozilla contributors, who
>> have been told -- though the organizational and institutional
>> responses to the incident -- that our contributions just aren't valued
>> as much as those of heterosexual people.
>
> I have a proposal that I think might satisfy both Mike and Tim.
>
> First, let us note the two prime characteristics of Gerv's post:
>
> (a) it was discriminatory;
>
> (b) it was non-Mozilla-related.
>
> Characteristic (a) was the one that caused all the problems.  Nonetheless, many people are suggesting that we should ban posts with characteristic (b).  Let's not tangle the two characteristics!  It's simple:  if we want to ban discriminatory posts, then let's ban discriminatory posts.  Let's not instead ban non-Mozilla-related posts just because this week's discriminatory post happened to also be non-Mozilla-related.
>
> In order to achieve this ban, I suggest we create a "Planet Mozilla Code of Conduct".  It would read something like this.
>
> - Planet Mozilla represents and belongs to the Mozilla community.
>
> - Discriminatory posts will not be tolerated.
>
> - If discriminatory posts are made, the Planet Mozilla module owners will take action as they see fit, such as removing said posts from Planet Mozilla and/or removing the blogs hosting those posts from Planet Mozilla.
>
> This obviously needs some fleshing out, but you get the picture.  A link to this code of conduct could be put somewhere prominent at the top of planet.mozilla.org.
>
> And that's it.  Good things about this proposal:
>
> - It's extremely simple, and can be implemented very quickly.
>
> - If discriminatory posts are made in the future, the actions that can and will be taken are clear, and the responsibility for who can take those actions is clear.
>
> - It establishes what behaviours are not acceptable.  And if a discriminatory post is removed from Planet Mozilla, this serves as an official Mozilla community renunciation of them.  I hope these two characteristics will satisfy Tim.
>
> - Although it ends Planet Mozilla's five years of "post anything" rules, in practice it will make no difference to how Planet operates 99.99% of the time.  I hope this will satisfy Asa and Mike.  (It's very common for new systems and communities to start with few or no rules and then to add rules later in response to bad events.  I think it's a testimony to the civility of the Mozilla community that the "post anything" rule worked as long as it did.)
>
> - There's no restriction of free speech.  People can still say whatever they want on their own blog.  But they cannot expect discriminatory content to be amplified and implicitly endorsed by the Mozilla community.
>
> Now, this proposal does nothing to address the other criticisms of Planet Mozilla -- that non-Mozilla-proposal posts are uninteresting or irrelevant, that the signal-to-noise ratio is to low, that the formatting is bad, and so on.  But those issues are *entirely orthogonal* to the issue of discriminatory content.  They should be discussed and addressed separately, and in a less urgent manner.
>


Playing devils advocate here.

Who decides what is discriminatory? Is WoMoz discriminatory or
exclusionary because it's female centric? If some men got together
and created DudeMoz (MeMoz sounds weird and ambiguous), would that be?
Is a Mozilla related LGBT community exclusionary to people with
strong christian beliefs?

Again, who makes this decision? This sounds like someone will be
setup to fail because no matter what they do they will be the assholes
of the community for "enforcing" or not "enforcing" the rules.

I'm not asking you personally to answer that question. It's more rhetorical.

Regardless, I don't think this should be a planet specific policy, it
should be community wide and apply to groups/mailing
lists/bugzilla/mozilla hosted blogs/events/etc.

Might be good to let module owners scapegoat to conductors? Or maybe
that's also a bad idea (I'd feel bad to say "here you take the heat").

Robert O'Callahan

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Mar 9, 2012, 9:46:51 AM3/9/12
to Mitchell Baker, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I agree completely with what Mitchell said.

I think we can have a generous definition of what "Mozilla-related" content
is, and err on the side of generosity. I expect we won't run into problems
there, and I don't think we'll need a predefined enforcement procedure for
violations.

I personally enjoy reading the non-Mozilla content of Mozilla community
members that currently appears on Planet, so I think an alternative feed
(less Mozilla-branded) with all that content would be a good thing. But due
to time constraints I might choose not to read it.

Rob
--
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your Father in heaven. ... If you love those
who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors
doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more
than others?" [Matthew 5:43-47]

Gian-Carlo Pascutto

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Mar 9, 2012, 5:58:12 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 9/03/2012 10:45, n.neth...@gmail.com wrote:

> First, let us note the two prime characteristics of Gerv's post:
>
> (a) it was discriminatory;

Your entire line of reasoning is based on the presumption this is
something that everyone agrees on and will always agree on. I would
postulate that isn't so.

I think that, arguing from the line of reasoning that was reflected in
Gerv's original post, you could take a position that he was making a
post *against* discrimination.

I don't personally agree with that, but I could see that his position
leads to that point of view. It often happens that when two sides
fundamentally disagree on a contentious issue, they consider each others
position "hate speech", "discrimination", "indecent", "inflammatory",
"trolling", etc.

So, a proposal to filter on that, IMHO, can't work, because either you
disagree whether posts are acceptable or not - which just leads to the
situation we're already in now -, or you have someone who has to judge
it, and that will amount to censorship.

> - There's no restriction of free speech. People can still say
> whatever they want on their own blog. But they cannot expect
> discriminatory content to be amplified and implicitly endorsed by the
> Mozilla community.

Can they say what they want or not? Let's not pretend limiting speech by
some criterion still allows free speech to exists. It's a terminal
incompatibility.

--
GCP

Dao

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Mar 9, 2012, 7:46:40 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 09.03.2012 10:45, n.neth...@gmail.com wrote:
> First, let us note the two prime characteristics of Gerv's post:
>
> (a) it was discriminatory;
>
> (b) it was non-Mozilla-related.
>
> Characteristic (a) was the one that caused all the problems. Nonetheless,
> many people are suggesting that we should ban posts with characteristic (b).
> Let's not tangle the two characteristics! It's simple: if we want to ban
> discriminatory posts, then let's ban discriminatory posts.

+1

luke....@gmail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 10:11:20 AM3/9/12
to mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
So something like:

planet.mozilla.org - aggregated feed of Mozilla-mission posts; established content policies; "Report abuse" feature

MozilliansFirehose.com - anything and everything from a Mozillian?

luke....@gmail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 10:11:20 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org

jorgev

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Mar 9, 2012, 10:40:16 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I also think that it is a tad extreme to enact such policy changes
based on one bad post. While it is certain that it caused lots of
damage within the community, it is unclear that these actions will do
anything to prevent this from happening again. In fact, I feel that
the public outcry and pushback is what will prevent this from
happening again in a long time, while there's still memory of the
incident.

Like somebody else said already, unless the official planet is
actively edited, someone will still be able to post offensive content.
There's also the possibility of creating posts that are work related
but at the same time give opinions on touchy subjects. It didn't take
more than a couple of sentences to fire up this controversy, and it's
hard to believe that every single line will be reviewed before being
posted to the official Planet. The only real mitigation in the
proposed changes is that all of us will roughly know what is right and
isn't right to post, but what we post will continue to be under our
discretion.

Moreover, I feel that having a completely uncensored Planet Mozillians
feed might encourage even more bad posts, given that there's already a
separate, on-topic feed. What kind of restraint will bloggers have in
this other planet? Is that planet going to have a code of conduct? I
feel that the current unspoken rule of keeping your posts mostly on
topic on planet has served us well (even if often there's plenty of
content that doesn't interest me), and throwing it all away for one
post (and arguably a couple others in the past) is too much.

- Jorge

Robert Kaiser

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Mar 9, 2012, 11:55:06 AM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Asa Dotzler schrieb:
> Mozilla is more than just some lines of code. It's more than a few
> websites. Mozilla is all about *people*. Our Mission and Manifesto are
> about *people*. Our work is in support of *people*.
>
> We create change in the world by organizing *people* and our forums for
> discussion and interaction, from IRC to Planet, all carve out space for
> *people* to relate to each other as human beings -- rather than simply a
> bunch of automatons in a factory cranking out products Foxconn style.
[...]
> Mozilla is more than just “a job” and I hope that Planet will continue
> to make that more obvious, not less.

Fully agreed. I *want* to see all those differing, sometimes
controversial, opinions of the people in our project. I've developed a
thick skin and a good sense what to read in what detail to be able to
grasp it all, I think anyone who wants to fully live Mozilla would do
good if (s)he would go a similar way.


I can envision having another feed for all those who are only interested
in sterile work, where we can only subscribe our feeds to if we care
that only strictly "Mozilla" topics go in there.

Robert Kaiser

Gervase Markham

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Mar 9, 2012, 11:57:35 AM3/9/12
to Mitchell Baker
On 09/03/12 00:30, Mitchell Baker wrote:
> This week has seen heated discussion about the scope of materials
> syndicated to Planet Mozilla. Here's my view.

+1.

Gerv

Gervase Markham

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Mar 9, 2012, 11:57:56 AM3/9/12
to jpr...@gmail.com
On 09/03/12 06:07, jpr...@gmail.com wrote:
> What would the consequences being for those who break it (either
> intentionally, or mistakenly, as Gerv has said was the case with this
> particular post)?

A small point of clarification; I have not (as far as I can remember)
said that. It is not possible, either intentionally or mistakenly, to
break an "all content is welcome" content policy.

Gerv

Robert Kaiser

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:04:04 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
jorgev schrieb:
> What kind of restraint will bloggers have in
> this other planet?

Hopefully almost none. That's what openness on the web is about.

Robert Kaiser

Blake Winton

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:09:53 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 09-03-12 11:55 , Robert Kaiser wrote:
> Asa Dotzler schrieb:
>> Mozilla is more than just “a job” and I hope that Planet will continue
>> to make that more obvious, not less.
> Fully agreed. I *want* to see all those differing, sometimes
> controversial, opinions of the people in our project. I've developed a
> thick skin and a good sense what to read in what detail to be able to
> grasp it all, I think anyone who wants to fully live Mozilla would do
> good if (s)he would go a similar way.

I think that requiring a thick skin to contribute to Mozilla would
exclude many people whose input and contributions we want.

> I can envision having another feed for all those who are only interested
> in sterile work, where we can only subscribe our feeds to if we care
> that only strictly "Mozilla" topics go in there.

Can you imagine a middle ground between "anything goes" and "sterile
work"? How about "no controversial topics, but all the personal stuff
you want"? Would that be good enough in your opinion, or do you really
feel that taking stands on divisive issues (and possibly splitting the
community, and likely driving away people who don't want to deal with
the controversies) is necessary?

Later,
Blake.

Robert Kaiser

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:11:00 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Gian-Carlo Pascutto schrieb:
> So, a proposal to filter on that, IMHO, can't work, because either you
> disagree whether posts are acceptable or not - which just leads to the
> situation we're already in now -, or you have someone who has to judge
> it, and that will amount to censorship.

Right. And one could in theory argue that a statement that we should
block installation of non-AMO add-ons by default would be
discriminatory, or about not supporting people using older OSes any
more, or similar things. It's pretty hard to draw the lines there.

Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:14:08 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Blake Winton schrieb:
> Can you imagine a middle ground between "anything goes" and "sterile
> work"? How about "no controversial topics, but all the personal stuff
> you want"?

I think that would raise the question if WoMoz or, say, an LBGT event,
or even stuff like dropping support for older OSes must be excluded as
well because those all will be seen as controversial by some group of
people.

Robert Kaiser

Gervase Markham

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:26:00 PM3/9/12
to n.neth...@gmail.com
On 09/03/12 09:45, n.neth...@gmail.com wrote:
> I have a proposal that I think might satisfy both Mike and Tim.
>
> First, let us note the two prime characteristics of Gerv's post:
>
> (a) it was discriminatory;

The problem with your proposal, as Gian-Carlo and Robert have pointed
out, is that there is some dispute about a).

Without wanting to have the same arguments again (not the point of this
thread), there are two overlapping uses of the verb 'discriminate'.

The first is simply "make a distinction". I don't think anyone would
dispute that my post called for UK law to continue to do this, as it
does now; but the act of making a distinction is not, in itself,
automatically offensive.

The second way the word can be used is something like "make a
distinction in a way which leads to _prejudicial_ treatment". I think
that there is not consensus within the Mozilla community as to whether
the current state of UK law is discriminatory in this respect.

And, in general, if you were to take a survey across the entire Mozilla
community, including those bits of it living in Eastern Europe, Africa,
South America, Asia and so on, you would find a diverse range of opinion
on the components of how you identify a post as "discriminatory" in the
second sense.

> - Discriminatory posts will not be tolerated.

So the question that raises is: under your plan, who gets to decide what
is discriminatory, and why? Me? Tim? Mitchell?

Gerv

Ken Saunders

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:28:40 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Sorry if this goes through twice, I didn't have JS enabled the first
time.

On Mar 9, 9:46 am, "Robert O'Callahan" <rob...@ocallahan.org> wrote:
> I agree completely with what Mitchell said.

ditto

> I think we can have a generous definition of what "Mozilla-related" content
> is, and err on the side of generosity. I expect we won't run into problems
> there, and I don't think we'll need a predefined enforcement procedure for
> violations.

+1

--ramble--
For what it's worth, I've always been interested in getting to know
Mozillians beyond their Mozilla work and efforts. Doing so, I've
formed some great relationships and have learned some interesting
things like Mitchell makes cool quilts, and that Mary is an awesome
athlete, and that Asa digs high tech sneakers.

My best friend is a Mozillian who has totally opposite religious
beliefs than I do. Other Mozillian friends have different political
and/or moral beliefs or other stances yet we're still friends and it
isn't that I was a horrible person at one time, but I will tell you
that being a part of Mozilla for the past 8 years and getting to
actually know people has taught me to be more tolerant, accepting, and
less closed minded because I've focused more on the things that we do
have in common and realized that others are actually great people,
they just believe in something different than I do.

It would be great for Mozilla, heck, the World if we all could do that
so perhaps y'all could give that some thought.
--end ramble--

In any event, I agree with Mitchell and with Asa's human element
comments, but like I said, there's Facebook and other venues that
weren't in place a few years back for actually getting to know people.

Ken

Blake Winton

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:43:13 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Yes, exactly. It certainly raises the question. It seems to me that a
reasonable basis for what to include and what to exclude would be the
things mentioned explicitly in the Mozilla Harassment Policy. (Sorry,
OS/2 and Amiga lovers! ;)

I notice you still haven't answered whether or not you feel that taking
stands on divisive issues (and possibly splitting the community, and
likely driving away people who don't want to deal with the
controversies) is necessary, though.

Later,
Blake.

Robert Accettura

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:45:05 PM3/9/12
to Blake Winton, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:09 PM, Blake Winton <bwi...@latte.ca> wrote:
>
> Can you imagine a middle ground between "anything goes" and "sterile work"?
>  How about "no controversial topics, but all the personal stuff you want"?
>  Would that be good enough in your opinion, or do you really feel that
> taking stands on divisive issues (and possibly splitting the community, and
> likely driving away people who don't want to deal with the controversies) is
> necessary?
>

How do you define "controversial topics"? Or better yet, who gets to?

While I love the idea*, I can't imagine how this would work in
practice as the community grows and diversifies. Something that's not
controversial in one place may be a hot button issue in another. I
know I'm not culturally aware enough of every place mozillians are
(all 7 continents) to feel 100% comfortable about that.


* preed I think put it better than anyone in his blog post my personal
sentiments towards what the planet team has been trying for and how
every decision has been made, it's highly relevant, and I suggest a
read if you can spare a few minutes:
http://soberbuildengineer.com/blog/2012/03/a-stroll-through-planet-mozilla-history/

--
Robert Accettura
rob...@accettura.com

Ken Saunders

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:21:00 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Mar 9, 9:46 am, "Robert O'Callahan" <rob...@ocallahan.org> wrote:
> I agree completely with what Mitchell said.

ditto

> I think we can have a generous definition of what "Mozilla-related" content
> is, and err on the side of generosity. I expect we won't run into problems
> there, and I don't think we'll need a predefined enforcement procedure for
> violations.

phillipadsmith

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Mar 9, 2012, 12:39:58 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Mar 8, 6:30 pm, Mitchell Baker <mitch...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> This week has seen heated discussion about the scope of materials
> syndicated to Planet Mozilla.   Here's my view.
>
> I believe the former is the best path.   It's a path based on the
> promise of the web, of inclusion, and of user sovereignty.  It's the
> path of the Mozilla Manifesto, and its adoption by people of all sorts
> of different views.    It allows us to focus on issues, such as SOPA and
> ACTA, that are directly related to our mission.   It allows Mozillians
> to have divergent views on other topics without tearing ourselves apart
> and damaging our ability to fulfill our unique mission.
>
> In the past we've chosen the latter for planet.mozilla.org.  I believe
> we need a core information flow and gathering space that is focused on
> what we all came to Mozilla for -- how to move our particular mission
> forward.
>
> Proposals have been made to change planet,  or to start a similar
> planet.mozillians.org.  I'm personally learning towards the idea of
> remaking planet to be the gathering place for updates about Mozilla
> activities.  I'll talk with the planet module owners and peers, as well
> as monitor the discussion forums.  I'm not sure of the particular
> solution yet, but in my mind I'm clear that we need a forum focused on
> the thing we all agree on -- Mozilla and our mission.
>
> Mitchell

At the risk of wading into a conversation that I've not been invited
to, I wanted to propose that "fixing" Planet Mozilla is not merely a
matter of technical "plumbing." IMHO, it's a challenge that requires a
*human* solution.

I spoke with several folks in the Mozilla community last year and
asked them what they loved about Planet Mozilla, and what needed
improvement. Some of the themes from those conversations are
summarized here:

http://www.phillipadsmith.com/2011/12/rethinking-planet-mozilla-the-challenge-of-too-much-signal.html
http://www.phillipadsmith.com/2011/12/rethinking-planet-mozilla-hacking-the-core-of-mozillas-story.html

Planet Mozilla is _one_ fire hose of Mozilla's activities, but there
are many others now: e-mail lists and groups, blogs that aren't on the
planet, social media, events, conference calls, and so on. Planet
Mozilla -- if one kept the name and intention, but let go of the
historical idea of a "Planet" as an RSS feed aggregator -- could be so
much more than it is today.

Viva Planet Mozilla! :)

Phillip.

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 9, 2012, 1:43:16 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/9/2012 1:45 AM, n.neth...@gmail.com wrote:
> In order to achieve this ban, I suggest we create a "Planet Mozilla Code of Conduct". It would read something like this.

Why single out Planet. If Planet is expected to police and enforce a
code of conduct than so should Bugzilla, IRC, Newstgroups, Wiki pages,
blog posts on Mozilla servers which aren't syndicated to Planet, web
pages, HTML forums, AMO, any any other location where people publish
under a Mozilla banner.

- A

Mike Connor

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Mar 9, 2012, 1:53:52 PM3/9/12
to Asa Dotzler, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
+1. Christie has already posted in another .governance thread advocating for the creation of a community code of conduct, and that is a critically important, community-wide discussion in which I hope everyone supports and participates.

-- Mike

Mike Connor

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Mar 9, 2012, 2:04:04 PM3/9/12
to Gian-Carlo Pascutto, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 2012-03-09, at 5:58 AM, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:

>> - There's no restriction of free speech. People can still say
>> whatever they want on their own blog. But they cannot expect
>> discriminatory content to be amplified and implicitly endorsed by the
>> Mozilla community.
>
> Can they say what they want or not? Let's not pretend limiting speech by
> some criterion still allows free speech to exists. It's a terminal
> incompatibility.

Limiting speech is not the same thing as limiting what speech Mozilla amplifies. Whether Planet exists, and what form Planet takes, has no inherent limiting factor on the ability of individuals to speak freely on any subject.

Many people seem to be conflating "what gets syndicated by Planet" and "what individuals can say personally" in this way. I don't think that's correct, or relevant, unless one presumes that being a part of the Mozilla community grants an individual some sort of right to use Mozilla resources to promote their own agenda.

-- Mike

Taras Glek

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Mar 9, 2012, 2:07:36 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I support this proposal. The current notion that planet.mozilla.org is a
collection of free speech that doesn't have obvious connections to the
Mozilla mission is entirely non-obvious. I know quite a few people who
would benefit from following planet, but avoid it because of the
terrible signal/noise ratio.

I would be more comfortable posting non-Mozilla related items if I knew
that they would go onto a separate aggregator.


Taras

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 9, 2012, 2:29:07 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
This is also not really a fair response, Mike. If I have a blog that
will be read by no-one directly but will be read by thousands at Planet,
if I am told cannot post to Planet, Mozilla has effectively said to me
"you are denied the opportunity to be heard." Speaking and being heard
are two different things in reality, but conceptually, I think lumping
them together is completely legitimate in this context.

I agree that this is not a "free speech" issue, but just as corporations
and the wealthy in our country have far more effective speech (the
ability to be heard) because they can buy the megaphone of advertising
and various other forums, so do Planet syndicators have more effective
speech (the ability to be heard) because they have the megaphone of
Planet. Taking that megaphone away absolutely does impact their speech.
It doesn't take it away, it just makes it a lot less useful.

If a tree falls in the forest and all that.

- A

jpr...@gmail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 2:29:28 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, jpr...@gmail.com
On Friday, March 9, 2012 8:57:56 AM UTC-8, Gervase Markham wrote:

> A small point of clarification; I have not (as far as I can remember)
> said that. It is not possible, either intentionally or mistakenly, to
> break an "all content is welcome" content policy.

Apologies Gerv.

Lots of words exchanged with lots of people on this in the past 56 hours. :-)

I think my memory is keying off of you saying something about having recently moved to a new Wordpress installation, and changes to the way your feed was syndicated due to that? I may have inferred that to mean "I didn't think this would get syndicated to Planet, but it did" and thus it being a mistake in that regard, not in regards to breaking any content policy.

Your analysis is spot on about it being impossible to break an "all content is welcome"-policy.

sorry about that,
preed

Kyle Huey

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Mar 9, 2012, 2:53:58 PM3/9/12
to Asa Dotzler, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 11:29 AM, Asa Dotzler <a...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 3/9/2012 11:04 AM, Mike Connor wrote:
>
>> Limiting speech is not the same thing as limiting what speech Mozilla
>> amplifies. Whether Planet exists, and what form Planet takes, has no
>> inherent limiting factor on the ability of individuals to speak freely on
>> any subject.
>>
>> Many people seem to be conflating "what gets syndicated by Planet" and
>> "what individuals can say personally" in this way. I don't think that's
>> correct, or relevant, unless one presumes that being a part of the Mozilla
>> community grants an individual some sort of right to use Mozilla resources
>> to promote their own agenda.
>>
>> -- Mike
>>
>>
> This is also not really a fair response, Mike. If I have a blog that will
> be read by no-one directly but will be read by thousands at Planet, if I am
> told cannot post to Planet, Mozilla has effectively said to me "you are
> denied the opportunity to be heard." Speaking and being heard are two
> different things in reality, but conceptually, I think lumping them
> together is completely legitimate in this context.
>

No, mconnor hit the nail right on the head. I don't think the Mozilla
project owes its contributors the right to be heard on anything that's not
related to Mozilla. If I want to promote my Minecraft server/model train
club/political views/whatever on my own time that's fine, but why should
Mozilla allow me to use its megaphone? Lumping them together is absolutely
not legitimate in this context.


> I agree that this is not a "free speech" issue, but just as corporations
> and the wealthy in our country have far more effective speech (the ability
> to be heard) because they can buy the megaphone of advertising and various
> other forums, so do Planet syndicators have more effective speech (the
> ability to be heard) because they have the megaphone of Planet. Taking that
> megaphone away absolutely does impact their speech. It doesn't take it
> away, it just makes it a lot less useful.
>

So? The fact that I don't have rights to post to
https://twitter.com/#!/firefox limits the impact of my speech too. So does
the fact that I don't own a 24 hour cable TV news network. Nobody owes me
either of those, and nobody owes me the usage of Mozilla's
servers/bandwidth/domain name that I get on planet either.

- Kyle

Benoit Jacob

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Mar 9, 2012, 2:54:22 PM3/9/12
to Asa Dotzler, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org


----- Original Message -----
> On 3/9/2012 1:45 AM, n.neth...@gmail.com wrote:
> > In order to achieve this ban, I suggest we create a "Planet Mozilla
> > Code of Conduct". It would read something like this.
>
> Why single out Planet. If Planet is expected to police and enforce a
> code of conduct than so should Bugzilla, IRC, Newstgroups, Wiki
> pages,
> blog posts on Mozilla servers which aren't syndicated to Planet, web
> pages, HTML forums, AMO, any any other location where people publish
> under a Mozilla banner.

Any off-topic discussion on Bugzilla is immediately RESOLVED INVALID, but on Planet everyone is welcome to talk about personal issues. This is so different, that if you don't see the difference, I don't know what I can say!

Ditto for newsgroups / mailing lists and wiki pages. IRC channels sometimes digress, but that's generally only on innocent subjects and among people who know each other.

Planet is the only Mozilla resource where there is no rule against off-topic content.

Benoit

Benoit Jacob

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Mar 9, 2012, 3:18:40 PM3/9/12
to Asa Dotzler, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
A quick chat on IRC brought up some links to similar past discussions, that may be useful to have here for context. Just to underline that this discussion didn't suddenly start this week.

Similar mozilla.governance discussion 3 years ago:
https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.governance/browse_thread/thread/b78c4ff7d4d5e967?hl=fr&pli=1

Bug report from last year:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=657098
> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>

n.neth...@gmail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 3:24:19 PM3/9/12
to mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, n.neth...@gmail.com
On Saturday, March 10, 2012 1:42:27 AM UTC+11, Robert Accettura wrote:
> Playing devils advocate here.
>
> I'm not asking you personally to answer that question. It's more rhetorical.

I'm happy to answer it, and more or less I covered it in my proposal.

> Who decides what is discriminatory?
> Again, who makes this decision?

Two groups: (a) whoever writes the code of conduct, and (b) whoever interprets the code of conduct on a day-to-day basis. I suggested that the Planet Mozilla module owners be responsible for (b).

As for (a), the Planet Mozilla module owners should be involved, and probably Mitchell, and to a degree, everyone. It shouldn't be that hard. I'm pretty sure Mozilla Corporation has a policy about these sorts of things, that could be used as a starting point. Graydon also suggested http://citizencodeofconduct.org/, IIRC.

Any rule system has people responsible for writing the rules and interpreting the rules. If you disagree with the rules, you can try to get them changed or become one of the people responsible for interpreting them. For example, if my proposal was enacted and you didn't like the outcome you could try to become a Planet Mozilla module owner. It's all pretty simple.

Nick

n.neth...@gmail.com

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Mar 9, 2012, 3:24:19 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, n.neth...@gmail.com

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 9, 2012, 3:29:26 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
The Planet Module Owner and Peers made a policy that's been in place for
5 year that says we do give Mozilla contributors that megaphone. That
now seems to be up for a popular vote. I'm not actually arguing that
Mozilla must give these posts a megaphone, what I'm arguing is that we
have a policy that we do give these posts a megaphone, some what to
change that policy. I'm arguing that taking that megaphone away has a
very real impact on speech and that it is not fair to simply dismiss
that concern. You can agree or disagree with the policy and the impact
it has, but you cannot ignore the fact that a change in policy will
impact our community's speech.

>
>
>> I agree that this is not a "free speech" issue, but just as corporations
>> and the wealthy in our country have far more effective speech (the ability
>> to be heard) because they can buy the megaphone of advertising and various
>> other forums, so do Planet syndicators have more effective speech (the
>> ability to be heard) because they have the megaphone of Planet. Taking that
>> megaphone away absolutely does impact their speech. It doesn't take it
>> away, it just makes it a lot less useful.
>>
>
> So? The fact that I don't have rights to post to
> https://twitter.com/#!/firefox limits the impact of my speech too. So does
> the fact that I don't own a 24 hour cable TV news network. Nobody owes me
> either of those, and nobody owes me the usage of Mozilla's
> servers/bandwidth/domain name that I get on planet either.

That's a matter of policy. If the twitter.com/firefox owner lets you
post there, great. If they don't, great. That decision does impact your
speech. They have decided that you do not get to post there. If you
disagree with that, you are free to challenge it but you cannot pretend
that policy decision does not have an impact on your speech.

- A

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 9, 2012, 3:31:03 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
As it happens, Robert is the Planet Mozilla module owner. (in case
anyone was unaware or confused about that.)

- A

Nicholas Nethercote

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Mar 9, 2012, 3:34:15 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 7:24 AM, <n.neth...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Saturday, March 10, 2012 1:42:27 AM UTC+11, Robert Accettura wrote:
>
> Two groups: (a) whoever writes the code of conduct, and (b) whoever interprets the code of conduct on a day-to-day basis.  I suggested that the Planet Mozilla module owners be responsible for (b).

Oh, and somebody else on this thread suggested a "rebort abuse"
button, which I think would fit in quite nicely.

Nick

ps: apologies if I've been double-posting, the Google Groups interface
has been giving me grief. I'm now subscribed to this list via email.

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 9, 2012, 3:35:42 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/9/2012 11:07 AM, Taras Glek wrote:
> I know quite a few people who
> would benefit from following planet, but avoid it because of the
> terrible signal/noise ratio.

About 80% of the people who syndicate to Planet have a mozilla-specific
feed. Of the ones who don't, fewer than half of those posts are not
mozilla-specific. I get that for some, 90+% "meets my topical interests"
is a terrible signal/noise ratio. For me, that's not the case. For
many, who wish to learn more about their colleagues and would prefer a
Planet closer to what most other open source projects offer, it is a
terrible signal to noise ratio with far too much boring project status
information.

- A

Kyle Huey

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Mar 9, 2012, 3:43:20 PM3/9/12
to Asa Dotzler, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Asa Dotzler <a...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 3/9/2012 11:53 AM, Kyle Huey wrote:
>
> The Planet Module Owner and Peers made a policy that's been in place for 5
> year that says we do give Mozilla contributors that megaphone. That now
> seems to be up for a popular vote. I'm not actually arguing that Mozilla
> must give these posts a megaphone, what I'm arguing is that we have a
> policy that we do give these posts a megaphone, some what to change that
> policy. I'm arguing that taking that megaphone away has a very real impact
> on speech and that it is not fair to simply dismiss that concern. You can
> agree or disagree with the policy and the impact it has, but you cannot
> ignore the fact that a change in policy will impact our community's speech.
>

Ok, after reading this response I think we mostly agree. Yes, changing the
policy will impact how speech by people in the community is heard. I
totally acknowledge that. I (and I think others, but I don't want to put
words in anyone's mouth) am ok with paying that price.

- Kyle

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 9, 2012, 3:45:40 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/9/2012 11:54 AM, Benoit Jacob wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> On 3/9/2012 1:45 AM, n.neth...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> In order to achieve this ban, I suggest we create a "Planet
>>> Mozilla Code of Conduct". It would read something like this.
>>
>> Why single out Planet. If Planet is expected to police and enforce
>> a code of conduct than so should Bugzilla, IRC, Newstgroups, Wiki
>> pages, blog posts on Mozilla servers which aren't syndicated to
>> Planet, web pages, HTML forums, AMO, any any other location where
>> people publish under a Mozilla banner.
>
> Any off-topic discussion on Bugzilla is immediately RESOLVED INVALID,

Would that were so. I don't think that there's a single person on this
project that could say something like that with a straight face.
Bugzilla's signal to noise ratio is worse than any other forum we have,
including IRC.

> but on Planet everyone is welcome to talk about personal issues. This
> is so different, that if you don't see the difference, I don't know
> what I can say!
>
> Ditto for newsgroups / mailing lists and wiki pages. IRC channels
> sometimes digress, but that's generally only on innocent subjects and
> among people who know each other.

And who is to define innocent? There are more hateful and personal
attacks on IRC in a week than there are on Planet in a year.

> Planet is the only Mozilla resource where there is no rule against
> off-topic content

That's simply not true because Planet does not recognize the idea of
off-topic. You seem to want to re-define what Planet is and then make
claims about what is or is not relevant to Planet. Planet is what the
Planet Module team have defined it as and whether or not you'd like it
to be otherwise, you cannot assert that today it is otherwise.

I could define Gecko as having no purpose but rendering Web content in
service of Firefox growth and call for Firefox to drop it in favor of
Webkit. But because I'm not the Gecko Module Owner, I don't get to
define why Gecko exists and what goals it fulfills.

Module Owners define their modules, construct roadmaps for their
modules, and enforce the policies of their modules. That is as absolute
as anything in the Mozilla world. Planet is an official Module in the
Mozilla system and it has an official Owner and a set of Peers who are
responsible for defining what Planet is, where it's going, etc.

You are well within your rights to try to influence that, or to seek the
overthrow of the current Module Owner, but you don't get to simply claim
it is something that it is not any more than I get to decide what our
GFX module is and ought to be.

- A

Asa Dotzler

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 3:55:01 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
I agree that there are some who would like to change the policy. There
are others, in this thread, who are vehemently against changing the
policy.

- A

Asa Dotzler

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 3:58:06 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/8/2012 4:30 PM, Mitchell Baker wrote:
> This week has seen heated discussion about the scope of materials
> syndicated to Planet Mozilla. Here's my view.
>
> Mozilla is a community unified around the Mozilla mission and manifesto.
> We agree on these things, but we are extremely diverse on almost every
> other topic. In fact, Mozilla is remarkable in how many people with
> otherwise differing views we gather around our mission.
>
> How do we handle this?

One thing that I fear isn't clear in this discussion is that Planet is
an official Mozilla Module. It has an Owner and a set of Peers. Those
people are responsible for the Planet roadmap, reviewing changes to
Planet, and all Planet policies. The Planet Module Owner is the ultimate
say in what happens with the Planet Module -- just like all of the Owned
code modules in Mozilla's HG repo.

So, we're not dealing with a popular vote here -- just as we wouldn't
put the decisions and policies of the GFX Module Owner up for a popular
vote.

What this is, as I see it, is an attempt by some in the community to
overrule the Planet Module Owner, to force a change to the Planet
policy. In the code world that would be the equivalent of a handful of
contributors challenging the decision making of the GFX Module Owner,
and when those contributors didn't get satisfaction, taking it to
Brendan with the hope that Brendan would overrule the GFX Module Owner.

I just want that to be clear because it has real implications for the
governance of the project. This project has very rarely escalated to
Brendan to see the plans, work, or policy of a code Module Owner
overruled. That's what's happening right now.

- A


Nicholas Nethercote

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 4:06:16 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Asa Dotzler <a...@mozilla.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Why single out Planet.
>>> If Planet is expected to police and enforce
>>> a code of conduct than so should Bugzilla, IRC, Newstgroups, Wiki
>>> pages, blog posts on Mozilla servers which aren't syndicated to
>>> Planet, web pages, HTML forums, AMO, any any other location where
>>> people publish under a Mozilla banner.

I single out Planet because it is right in the middle of this week's
enormous controversy :) Rule- and policy-making is often done
reactively. That's ok, we're all human.

Also, of all the forums you mentioned, Planet is probably the most prominent.

Actually, at least some of the communication channels you mentioned
already have some rules, for example:

- Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

- "Forums" (which I think means mailing lists):
http://www.mozilla.org/about/forums/etiquette.html

We can quibble about the scope of these rules, and how they are
enforced, sure. But introducing rules for Planet is not
unprecedented.

Others have suggested we need a community-wide code of conduct. That
doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Nick

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 9, 2012, 4:24:57 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Planet has lots of rules.

The rules are: that you must be a part of the Mozilla community to post
to planet; that you must provide a description of who you are and the
kind of content you intend to publish so that when we introduce you to
the planet audience people will know why you're there; that you must
maintain an alive feed to stay on planet; and that if you leave the
Mozilla community you will be removed from planet. Further we have rules
about what the Planet Module team can and cannot do. We cannot remove or
alter your feed without notify you (best effort if your email address is
dead); We will announce all changes to policy or the list of included
feeds to a Planet blog; and that Planet leaders will not censor or
filter community members' feeds.

There's plenty of precedent for having rules at Planet. We have a Module
which has developed a set of rules and enforced those rules for 5 years.
What some here are asking for is a change to those rules. The Planet
team responded to those requests saying "no, we are not going to change
our editorial policy". Now it has been escalated to the Governance
newsgroup in an effort to overrule the Planet Module Owner. That's
where we are today.

- A

Mike Connor

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 6:27:58 PM3/9/12
to Asa Dotzler, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Asa,

I can't speak for anyone else, but this is certainly something I deeply understand, both as someone who has served the project as a module owner and peer in multiple areas, and a member of the Module Ownership group.

It is fortunately quite rare for anyone to seek to formally override a module owner decision, let alone unseat a module owner. In general, we delegate substantial authority to module owners and grant them a mandate to act in the best interests of the project. However, those module owners are still responsible to the project as a whole, just as any responsible leader is responsible to their constituents. If any module owner makes choices that are considered harmful to the Mozilla project and community, it feels both natural and healthy to reconsider those choices and that mandate as a community.

At this point, we have a polarized and painful divide within the community. An significant minority group feels alienated and afraid, and the official response from the Planet owner and peers has seemingly exacerbated the problem, based on the comments on that post. Under the circumstances, I see no other alternative than to escalate the issue past the module owner level, and allow us to discuss and act (if we decide to act) as a community. This is not an opinion I came to lightly, or without regret, but I hope you can see that this issue has implications far exceeding the scope of a single module.

- Mike

Majken Connor

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 7:16:01 PM3/9/12
to Mike Connor, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, Asa Dotzler
People should be able to get to know each other, but as you've stated, 90%
of planet posters are not using planet for this purpose. Clearly this is
not the tool people want to use to meet this goal. You've not restricted
their ability to do so, and yet they're choosing not to anyway.

If this were a Firefox UI discussion, you would not force something to do
what 10% of the people wanted and ignore how 90% want to do it. You would
find a better way to satisfy that 10%. Mozillians, status.net, a twitter
aggregator... all things people have asked for.

yes, we're talking about this because situation a) happened, but it is
pretty clear that most people actually want situation b) and this was their
chance to discuss it.

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 9, 2012, 7:30:47 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Mike, I agree with you here for the most part. I just want people who
don't have your experience with our governance system to understand what
they're involved in.

- A

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 9, 2012, 7:33:47 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/9/2012 4:16 PM, Majken Connor wrote:
> People should be able to get to know each other, but as you've stated, 90%
> of planet posters are not using planet for this purpose. Clearly this is
> not the tool people want to use to meet this goal. You've not restricted
> their ability to do so, and yet they're choosing not to anyway.
>
> If this were a Firefox UI discussion, you would not force something to do
> what 10% of the people wanted and ignore how 90% want to do it. You would
> find a better way to satisfy that 10%. Mozillians, status.net, a twitter
> aggregator... all things people have asked for.
>
> yes, we're talking about this because situation a) happened, but it is
> pretty clear that most people actually want situation b) and this was their
> chance to discuss it.

It is not at all clear what "most people want". A large portion of the
people on Planet who have responded to me have said things like "I got
on back in the old days and didn't even know I could syndicate my whole
feed" or "I just did what my manager told me" and there are a
non-trivial number of people have no personal blogs and only have a
Mozilla blog that they only blog about Mozilla on but that does not mean
that they don't enjoy reading posts from other people on other topics.

To assert that it is clear what most people want is unfair to the
discussion. Without data, you're jumping to conclusions and asking for
something not (yet) supported by the data.

- A

Majken Connor

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 8:03:18 PM3/9/12
to Asa Dotzler, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Well I had data. According to you it was the wrong data. So let's get the
right data. Meanwhile, if people weren't submitting their full feeds, and
planet policy is to have the full feed then IMO the planet team failed the
system they want by not informing people they could also submit their full
feed. You're arguing for something that hasn't existed in practice.

More importantly this is not a decision that should be made based on what
people enjoy (lots of people enjoy old Firefox features and not uprading)
but on what makes sense and what works. I would appreciate more discussion
along the lines of how it works if you're defending using planet for this
purpose. You haven't said why planet is a better tool than others for this
goal. You haven't taken into account the repercussions of the exponential
increase in posts to planet if everyone posts their full feed, and if
everyone in the Mozilla community gets to have their full blog syndicated
on planet.

We have about 250 people in the reps program alone (going off of the people
who have completed their ReMo profile on the wiki
https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/People) then there are about, 700 employees,
there is a little bit of overlap so 950 gives us a good number since this
doesn't represent the whole community, nor regular team posts like meeting
notes. Let's assume they average 1 post a week. That's already 135 posts a
day. You could read that in an hour if you read daily at a rate of 2 posts
a minute, though that doesn't include time for longer posts, videos,
commenting, reading links contained in the blogs. This is just to get a
ballpark of the magnitude we're talking about. Obviously we'd need to do
some real counting, but I think if planet is working the way you want it
to, this is a good estimate.


On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 7:33 PM, Asa Dotzler <a...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 3/9/2012 4:16 PM, Majken Connor wrote:
>
>> People should be able to get to know each other, but as you've stated, 90%
>> of planet posters are not using planet for this purpose. Clearly this is
>> not the tool people want to use to meet this goal. You've not restricted
>> their ability to do so, and yet they're choosing not to anyway.
>>
>> If this were a Firefox UI discussion, you would not force something to do
>> what 10% of the people wanted and ignore how 90% want to do it. You would
>> find a better way to satisfy that 10%. Mozillians, status.net, a twitter
>> aggregator... all things people have asked for.
>>
>> yes, we're talking about this because situation a) happened, but it is
>> pretty clear that most people actually want situation b) and this was
>> their
>> chance to discuss it.
>>
>
> It is not at all clear what "most people want". A large portion of the
> people on Planet who have responded to me have said things like "I got on
> back in the old days and didn't even know I could syndicate my whole feed"
> or "I just did what my manager told me" and there are a non-trivial number
> of people have no personal blogs and only have a Mozilla blog that they
> only blog about Mozilla on but that does not mean that they don't enjoy
> reading posts from other people on other topics.
>
> To assert that it is clear what most people want is unfair to the
> discussion. Without data, you're jumping to conclusions and asking for
> something not (yet) supported by the data.
>
> - A
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/**listinfo/governance<https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance>
>

Nicholas Nethercote

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 8:43:53 PM3/9/12
to Asa Dotzler, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Asa Dotzler <a...@mozilla.org> wrote:
>
> One thing that I fear isn't clear in this discussion is that Planet is an
> official Mozilla Module. It has an Owner and a set of Peers. Those people
> are responsible for the Planet roadmap, reviewing changes to Planet, and all
> Planet policies. The Planet Module Owner is the ultimate say in what happens
> with the Planet Module -- just like all of the Owned code modules in
> Mozilla's HG repo.
>
> So, we're not dealing with a popular vote here -- just as we wouldn't put
> the decisions and policies of the GFX Module Owner up for a popular vote.
>
> What this is, as I see it, is an attempt by some in the community to
> overrule the Planet Module Owner, to force a change to the Planet policy. In
> the code world that would be the equivalent of a handful of contributors
> challenging the decision making of the GFX Module Owner, and when those
> contributors didn't get satisfaction, taking it to Brendan with the hope
> that Brendan would overrule the GFX Module Owner.
>
> I just want that to be clear because it has real implications for the
> governance of the project. This project has very rarely escalated to Brendan
> to see the plans, work, or policy of a code Module Owner overruled.  That's
> what's happening right now.

That sounds like an accurate description to me, except for the "has
real implications for the governance of the project" part.
http://www.mozilla.org/about/roles.html is relevant here:

"The ultimate decision-maker(s) are trusted members of the community
who have the final say in the case of disputes. This is a model
followed by many successful open source projects, although most of
those communities only have one person in this role, and they are
sometimes called the "benevolent dictator". Mozilla has evolved to
have two people in this role - Brendan Eich has the final say in any
technical dispute and Mitchell Baker has the final say in any
non-technical dispute. This has been the case since 1998 for Brendan
and 1999 for Mitchell."

It sounds to me like Mitchell has the final call on this matter, and
given how controversial this matter is, she will have to make that
final call.

Now, an important question here is: what is "this matter"? Is it:

(a) Should non-Mozilla-related content be allowed on Planet?

or

(b) Should discriminatory content be allowed on Planet (and other
Mozilla communication channels)?

In Mitchell's first message in this thread she said:

"I'm personally learning towards the idea of
remaking planet to be the gathering place for updates about Mozilla
activities. I'll talk with the planet module owners and peers, as well
as monitor the discussion forums."

This focused on (a). In my opinion, (b) is the question that matters
and the one that Mitchell should be focusing on, and (a) is an
entirely separate matter that the Planet module owners and peers
should decide. But Mitchell has the final say.

Nick

Justin Dolske

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Mar 9, 2012, 8:53:22 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
[Wrote this last night, and have not caught up with the flood of new
comments.]

On 3/8/12 4:30 PM, Mitchell Baker wrote:

> Proposals have been made to change planet, or to start a similar
> planet.mozillians.org. I'm personally learning towards the idea of
> remaking planet to be the gathering place for updates about Mozilla
> activities.

It's hard to disagree with Mitchell's points about the Mozilla mission,
manifesto, and unique community.

But I strongly believe that changing Planet Mozilla is the wrong
discussion to be having, about the wrong things, and at the wrong time.

PMO certainly has a bunch of problems. People have been grumbling about
it for a long time -- it's high-volume, often repetitive, clogged with
meeting notes, and so on. There's clearly work to be be done. Some
changes were already underway, and it's entirely possible that even
larger changes may be needed.

Until 5 days ago this was a tranquil, low-priority issue. The Planet
Mozilla blog has been posting for months
[http://blog.mozilla.com/planet/2011/09/23/updating-planet-mozilla-policy/]
about planned improvements and changes to policy, which generated little
interest. Most comments there seemed concerned that the spinning-off of
"project" blogs could result in the community missing out on
announcements or interesting posts.

What happened 5 days ago? Well, obviously Gerv's post regarding a
petition to keep the term "marriage" in the UK defined as "one man and
one woman". And then came the resulting firestorm of criticism, ranging
from "this doesn't belong on Planet" to accusations of "hate speech".
People said they felt attacked, excluded, and belittled.


So why are we talking about a broad policy change instead of how to
address the specific issue/content that's causing strife?


I could understand if this was a pervasive or frequent problem. But it's
not. Instead, this feels like punishing everyone for a few isolated
incidents, years apart.

I could also understand if this was an effective remedy. But it's not.
Restricting content to mission-related content does nothing to address
objectionable content. Take, for instance, the plethora of recent
examples in our industry where speakers at conferences have made
on-topic but shockingly misogynistic presentations.

I might even understand if it was a complete solution, but again it's
not. Blogs are just one medium of many. Newsgroups. Air Mozilla. Email
lists. Facebook. IRC. Yammer. Forums. Office bulletin boards. Heck, just
_talking_ with other Mozillians in a community space or other official
gathering. All have the potential for objectionable use, a good solution
should cover all of them.


Instead of talking about Planet Mozilla policy right now, I'd suggest we
should be doing the following:

1) Create a Mozillian Code Of Conduct; including expectations,
boundaries, caution areas -- part of the current problem is that there
are widely varying ideas of what's appropriate in the community and what
current PMO policy is. I vaguely remember Myk starting something along
these lines years ago (bug 364003?), but I'm not sure what became of it.
More recently there's been a general trend of improving the tone of
communication -- the efforts of dmose, Stormy, and Mozilla Conductors
all come to mind.

2) Begin a discussion of potential responses for when Mozillians violate
#1, so there are some existing suggestions or shared understanding of
who can do what and when (instead of winging things in the
heat/confusion of the moment).

3) Determine some final response for the current issue. A thing
happened, a lot of people are upset, but eventually we need to find
closure and move on (it will be impossible to satisfy everyone). The PMO
Module Owners have already posted their response. I presume that given
the scale of the ongoing debate we're at
http://www.mozilla.org/about/roles.html#ultimate-decision-makers and
hence Mitchell's starting of this thread?

4) After a cooling-off period (a month from now?), re-open discussion on
Planet Mozilla policy changes. We know it's broken, but everyone is in
defensive/reactive-mode right now. Let's be sure there's a clear
separation between general PMO improvements and the content that's the
immediate issue.

Justin

Reed Loden

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 9:01:38 PM3/9/12
to Majken Connor, gover...@lists.mozilla.org, Asa Dotzler
On Fri, 9 Mar 2012 20:03:18 -0500
Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well I had data. According to you it was the wrong data. So let's get the
> right data.

Maybe I'm overlooking something, but I don't see any actual data
presented by you in this thread. Would you please show me where this
data is located so I may take a look at it? Thanks.

> Meanwhile, if people weren't submitting their full feeds, and
> planet policy is to have the full feed then IMO the planet team failed the
> system they want by not informing people they could also submit their full
> feed. You're arguing for something that hasn't existed in practice.

I think you misunderstand the current Planet policy. The policy is that
Mozillians are welcome to use whatever feed URL they like for their
addition, but we encourage people to use a full blog feed URL. However,
again, the final decision rests with the Mozillian requesting to be
added. Based on my reading of addition requests over the past years,
I'd say that we do a pretty good job at informing people they are
welcome to use their full feed, especially if they are unsure of what
feed URL to provide.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Planet_Mozilla#Being_added_to_Planet_Mozilla
lists the steps needed to get a blog added to Planet.

~reed

Nicholas Nethercote

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 9:06:38 PM3/9/12
to Justin Dolske, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Justin Dolske <dol...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> 1) Create a Mozillian Code Of Conduct...
> 2) Begin a discussion of potential responses for when Mozillians violate #1...
> 3) Determine some final response for the current issue...
> 4) After a cooling-off period (a month from now?), re-open discussion on
> Planet Mozilla policy changes...

Yes!

(What you just wrote describes my position on this matter more
comprehensively, eloquently, and concisely than anything I've written
in this thread.)

Nick

Majken Connor

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 9:29:34 PM3/9/12
to Reed Loden, gover...@lists.mozilla.org, Asa Dotzler
Reed - it's all replies to things that have been said here already. Asa
said about 90% of people don't use their full feed. He (and others) have
also expressed the preference for people to use their full feeds.


But regarding others' postings about why talk about changing planet
altogether. Well I think it's because it's a simpler solution, that doesn't
take sides. However I'm realizing that sides really do need to be
addressed. We can't fix people's hurt by making change with a wide net and
calling the problem fixed, because the real problem isn't that Gerv posted
his post. The problem is that the current policy allowed it. The current
policy doesn't even allow for examination of whether or not it was
appropriate since the current policy is anything goes.

IMO where Gerv's post crossed the line into discrimination is that it
wasn't an expression of opinion, it was a call to action. I think Gerv's
views shouldn't be the topic of this discussion, which is why I have been
advocating for a larger solution. I think the post was inappropriate and it
was Gerv's mistake and Mozilla's responsibility to correct. I think if I
posted lewd pictures of myself to my blog it would also be Mozilla's
responsibility to correct this as well...or I can post them if you're all
cool with that, I'm curious how many people would defend my right to do so
or if this would be a clearer case to consider.

A free for all policy is not acceptable, and the only reason it has worked
so far is because people take it upon themselves to be respectful to each
other. When people are accidentally disrespectful to each other, it should
be fixed, not defended.

Reed Loden

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 9:42:34 PM3/9/12
to Majken Connor, gover...@lists.mozilla.org, Asa Dotzler
On Fri, 9 Mar 2012 21:29:34 -0500
Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think if I posted lewd pictures of myself to my blog it would also be Mozilla's
> responsibility to correct this as well...or I can post them if you're all
> cool with that, I'm curious how many people would defend my right to do so
> or if this would be a clearer case to consider.

Are these lewd pictures of a pornographic nature? If so, that would
be a violation of (U.S.) laws, which would fall under our (stated)
policy[1] of removing blogs due to illegal activities.

Even if they aren't pornographic, the Planet team "reserves the right
to remove blogs (temporarily or permanently) for various reasons".
Generally, this is only for spam or the like, but the list of reasons
is left open for the "unknown"/"special" cases that may come up.

~reed

[1]
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Planet_Mozilla#Being_removed_from_Planet_Mozilla

Justin Dolske

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 11:03:30 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/8/12 6:02 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> I would like to think that we can all be trusted to not rules-lawyer a
> policy stated in nonspecific terms, and that actual enforcement of this
> ban will not be required (but if it ever does come up, I would support
> sanctions up to and including permanent removal from Planet, depending
> on how egregious the violation is and how often it is repeated).

This seems on the right track to me, and matches some of the other
conduct policies I found though Googling.

The community is never going to agree on everything. But putting some
boundaries around things that are always unacceptable (e.g. sexual
harassment) and things that should be avoided or treated carefully (e.g.
politics) should be possible, and help set the tone and expectations. At
a minimum, I assume there are off-the-shelf HR policies that would make
a fine starting point.

Here's a few of the community policies I've stumbled across:

http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html

http://my.opera.com/community/blogs/corp-policy/

http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html


Also of potential interest:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/legal/intel-social-media-guidelines.html
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/terms-of-use/
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/lessons_learnedcisco_updates_policy_on_employee_blogging/

Justin

Stuart Parmenter

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 11:09:30 PM3/9/12
to Justin Dolske, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
> 2) Begin a discussion of potential responses for when Mozillians
> violate
> #1, so there are some existing suggestions or shared understanding of
> who can do what and when (instead of winging things in the
> heat/confusion of the moment).
>
> 3) Determine some final response for the current issue. A thing
> happened, a lot of people are upset, but eventually we need to find
> closure and move on (it will be impossible to satisfy everyone). The
> PMO
> Module Owners have already posted their response. I presume that
> given
> the scale of the ongoing debate we're at
> http://www.mozilla.org/about/roles.html#ultimate-decision-makers and
> hence Mitchell's starting of this thread?
>
> 4) After a cooling-off period (a month from now?), re-open discussion
> on
> Planet Mozilla policy changes. We know it's broken, but everyone is
> in
> defensive/reactive-mode right now. Let's be sure there's a clear
> separation between general PMO improvements and the content that's
> the
> immediate issue.
>
> Justin
>

Justin you beat me to it! This is spot on. I support this plan.

stuart

Justin Dolske

unread,
Mar 9, 2012, 11:26:49 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/9/12 11:07 AM, Taras Glek wrote:

> I support this proposal. The current notion that planet.mozilla.org is a
> collection of free speech that doesn't have obvious connections to the
> Mozilla mission is entirely non-obvious. I know quite a few people who
> would benefit from following planet, but avoid it because of the
> terrible signal/noise ratio.
>
> I would be more comfortable posting non-Mozilla related items if I knew
> that they would go onto a separate aggregator.

Some questions, I suppose more for the people who had very strong
reactions to Gerv's post...

1) Would folks' reactions have been different if it had been more widely
known that PMO content was unrestricted? It seems to me the objections
were more about the content, than a violation of a wrongly-assumed policy.

2) Would a segregating "unrestricted" content to some other place have
avoided the problem? If someone posted violent threats or racial slurs
to such a location, seems like that would still be pretty serious. If
someone posted borderline-offensive content to there, wouldn't the
reaction be similar to what we have today?

I actually rather like the idea of a "Planet Mozillians" -- even if it's
just a rebranding of the current PMO, because it sounds like it's more
about the people and community. But I also don't think (for the above
reasons) that it helps with the current issue that has people upset, and
so we probably shouldn't conflate the two.

Justin

Zack Weinberg

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Mar 9, 2012, 11:48:28 PM3/9/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 2012-03-09 8:03 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:
>Here's a few of the community policies I've stumbled across:
>
> http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html
> http://my.opera.com/community/blogs/corp-policy/
> http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

Also perhaps worth pointing out:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Friendly_space_policy (Christie
Koehler's post had several more, I particularly liked this one)

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BanOnPolitics

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/index.php?title=Conference_anti-harassment_policy
(has a lot of conference-specific material)

Justin Dolske

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Mar 10, 2012, 12:08:49 AM3/10/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/9/12 6:01 PM, Reed Loden wrote:

>> Meanwhile, if people weren't submitting their full feeds, and
>> planet policy is to have the full feed then IMO the planet team failed the
>> system they want by not informing people they could also submit their full
>> feed. You're arguing for something that hasn't existed in practice.
>
> I think you misunderstand the current Planet policy. The policy is that
> Mozillians are welcome to use whatever feed URL they like for their
> addition, but we encourage people to use a full blog feed URL. However,
> again, the final decision rests with the Mozillian requesting to be
> added.

As a single data point: my Planet feed is only for tagged posts, but I
did that intentionally so I would have the option to not post things to
Planet.

Of my 105 posts, I've only left the tag off twice, I think by accident:

http://blog.mozilla.com/dolske/2008/01/30/packing-efficiency/
http://blog.mozilla.com/dolske/2008/10/13/image-manipulations/

....oh, and it didn't matter because despite my remembered intentions
it's _actually_ my full feed that's syndicated on PMO. >_< Guess I'll be
filing a bug!

Justin

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 10, 2012, 12:14:33 AM3/10/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/9/2012 8:03 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:
> On 3/8/12 6:02 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>
>> I would like to think that we can all be trusted to not rules-lawyer a
>> policy stated in nonspecific terms, and that actual enforcement of this
>> ban will not be required (but if it ever does come up, I would support
>> sanctions up to and including permanent removal from Planet, depending
>> on how egregious the violation is and how often it is repeated).
>
> This seems on the right track to me, and matches some of the other
> conduct policies I found though Googling.
>
> The community is never going to agree on everything. But putting some
> boundaries around things that are always unacceptable (e.g. sexual
> harassment) and things that should be avoided or treated carefully (e.g.
> politics) should be possible, and help set the tone and expectations. At
> a minimum, I assume there are off-the-shelf HR policies that would make
> a fine starting point.

Then do it for all of Mozilla and not single out one channel, Planet
Mozilla, which has a 5 year history of policy that forbids that kind of
content enforcement. I refuse to accept that Planet cannot have a post
on religion but our email and newsgroups are littered with religious
content.

- A

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 10, 2012, 12:29:57 AM3/10/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/9/2012 5:03 PM, Majken Connor wrote:
> Well I had data. According to you it was the wrong data. So let's get the
> right data. Meanwhile, if people weren't submitting their full feeds, and
> planet policy is to have the full feed

Planet policy is to let contributors decide.

> then IMO the planet team failed the system they want by not informing
> people they could also submit their full feed. You're arguing for
> something that hasn't existed in practice.

No, that's incorrect. Lots of people had contributed self-censored feeds
back in the day when one person ran Planet with arbitrary editorial
rules and before we created a Mozilla Module with a real authority and
policy.

We have not done as much as I would like to revisit all of the
first-generation feeds and ask their authors if they would like to offer
a full content feed and we have not done as much as I would like to
encourage new contributors to at least consider whether or not they
would like to syndicate just their Mozilla content or all content.

Nevertheless, we have about half of the people who have come on to
Planet since the new module who are interested in syndicating their full
blog and not just a sub-section of their blog. For some of those people,
their whole blog is Mozilla-related today, but might change at some
point. For some of those people, they syndicate not-Mozilla work related
content today infrequently. For some people they syndicate non-Mozilla
content regularly.

It is my hope that more people will syndicate more "personal" content
over time and that we become more like the amazing Planet Gnome (please
do go check that out. Commenting on this issue without seeing how
amazing it can be when a community shares more than just work seems like
giving the issue short shrift.)

> More importantly this is not a decision that should be made based on what
> people enjoy (lots of people enjoy old Firefox features and not uprading)
> but on what makes sense and what works. I would appreciate more discussion
> along the lines of how it works if you're defending using planet for this
> purpose. You haven't said why planet is a better tool than others for this
> goal. You haven't taken into account the repercussions of the exponential
> increase in posts to planet if everyone posts their full feed, and if
> everyone in the Mozilla community gets to have their full blog syndicated
> on planet.

Actually, the Planet module team have taken into account how this has
changed as the number of contributors grows. I think it's even more
important as we grow to numbers where it's really easy to have no idea
about others working on the project. When we were a couple dozen regular
contributors, we all knew each other quite well -- inside and outside of
work. Today at almost 600 Planet contributors and probably 1,000 Mozilla
contributors, that's much less likely and Planet needs do do even more
to facilitate community connections around our community, including
personal connections.

> We have about 250 people in the reps program alone (going off of the people
> who have completed their ReMo profile on the wiki
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/People) then there are about, 700 employees,
> there is a little bit of overlap so 950 gives us a good number since this
> doesn't represent the whole community, nor regular team posts like meeting
> notes. Let's assume they average 1 post a week. That's already 135 posts a
> day. You could read that in an hour if you read daily at a rate of 2 posts
> a minute, though that doesn't include time for longer posts, videos,
> commenting, reading links contained in the blogs. This is just to get a
> ballpark of the magnitude we're talking about. Obviously we'd need to do
> some real counting, but I think if planet is working the way you want it
> to, this is a good estimate.

Planet is under 600 feeds today. I'd like to see that increase to about
1,000 which is the number of people I think are regularly active on the
project.

No one that I know reads every post. People read the summaries and if it
sounds interesting, they dive deeper. I think a great planet can have
content that is interesting to most everyone else on the project and
that content, the parts relevant to each reader, can be digestible in
about an hour.

But I don't think that should be the topic of discussion here. The topic
here is not how many posts we should have a Planet. The topic here is
whether or not the community is going to convince Mitchell to overrule
the Planet Module Owner and force a change of policy.

- A

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 10, 2012, 12:36:54 AM3/10/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Absolutely correct. Where Brendan is the final say in code questions,
Mitchell is for non-code questions. The only reason I focused on the
code side was that I wanted all of the programmers in this thread to
understand what was going on here and I figured they could relate to
code modules and Brendan more easily than they could to policy modules
and Mitchell.

I still assert that this has real implications for the governance of the
project and I want people to realize that escalation to this "ask
Mitchell or Brendan to override a Module Owner" is "kind of a big deal".

- A

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 10, 2012, 12:39:17 AM3/10/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
+1

- A

Asa Dotzler

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Mar 10, 2012, 12:48:06 AM3/10/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/9/2012 6:29 PM, Majken Connor wrote:
> A free for all policy is not acceptable, and the only reason it has worked
> so far is because people take it upon themselves to be respectful to each
> other. When people are accidentally disrespectful to each other, it should
> be fixed, not defended.

I think you're right and wrong here. Yes, the reason it's worked with
many tens of thousands of posts -- we've only seem serious escalation
around this one single post (and minor concerns around less than half a
dozen others,) is because the overwhelming majority of times that people
post (99.9999% of the time) they are considerate of what they post and
how it will be received. That's a pretty amazing track record, IMO.

When the system doesn't "just work" (0.0001% of the time) the answer is
not to transform the whole system into something completely different,
but to correct that one rare occurrence. That was done here. Gerv, upon
realizing what kind of a commotion he caused, pulled his post.

That's the system working -- pretty well IMO. Saying that's not good
enough, and re-defining the entire module to prevent the next one in
100,000 posts from upsetting some people, seems like the classic
"throwing the baby out with the bathwater."

- A

Justin Dolske

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Mar 10, 2012, 2:53:21 AM3/10/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 3/9/12 9:14 PM, Asa Dotzler wrote:

>> The community is never going to agree on everything. But putting some
>> boundaries around things that are always unacceptable (e.g. sexual
>> harassment) and things that should be avoided or treated carefully (e.g.
>> politics) should be possible, and help set the tone and expectations. At
>> a minimum, I assume there are off-the-shelf HR policies that would make
>> a fine starting point.
>
> Then do it for all of Mozilla and not single out one channel, Planet
> Mozilla, which has a 5 year history of policy that forbids that kind of
> content enforcement. I refuse to accept that Planet cannot have a post
> on religion but our email and newsgroups are littered with religious
> content.

Yes, any code of conduct should be universal.

I personally believe that any such code should be extremely liberal. If
someone wants to create a blog, newsgroup, email list or whatever for
$RELIGION Mozillians, why not?

I don't suggest setting up an enforcement regime for micromanaging
content. Just a set of guidelines for what the community broadly agrees
is unacceptable and what areas one should be cautious in. Ideally this
should be no more burdensome than the status quo -- about once every
year or so there will be some contentious topic, but instead of arguing
with no shared understandings, frameworks, or policies we'll have
something to help guide discussion and debate.

Maybe that means a policy like Mitchell's original post suggested (but
not just for Planet). Maybe we take the current Planet policy and make
that universal. Maybe something else.

Justin

Gian-Carlo Pascutto

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Mar 10, 2012, 4:30:16 AM3/10/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On 9/03/2012 18:11, Robert Kaiser wrote:
> Gian-Carlo Pascutto schrieb:
>> So, a proposal to filter on that, IMHO, can't work, because either you
>> disagree whether posts are acceptable or not - which just leads to the
>> situation we're already in now -, or you have someone who has to judge
>> it, and that will amount to censorship.
>
> Right. And one could in theory argue that a statement that we should
> block installation of non-AMO add-ons by default would be
> discriminatory, or about not supporting people using older OSes any
> more, or similar things. It's pretty hard to draw the lines there.

I don't think we pretend that those aspects of the project are
free-for-all, nor that the decisions made there never lead to controversy.

I'm objecting to the line of reasoning that says "you can say whatever
you want, as long as ...." because it's an oxymoron, and the second part
in the end always ends up meaning "whatever the majority or vocal
minority doesn't get upset about".

If we want to censor Planet Mozilla because we feel there's limits as to
what should be published under the Mozilla banner, fine. But let's call
a spade a spade, and don't think these limits can ever be objective.

--
GCP

Deb Richardson

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Mar 10, 2012, 6:00:09 AM3/10/12
to Justin Dolske, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 2:53 AM, Justin Dolske <dol...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> On 3/9/12 9:14 PM, Asa Dotzler wrote:
>>
>> Then do it for all of Mozilla and not single out one channel, Planet
>> Mozilla, which has a 5 year history of policy that forbids that kind of
>> content enforcement. I refuse to accept that Planet cannot have a post
>> on religion but our email and newsgroups are littered with religious
>> content.
>
> Yes, any code of conduct should be universal.

Absolutely. It's long since time we did this and I believe it will
prove be an important point in the evolution our project and
community.

~ d

Deb Richardson

unread,
Mar 10, 2012, 6:36:01 AM3/10/12
to Asa Dotzler, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 4:24 PM, Asa Dotzler <a...@mozilla.org> wrote:
> There's plenty of precedent for having rules at Planet. We have a Module
> which has developed a set of rules and enforced those rules for 5 years.
> What some here are asking for is a change to those rules. The Planet team
> responded to those requests saying "no, we are not going to change our
> editorial policy". Now it has been escalated to the Governance newsgroup in
> an effort to overrule the Planet Module Owner.  That's where we are today.

That seems like the correct place for us to be, no?

~ d

Christie Koehler

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Mar 10, 2012, 10:37:25 AM3/10/12
to mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Friday, March 9, 2012 9:36:54 PM UTC-8, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> I just want that to be clear because it has real implications for the
> governance of the project. This project has very rarely escalated to
> Brendan to see the plans, work, or policy of a code Module Owner
> overruled. That's what's happening right now.

I think you've made this point very clear.

> I still assert that this has real implications for the governance of the
> project and I want people to realize that escalation to this "ask
> Mitchell or Brendan to override a Module Owner" is "kind of a big deal".

This is good because it means our process for dealing with issues is working.

A group of people had issues with the governance on Planet Mozilla that was not satisfactorily addressed by Planet owners and so the issue has been escalated up the chain of authority.

This may be "kind of a big deal" because it doesn't happen that often, but I want to clarify that it means our processes are working and that folks have a process for redress when module owners aren't being sufficiently responsive.

-Ck

Christie Koehler

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Mar 10, 2012, 10:37:25 AM3/10/12
to mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Friday, March 9, 2012 9:36:54 PM UTC-8, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> I just want that to be clear because it has real implications for the
> governance of the project. This project has very rarely escalated to
> Brendan to see the plans, work, or policy of a code Module Owner
> overruled. That's what's happening right now.

I think you've made this point very clear.

> I still assert that this has real implications for the governance of the
> project and I want people to realize that escalation to this "ask
> Mitchell or Brendan to override a Module Owner" is "kind of a big deal".

Deb Richardson

unread,
Mar 10, 2012, 11:38:24 AM3/10/12
to Christie Koehler, mozilla.g...@googlegroups.com, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 10:37 AM, Christie Koehler
<christi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is good because it means our process for dealing with issues is working.
>
> A group of people had issues with the governance on Planet Mozilla that was not satisfactorily addressed by Planet owners and so the issue has been escalated up the chain of authority.
>
> This may be "kind of a big deal" because it doesn't happen that often, but I want to clarify that it means our processes are working and that folks have a process for redress when module owners aren't being sufficiently responsive.

Yep. The system is working as designed.

~ d
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