[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