inamerrata

Back in September last year I blogged on #debian-tech, a new IRC channel for discussing Debian, but with a charter and some ops with a mandate to enforce it. At the time I wrote:

It’ll probably be quite a bit different from #debian-devel on either OFTC or FreeNode; hopefully that’ll turn out to be in a good way. We’ve got (I think) a pretty good variety of ops, who have (I think) some pretty good ideas on encouraging good productive activities on Debian. We’ll see what happens!

Since then, we’ve had a couple of significant discussions on it, reflected on the wiki page; the multiarch discussion was interesting and spontaneous, and the release and archive qualification discussions were both potentially highly contentious discussions that seemed to end up being conducted really well, and have both had some pretty significant results. That’s pretty pleasing — this time last year, there wasn’t anywhere I’d’ve been comfortable having those sorts of discussions in public, now there’s somewhere that’s been demonstrated to work fairly well.

A more surprising outcome is that we’ve never actually banned anyone from the channel. To some extent, this is to be expected since people who don’t like the concept just won’t join in the first place, and to the extent that’s true, it’s a good thing. And at least Wouter, who’d also objected in the past, was willing to join briefly for one of the discussions important to him and get along fine.

Unfortunately that’s not the only reason for the total lack of bans. The other aspect is that people have turned out to be far more ready to ban themselves than the ops have been. To anonymise an example from November last year:

17:19 <aj> anyone in a position to do an upload?
08:17 <anibal> aj, what would you like to be uploaded?
08:31 <aj> anibal: it’s fine now, don’t worry ’bout it
09:00 <anibal> aj, np
09:13 <dato> aj: you’re feeding our curiosity! ;-)
09:14 <aj> look, they’re secret changes, i can’t just go announcing this stuff you know!!
09:15 <aj> (oh god oh god, please don’t let any of them look in dak cvs)
15:45 <neuro> aj: best not look in wanna-build svn, either.
15:56 <aj> neuro: why? are there… secrets?
15:57 <neuro> only the ones that were posted to debian-devel…
16:01 <aj> neuro: this is a job for setec astronomy!
17:15 <taggart> aj: classic
01:09 <anon> aj: I’m a bit confused – are your comments within the charter of the channel? Or is being discourteous about people who aren’t currently participants in the channel intentionally permitted?
01:21 <neuro> anon: talking about the secret changes referred to elsewhere is being “discourteous” about other people?
01:23 <anon> Oh, screw it
01:23 -!- anon [anon@anon.anon] has left #debian-tech []

(For reference, the changes being referred to were some of the security-related dak hacking I was doing at the time, probably this.)

Obviously “secret changes” was a reference to a recent (at the time) mail to -devel-announce, which was somewhat controversial in so far as the changes it was announcing weren’t “secret”, just not widely known — and following the above, there was a brief productive discussion about what those changesmeant. In any case, Henrique noted subsequently that he considered the use of the term sarcastic. So in theory joking about it ought to have been fair game.

But on the other hand, it’s not particularly surprising that it might make someone uncomfortable either. What’s less great is that trying to talk about the disagreement resulted in “anon” giving up straight away and leaving — I wasn’t around for that quarter hour, let alone the couple of minutes between neuro’s comment and anon’s departure. And similar things have happened in a few other cases, so it’s not just “anon” being particularly sensitive — which is why I figure there’s not much point naming names in this case. FWIW, you can’t guess who “anon” is from any of the names above, or afaik from any of the related threads either. I’ve no idea if “anon” would care about being named here.

This is pretty much the exact opposite of what I expected — I figured any problems we’d have would be related to people being overeager to defend themselves or their point of view, not immediately giving up and walking away at the first sign of disagreement. After all, there’s always going to be some way to get around the rules if you really want to.

In part, that’s also why #d-tech isn’t that active; without some way of addressing the above, it seems a bit silly to advertise it too much, which for a new channel that hasn’t had that much discussion means there’s not going to be much in the future.

When you get right down to it, I’m really not sure what the deal is here. On rereading both Andrew Suffield’s recent semi-resignation following his banning from posting to -devel-announce, and Lars Wirzenius’s remark that “In some ways, I am a loser” in his recent de-nomination, I’m left wondering if those aren’t examples of some related problem. I’m just not sure what that is.

The only thing I can think of is some sort of inability to cope well with people disagreeing with them, but that’s an absurdly broad generalisation, and I know for a fact it isn’t true in at least some of the cases — and I don’t really believe it for the rest anyway. Originally I was worried that I’d developed some big scary aura and people were afraid to disagree with me, but I don’t think any of the examples above could reasonably be put down to that.

I guess when you get right down to it, I wonder if this isn’t the other side of the coin to complaining about poor communication in others — that is, not having confidence in your ability to put up with it, or not thinking it’s worth standing up to, or whatever. After all, if you were confident you could stand it, and did think it was worth putting up with, would you bother complaining in the first place?

UPDATE 2006/02/28:

First responses to the above? Joerg:

No bans? No traffic!

Anthony, of course you dont need a ban. That channel has virtually no traffic, compared to many/most other debian related channels. Most of the time its a join/part log, no discussion.

Second, from Clint:

Exclusion and hypocrisy

Anthony, you and Ryan behaving like snarky assholes looks to me to be in direct conflict with the #debian-tech charter.

The fact that at least one of the channel ops considers this to be acceptable behavior is a perfectly valid reason for people to refuse to participate.

Ah, isn’t it great the way Debian’s such a supportive environment these days?

Of course, the two responses above are fundamentally contradictory: if Clint’s right a ban (or similar) would’ve been appropriate, in spite of Joerg’s claim. On the other hand, Google’s sole definition of “snarky” seems to be “A colloquialism meaning short-tempered or snappish.” which doesn’t seem terribly applicable here — however short tempered anyone was, anon left before anyone had a chance to lose theirs. Sadly, the rest of Clint’s epithet assumes you’ve got some idea what the problem is in the first place.

Even if Clint’s completely wrong, Joerg’s complaint doesn’t really work either: even in spite of the lack of traffic, the other examples have had at least some sort of component of trying to keep the channel on track (so that it doesn’t devolve to people calling each other “snarky assholes”, eg). Here’s one:

14:59 <aj> foo: “* foo smacks bar.”; cf the charter, be nice, etc
15:00 <foo> aj, you’re kidding, right?
15:00 <aj> foo: no, not really?
15:01 <aj> foo: nor threatening if that’s what you’re thinking; just reminding
15:01 -!- foo [foo@foo.foo] has left #debian-tech [probably not the channel for me]

It’s pretty easy to say “but foo’s not out of line!” — and, heck, that’s what I thought, which was why it was just a pointer/reminder. Surely there’s something fundamentally wrong when people get scared away merely by “be nice”. If there’d been some history of bans following that sort of comment, I could understand — but there’s been no history of bans whatsoever.

UPDATE 2006/02/28:

Oh, and now there’s a response from Wouter too:

As you may have noticed, I did not say much during that time, and did not ever join #debian-tech afterwards. The reason that I did join at that point was that this discussion was, indeed, important, and that it was going on at #debian-tech. I didn’t want to risk not having a say again in the future of things that are important to me; the fact that I did this should not be interpreted as an acceptance of and agreement with the channel’s charter.

Of course, for the short time he was there (around 24h) he did abide by the charter; and the above’s exactly my point: even when people disagree with the concept of the charter, they’re still able to join and be productive. Which is great!

I still feel very uncomfortable about the be nice, or else… charter of #debian-tech, because it means you can not know whether something you say as a joke will be interpreted as hostility and might get you kicked. […]

Of course, it’s true you’ll never know whether something you say as a joke will be interpreted as hostility by someone — and there’s now a couple of examples of that above. But we’ve had a few months of evidence that none of that’s enough to get you kicked on #d-tech, which ought to provide some evidence that that fear’s not well-founded.