On Friday 2012-03-09 13:53 -0800, Graydon Hoare wrote:
> The most disappointing aspect of this week has been the repeated
> abdication of responsibility for those decisions, the suggestion
> that "no policy" is ever actually how we decide things. People in
> decision-making roles speaking as though the formal organization has
> no existing policies guiding choices of what is ok or not-ok to do
> with our resources, in our spaces. That's not true. The organization
> _obviously_ has policy. And it must. It's necessary to function as
> an organization. It makes decisions that way all the time.
I agree with you that "no policy" (in the sense that I think I
recall you writing elsewhere, of "allow anything") is a bad idea.
> All anyone's asking for is for those policies to be made explicit,
> articulated as norms for the community facilities we own and
> operate,
"Have a policy" and "have an explicit policy" are two different
things. In many cases Mozilla has quite succesfully used informal
policy: writing things down formally only when events show they
need to be written down. In many cases it's been sufficient to have
non-normative descriptions of the way things work rather than a
normative text. I think, for example, we may have been more
welcoming to new contributors if we hadn't left untouched the
normative text of our code review policy that hadn't actually been
followed as written for quite a few years (roughly 2004-2009,
perhaps?).
I this case, though, I agree that writing some amount of policy down
formally may be useful.
> and refined to ensure they contain anti-discrimination
> policy for oppressed groups. It appears -- abstractly and from the
> distance of such abdication -- that we do no more than the legal
> minimum[1] to protect oppressed groups from discrimination. If so,
> we should say in writing that we're not willing to do more than the
> legal minimum. But I hope that's not true. Because if so that's an
> embarrassment. Many of our competitors and other open source
> projects do much better than the legal minimum. They have positive
> codes of conduct that make it clear that oppressed groups are
> welcome and discrimination against them will not be tolerated. We
> can too. It's not hard.
On the contrary, I think writing policy well is extremely hard.
It's easy to write policies that seem like they're going to do the
right thing. But a formal written policy needs to produce the right
result for a broad range of cases. Whatever the policy is, there
are going to be hard cases near the boundary, many of which the
policy's authors didn't forsee. Building consensus around a written
policy requires building consensus that that boundary is in the
right place.
In many cases this can be alleviated somewhat by making the policy
more vague. Which in turn returns to a continuum back from "have an
explicit policy" towards "have a policy".
(For example, comparing two of the policies cited in
http://subfictional.com/2012/03/09/the-overdue-need-for-community-conduct-standards-at-mozilla/
,
http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/conduct is mostly quite
vague about what conduct is unacceptable, whereas
http://citizencodeofconduct.org/ is much more precise about what
types of conduct are forbidden. I think working out which I think
is better would take me some time.)
-David
--
𝄞 L. David Baron
http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla
http://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂