Posted by Alex UA on January 22, 2011 at 2:25pm
One of the concerns I have with policy making is how current policies are created and posted on Drupal.org as "official" d.o. policy. Some of the items I think need clarity:
- Where does debate happen?
- What level of support does something need before becoming a policy? For this I mean both the raw # of votes, as well as the % of votes supporting the proposition (simple majority--i.e. 50+1-- super majority-- i.e. 2/3s?)
- Who gets to vote? Is anyone qualified? Do they need a certain permission on d.o. (documentation, webmasters, cvs access, etc)? Are any votes worth more than others?
- Are there certain policy that do not require said procedure? For example, while security policies are obviously best left to the security team, I'm less certain whether they would require their own rules for making policy, but I'm guessing they would.
- What are the appeal processes for challenging accepted rules?
I know that this all seems pretty heavy on procedure, and I'm not advocating for something overly procedural (cough---roberts rules---cough), but I feel strongly that there's a need to move away from the current ad-hoc methods for choosing new policies that affect the community at large.
Comments
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I think debates should happen in the webmaster's queue so it's centralized in one place and people know where to go to keep an eye on what's being decided and chime in if they so desire. This discussion, for example, is likely to be missed considering there's only 22 members in this group out of hundreds of thousands in the community.
I don't know about what percentage. It's hard to put a number on that. I think the biggest problem is who gets to make the decision that, ok, we've discussed it enough and "this" is what we're going with? Dries rarely gets involved in any of the discussions and so there's no clear leader. There's a loose hierarchy of uber-admin -> site admin -> site maintainer -> doc team -> everyone else. But there isn't any particular person in charge of most of the sections so no final go-to person to make the decision to implement. This is a big reason why I scaled back on my participation in a lot of these areas. I was uncomfortable being the one making the decision and had no one I could go to that was "in charge" that I could ask before implementing.
I think everyone should have a say. Those who are active in the community tend to have more weight but that doesn't mean we dismiss someone's ideas just because they aren't. I think the important thing is there's more than a "+1", especially with non-maintainers. If an admin chimes in with a quick +1, we know who they are and there's a level of trust there. To some extent with maintainers as well. But someone who isn't well known putting in a +1 doesn't add as much because we don't know who they are. They could be a shill account, someone paid off by a company with interest in the issue, etc. With a +1 we have nothing to go by but the person's reputation. With more words, it's the words that are important more than who's saying them.
I think all policy changes that affect the community should be discussed unless it's an emergency situation and we need to do something quickly. Even then, discussion can happen after the fact to determine if we continue doing whatever was done.
I don't know about an appeal process. If we've gone through this whole ordeal of getting something in place, I think there would need to be a really good reason to start that all over again.
I've been trying to push the community to have more procedures and guidelines for things for a while. That's why I fought so hard against your assertion that we don't need guidelines for Drupal Planet even though I, personally, have no issue with what's currently on Planet. I want procedures and guidelines in place so that I, as a site maintainer, feel comfortable making decisions knowing I am following what was laid out by the community rather than just going with what I personally prefer. I'm glad you finally see the need for procedures.
Michelle
Dismissive
That is exactly what happened, Kiam being the most active person telling me "your voice doesn't count" (which somehow got twisted in his mind to mean that I felt that only my voice counts, to which I say "huh?"). I was told, in issue after issue, that I was not "trusted enough" to give a +1 that carried any meaning, and it is this denial of my voice that led me to push for changes (both here and in the webmasters issue queue).
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
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That is not true at all. I simply reported what somebody else said before me; in fact, gdemet reported before me that in a specific report he needed a +1 from another site maintainer and (then) that the status should be changed only after another site maintainer gave a +1 and the post was added to the scheduling page.
Anyway, this is the Drupal.org policies group; the topic of the posts here should be policies. It would be nice if we could focus on policies, what policies we need, what those policies should allow, etc.
Also...
I think you and I are something like 99% on the same page here, though for the record I was not pushing for "no guidelines" I was pushing for "positively termed guidelines." (It really is as simple as saying "post good content" instead of "don't post bad content," and is in the spirit of the (awesome) DCoC) As someone who comes out of the world of political organizing, and someone whose family is full of (very good) lawyers and debaters, I am very much a proponent of clear guidelines, just not the particular "thou shalt not" type of guidelines that were proposed (and prematurely enforced) for the planet.
WRT to being nervous about enforcing rules when there's no clear guideline, I've felt the same way. I don't want to tell someone on G.D.O that their behavior runs afoul of community standards, when those standards don't necessarily exist in "official" written form.
WRT appeals processes- I hear what you're saying, and I mostly agree, however only in cases when the original debate is had by enough people, who themselves have the support of the community. If the ~140 webmasters/site admins get to create these rules, then there clearly needs to be a way for others to either "vote" webmasters onto/off of the decision making team, or an easy way to appeal these decisions. Otherwise you have an unelected group of insiders (a group that doesn't appear to grow nearly fast enough to keep up with the growth of drupal, though I don't have statistics) dictating rules and policy to the 10's-of-thousands of active users of d.o. and the 100s-of-thousands of a d.o. users. I know that Drupal is, to some degree, a dictatorship, and I'm fine with that on the coding side, but on the community side it will be met with stiff resistance from those of us who cut our teeth fighting W. and his band of idiotic economy destroying, rights stomping, war mongers.
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
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I do think we have similar concerns but your hostile and accusatory tone makes it difficult to have a productive conversation about them. This is the first post of yours that was stated in a way that I felt comfortable responding.
I don't know if there is a solution here, though. It's a chicken and egg problem. Because there are no policies in place regarding enacting policy, getting a policy enacted is difficult. There are many who think things are just fine and that we should just react on a case by case basis rather than setting up guidelines. And, unless Dries decides to get involved, there really is no person in charge that can make the ultimate decision and say "this" is how things are going to be run. So unless we get some momentum and start getting an overwhelming number of maintainers who want to standardize, I think we're going to continue to see things being handled by whoever is interested in handling them at that moment however they feel is best.
Michelle
tone...
I guess my sardonic wit is lost on the masses ;-). Anyway, I feel I was met with hostility from the outset and I met it with the same. I'm almost always been the loudest one in the room/forum, so I'm used to taking flak when I get involved in a heated debate, and I'm just as used to returning the favor. Obviously this can lead to bad things happening, but it also can (and often does) lead to positive changes in the way things happen.
This is where my problem is: because we are talking about issues that revolve around "community assets" that we all rely on, and creating rules around community assets without any broader representation/accountability is going to lead to more big dust ups in the future. In these cases a "do-ocracy" feels a lot more like a dictatorship and will lead to more dust-ups whenever someone like me (i.e. someone who doesn't just accept 'authority' or 'Rules' as given, and who relishes fighting things that they feel are unjust and/or unfair) is told what they can or cannot do, without feeling like they can affect the policies that are put into place.
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
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I'm not saying it's ideal... Just that it's difficult to get past the notion that what we have is working fine. So far we've got two people saying let's get some policies in place, a few who think we don't need them, and a whole lot that just go with the flow. There isn't any obvious bug with concrete tests to fix, just differing opinions on how things should be run, which makes enacting change very difficult. Who's going to do it? Who gets to decide that a new policy will be created? There's no policy to follow and so it gets stuck.
This is something I've been concerned about since long before the whole Planet debate. But, whenever I've brought it up, the answer has always been that we're doing fine as we are and they just shrug and nothing happens. Until we have more people agreeing that there's a problem that needs fixing, I just don't see it getting fixed.
Michelle
If a problem is what they need...
then a problem is what they'll get! I am nothing if not excited to help start/escalate/cause trouble! I kid (a little bit) of course, but I do hope that this little dust up provides enough of an example of why this is problematic to convince enough people that it's not sustainable to go on like this.
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
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This post is really asking questions, rather than asking for a policy to be implemented.
Thanks captain obvious!
Here's an idea: why don't you go post the same thing everywhere you see me post? Oh, wait...
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
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Here is a better idea: why don't you open a post writing what your proposal is, first?
It seems to me that in two different posts there are only questions, not a draft of what the policies should be. This is not a support group where you ask something you didn't understand; it's a group where you should propose policies where and when they are necessary.
It seems a contradiction, though, to propose more policies when you have been caught to not follow an existing "policy".
PS: As I didn't give you any nickname, don't feel free to give me a nickname; so far, you are General Obvious.
warning
When you tell me "don't" what I really here is "do it more, but this time with more gusto, and perhaps a side of cowbell"
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology