[openstack-dev] [all][tc] Lets keep our community open, lets fight for it

Flavio Percoco flavio at redhat.com
Thu Feb 12 08:06:26 UTC 2015


On 11/02/15 17:19 +0000, Amrith Kumar wrote:

[snip]

>Mostly, I'm very happy to see Flavio's email which ends with this:
>
>> All the above being said, I'd like to thank everyone who fights for the openness of our community
>> and encourage everyone to make that a must have thing in each sub-community. You don't need to
>> be core-reviewer or PTL to do so. Speak up and help keeping the community as open as possible.
>
>Open decision making and discussion are absolutely the lifeblood of an open source community. And I agree, as an ATC I will fight for the open discussion and decision making. In equal measure, I recognize that I'm human and there are times when a quiet "sidebar" with someone, either on the telephone, or over a glass of suitable beverage can go further and quicker than any extent of public conversation with the exact same participants.
>
>You write:
>
>| This is seriously disturbing.
>
>Yes, what would be seriously disturbing would be if there were decisions being made without the open/public scrutiny.
>
>There seems to be a leap-of-faith that a private IRC channel implies covert decisions and therefore they should be shutdown. OK, great, the Twenty-First Amendment took the same point of view, see how well that worked out.
>
>I assure you that later today, tomorrow, and the next day, I will have private conversations with other ATC's. Some will be on the telephone, and some will be on public IRC channels with some totally unique name that you'd never know to guess. But, I will try my best to, and I welcome the feedback when people feel that I deviate from the norm of ensuring public, open discussion and decision making where all are invited to participate.
>
>Personally, I think the focus on password protected IRC channels is a distraction from the real issue that we need to ensure that the rapidly growing community is one where public discussion and decision making are still "the norm". Let's be adult about it and realize that people will have private conversations. What we need to focus on is ensuring that the community rejects "private decision making".

I personally don't care if you have private discussions with other
folks regardless of what their ATC status and impact on the community
is. You're free to do so, I don't plan to critizice that and that's
entirely your problem. However, I do care when those discussions
happen in a private IRC channel because I don't beleive that's neither
good for our community nor necessary.

It's not good for our community because it *excludes* people that are
not in such channels and it creates the wrong message around what core
means, just like it happened with "integrated" projects and like it
happens with PTLs. In addition to that, it isolates discussions which
is something we've been encouraging people not to do because not
everyone sees it the same way.

Furthermore, I don't think it is necessary because at the very end you
will have to disclose the discussion in order to make it effective
upstream. If this is not happening for you then I really don't want to
know it because I'd just rage quit. The reason for that is that the
only way to push something upstream without disclosing a hallway/phone
conversation is by having a small group of folks pushing whatever was
discussed quickly enough to avoid other community interactions, which
is more than just wrong.

Side Note: note that the above is not an accusation but just a
speculation based on your previous email and on the fact that I keep
fooling myself with the thought that I had seen it all and then
finding out new things.

Unfortunately, being an adult doesn't seem to be enough, we're lacking
of education on how open-source works and it's affecting a community
that we've been fighting to keep open and welcoming. If these "casual"
private conversations are affecting our community, I'd rather not have
them than seeing the work of these last years vanish.

Our community is far from perfect but lets try to not make it worse.
So, if you are participating in a private IRC channel, I ask you to
please reconsider leaving such medium and encourage the openness.

One last note. As someone that has mentored for the last three cycles
in Outreachy and that also mentored in GSoC in one of those cycles
(That makes it 4 programs in 3 cycles), I find it very offensive that
people that have been longer in this community do the opposite of what
I've been encouraging the participants of these programs to do. That
is, having the courage to participate in public discussion and
engaging with the community.

>There, I said it, and I said it in the open.

And I infinitely thank you for this.

Flavio

-- 
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco
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