On Friday 04 March 2005 06:21 am, Anthony Towns wrote:Perhaps we can source some code from the Chinese government. I believe they have a similar method of maintaining "political order". Pray do chose your "listmaster" committee carefully.I can think of a few ways to try to resolve this. The most important is killing "noise", by which I primarily mean off-topic threads, but also mails generally that don't add anything to the discussion because they're, eg, just rehashing old arguments, or outright spam, or similar.
*shrug* If I don't, it can always be changed to others, or they can be talked to, or the whole idea can be dropped. If we're really worried about the prospect of people going insane with power, then that would be one reason to keep the technical listmasters separate from the policy listmasters.
Your selections have already picked up some bias. Branden was able to unfairlyI think the following messages should have resulted in the posters being sanctioned to some degree, eg: http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2005/02/msg00022.html - campaigning is limited to a set three week period, campaigning for or against potential candidates outside this time is off-topic
campaign in advance through his "100 supporters" technique but this has escaped your notice.
Not in particular, however it wasn't done over the lists, so doesn't really have any effect on the quality of our lists. If you were troubled by this, far better to address it directly by saying something like "Offering and gathering public support for a candidate and his policies is campaigning -- please don't do this until the campaigning period starts" than to descend to the same level. Having to fight fire with fire is the worst result of our current list environment -- it just plain doesn't work.
In any case, this is precisely what makes on-topic requirements for mailing lists different to government censorship -- there _are_ other forums to discuss topics deemed off-topic. If you want to campaign over a beer, or on your blog, or by a mass mail out to developers, you certainly can.
At least my "campaining" has the excuse of thousands of misplaced Debian dollars driving it.
That's fine, it's not a question of whether you're selfless, hard working, or looking out for the best interests of Debian; it's whether the mail was on-topic or not. I'd be surprised if it weren't possible to find some mail that I've written to Debian lists that would qualify for some level of sanction too, eg. That's fine -- I think we've all screwed up, and I think we should start giving ourselves a reminder to get it right.
For reference, similarly fascist policies I've implemented in the past
have been the BTS control@ abuse banning [0] I mentioned in my platform,
and NMU abuse banning [1]. I don't think they're enjoyable for anyone -- I certainly don't find enforcing them any fun, but I do think knowing there are some consequences to breaking the boundaries of good behavour are helpful.
Cheers, aj
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/12/msg01980.html [1] http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2003/08/20
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