Le 2021-03-26 à 20:02, Valorie Zimmerman a écrit :
Hi Niccolò,
On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 3:26 PM Niccolò Ve
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi.
> Posts about Richard Stallman are off-topic and will not be allowed.
This is... plain out wrong. Off topic means off topic.
The KDE Community list exists, according to the subscription page:
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
<https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community>
The purpose of the mailing list is to provide a place for
non-technical information and discussions which are relevant to
the KDE community as a whole. All people who consider themselves
to be part of the KDE community are invited to join. Conversations
on the mailing list are respectful, considerate, polite and
constructive following our KDE Code of Conduct.
The list collects announcements, information and results from
discussions in other places and offers a place to get feedback on
non-technical questions or plans of relevance for the whole KDE
community.
Anything else is off-topic.
A RMS reply to a thread about RMS is NOT off topic.
The original post was about the FSF and their governance.
First of all, I find it unfortunate to be discussing messages most
readers don't even have access to, and I want to thank Niccolò for
reporting his experience.
Although I am not sure which exact thread Niccolò referred to, having
followed kde-community fairly well recently, I very much doubt that the
thread he replied to was not about RMS (even if it was also about FSF
and its governance).
Unfortunately "RMS pro/con" hijacked that thread and caused this list
to be moderated.
If you want to shutdown the discussion, just say so.
I did so.
I don't know if the following is what Niccolò meant, but if some
messages sent to this forum were indeed refused due to topicality, there
is a problem.
This mailing list is not a web forum and threads cannot be "locked". If
the new administration now rejects specific discussions which were
already started, replies to the specific (sub-)threads indicating
shutdown should be sent, so that participants do not waste their time
writing mails which end up rejected.
If, as Valorie seems to say, the worry goes beyond specific discussions,
we first need to avoid false dichotomies. Topicality is relative, and
messages about RMS are certainly neither the most topical nor the least
topical on this forum.
If forum administrators consider any discussion about RMS (or any other
topic which many/most participants consider potentially topical) to be
too little topical for kde-community, this should be communicated *with
sufficient prominence*. Indicating that a topic is rejected in a mail is
better than nothing, but has extremely low prominence in a mail titled
"Apology".
The ideal place to warn about rejections would be in the forum's
description. We could, for example, either:
1. specify in kde-community's description that discussion about RMS is
never considered sufficiently topical
2. specify in kde-community's description that only highly topical
discussion is accepted
3. or add a link from kde-community's description to a page clarifying
its filtering criteria
The fact that RMS is not "the issue" (he's surely _an_ issue...)
does not change that
the kde community email was about RMS. I sent an email 10 hours
*before* this apology.
It was rejected just*now.* As offtopic.
I live in the US; most of the other mods live in Europe. If they had
wanted to act on your email they could have done so, but I believe I
was the one to reject your post. There was nothing time-sensitive in it.
I did not like that thread, but this handling of the situation is
plain out bad. This apology
mail only made things worse. If I did not know about KDE, I'd say
that they are censoring
the discussion. Instead I'm just embarrassed.
Requiring lists to be on-topic is not censorship, which *governments* do.
I am not sure that defining censorship is helpful to this discussion,
but note that censorship is not only governmental.
[...]
Il giorno ven 26 mar 2021 alle ore 20:36 Valorie Zimmerman
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
ha scritto:
Hello my friends,
When I put this list on emergency moderation, I felt that this
was necessary. It still seems so, but I want to lift
moderation as soon as possible.
I may have played a part in continuing the negative thread
that "wouldn't die" by expressing my own opinion. I should
have followed my own advice and walked away after writing my
email and then removed parts which expressed a personal opinion.
While I may disagree with others about the value of RMS to
Free Software, he is not the issue. The more organizations
I've been involved with, the more I realize the value of good
governance. The FSF has been critical to the growth of Free
Software, and the recent news about their Board is very worrying.
My statement did not do anything to convey that or to help,
and for that I am truly sorry.
Posts about Richard Stallman are off-topic and will not be
allowed.
Thanks to those of you who called my attention to my part in
all of this.
All the best to each of you, to KDE and all of the Free
software communities,
Valorie
--
http://about.me/valoriez <http://about.me/valoriez> -
pronouns: she/her
--
Niccolò Venerandi
--
http://about.me/valoriez <http://about.me/valoriez> - pronouns: she/her
--
This mail's original content (non-quoted parts) is available under the Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0.
Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com
