On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 5:19 PM, SteveC <st...@asklater.com> wrote: > What are your ideas? How should we block people? For how long? What process > should it be? What are the best practices from other projects you're involved > in?
I think this is a great topic, and its nice to see it properly aired. I'm certainly in the "getting disillusioned" camp - not with the wider project, but in our inability to deal with the malcontents and disruptors, on the mailing lists, on the wiki, and in the database. I keep finding myself considering other projects where things are, y'know, a bit more enjoyable. >From my point of view we lack most of the building blocks to make moderation like this work. We lack accepted written guidelines in almost everything we do. What's a suitable topic for the newbies mailing list? How many nodes are too many on a roundabout? Should I post a question on help.openstreetmap.org and then argue with the answers? Why shouldn't I change all these tags? Who deals with revert wars on the wiki? Or agenda pushing in general? And so on. Without these guidelines, even well-meaning people can't properly self-police. I'd recommend the Art of Community for anyone interested in this. http://www.artofcommunityonline.org - it's exactly what we need to have people thinking about. What we do need to avoid though is bureacracy - I'd be quite happy to nominate a few people to write all the guidelines and have their word as law, rather than creating committees or suchlike. Finally, I think that although the big issues are demonstrating that we have a problem, it's all the little things that are most wearing. So my concrete suggestion, is for someone more eloquent than me to make a handful of guidelines for the mailing lists. Here's a starter: * Assume good faith * No conspiracy theories * No grandstanding * If you've made your point already, you don't need to tell us all again * Nitpicking doesn't help you or anyone else * Learn to live with the reply-to setting. We're not changing it, no matter what your opinion is and so on. and for the newbies list * The list is for helping newbies get started. It's not Yet Another discussion forum * If something isn't widely accepted, then as far as the newbies list is concerned, it's just that. Debate happens elsewhere * If you disagree with the way Things Are Done, the newbies list isn't the place to confuse people And for matters related to licensing * We've got a mailing list just for that. Use it * No, just because you think it's the most important thing in the world, doesn't exempt you from the previous point So does anyone want to make these a little more, eh, well rounded? :-) Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
