On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 3:14 PM, Gervase Markham <[email protected]> wrote: > At the Festival, I was encouraged to elaborate on this. I've talked > about my idea elsewhere, but here it is again: > > There are now at least two reasons we need to define a subset of > Mozillians who are trusted by the community. > > The first is that we want to have a discussion forum where we can talk > about sensitive subjects in a group larger than "employees" but smaller > than "public". We've needed this for ages, and we still need it. And we > need to define who's in and who's out, and how you decide. > > The second is that we want to give out @mozilla.org email addresses to > people who we are confident will not use them to damage Mozilla's > reputation. This is also a trust issue. As we are finding out, we need > to define who's in and who's out, and how you decide. > > My contention is that these two groups could be the same group.
So far, sounds great. > In order to define this group well, we need to "encode" existing trust > relationships. Here is my proposal, which I call the 'Mafia' way of > building a trust network. > > We seed the group with, say, twenty or so people whose status as > Mozillians is beyond doubt. We then say that anyone else can be admitted > to the group if they are endorsed (I won't say "vouched", as it's > confusing!) by two existing members. And if that person is found to have > broken a confidence or otherwise behaved in a way which leads to loss of > privileges or access, the two people who vouched for them also lose > those privileges, for a period of six months. (Hence, tongue-in-cheek, > 'Mafia' - "if you cross us, we'll come after you _and_ your parents".) I understand the need to do downsides, but this seems like a very harsh penalty. It would be easy to vouch for someone at some point, and at some point 5 years in the future, that someone does something bad and gets banned. Is it still fair for the original vouching person to be penalized for that? It seems like timeliness of the vouching must play a role here. The scheme I just came up with is, once you get 2 people to vouch for you, you get 4 points to vouch with for others (i.e. limiting the amount of vouches you can give out, adding some cost to vouching). But, vouches deteriorate over time, so after, say, a year, your 2 initial vouches are worth less than 1.0, and your access gets revoked unless you find some people to vouch for you again. Since people may migrate to different areas of the community, it may make sense to have other people vouch for you this time compared to last time. (Yeah, this gets complex. And probably needs its own thread. But it's a good discussion to have.) Cheers, Dirkjan _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
