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Rust Moderation Team Resigns

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261–270 of 912 posts

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you can't resign and not have it be a public thing. They said as little as they could

I'm pretty sure you can resign with a lot less "drama", for the lack of a better word. Simply make the PR remove people from the moderators list and say "We don't want to be moderators anymore", but instead they give clues to what could have happen for them to take this action. I guess you can say that their action was "semi-public". It wasn't trying to be completely private, and neither completely public, but somewh…

But if you just say "we don't want to be moderators anymore" nothing would change would it? The whole point of the statement is that the mod-team believes something in the organisational structure needs to change.

What would you have done in that case?

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#262
post #124

Things are happening behind closed doors in Rust's leadership. First there was a post from Steve Klabnik, a member from the Core team, about how Amazon is taking too much power in the Rust leadership (discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513130 ). Then that post, that seems against the Core team. I would appreciate some transparency and clarity about what's happening. Lots of people are currently won…

See the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515306.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#263
post #85
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but there is no way for us to know who the wrongdoer is in this case.

Why do we care? Are we in middle school? We are professionals - I'm not going to get involved in playground politics.

Proprietary software has a lot of problems and open source was a good response to them, but it's notable that proprietary isn't as prone to the 'middle school' problem. When money is involved, there's more alignment.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#264
post #147

These organizational breakdowns in tech communities (recently Rust,.NET, Elm) make me much more appreciative of long-running, relatively healthy communities.

Technical communities are formed around common purpose. They are not goals in themselves. Community needs only to be healthy enough to get things done. Take for example OpenBSD. Theo de Raadt may be an asshole sometimes, but he knows stuff can still steer the technology. OpenBSD is extremely opinionated even technologically, but it's really good.

This doesn't scale though, and OpenBSD - as much as I love it - is a clear example of that. Compare Theo who remains abrasive at times, and Linus, who realized that project the size of Linux cannot be handled with complete disregard for safe, inviting environment. Toxic leaders are the reason there's this idea that projects that are built on merit somehow must be ruthless and uninviting. It's really easy to e.g. confuse critique and criticism and in result give project the "avoid whenever possible" badge.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An accusation substantiated in secret is not an accusation substantiated. This is a fundamental principle of justice, dating back centuries.

You're neither the judge not the jury. They aren't trying to make the case to you. The case has (it seems) been made and resolved elsewhere. This is just a public statement saying they do not accept the resolution and therefore resign.

[deleted]

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe is better that no single action is emphasized or a single person and focus on the actual problem, the fact that there might be a group that is above the laws/rules and possible solutions. Edit: I think if some action will be made public then everyone will focus on debating why that action was correct/incorrect , then a lot of mostly politics dirt will be thrown around etc.

I'm generally in favor of enforcing high-level "behave professionally" norms in OSS communities. And not as a new phenomenon, either. I've been kick-banning disruptive people from IRC channels for several decades, I've run forums where I appointed mods, and I've always avoided participating in completely unmoderated communities beyond N=20 or so (not worth the headache). But for some reason, the formalization of cond…

With most OSS projects nowadays I don't think you have to use a mailing list or anything that would have an MOTD in order to contribute. Contributions nowadays are often done entirely through the repository, so it makes sense to put in them the things that people contemplating contribution should be cognizant of.

Repositories for most projects are more project repositories than mere code repositories.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#267

> You'll never get everyone to settle on the same moral values so it's inevitable that you'll get someone who is unapologetic about some value they hold. I'm less familiar with Rust community moderation, but as an example of what not to do, I would offer up the Go maintainers' strategy of advertising unrelated, partisan, ideological content on their web pages and then shutting down any kind of critical conversation a…

It's sad that the Equal Justice Initiative[0] (linked by the Go homepage) is considered partisan.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Justice_Initiative

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe is better that no single action is emphasized or a single person and focus on the actual problem, the fact that there might be a group that is above the laws/rules and possible solutions. Edit: I think if some action will be made public then everyone will focus on debating why that action was correct/incorrect , then a lot of mostly politics dirt will be thrown around etc.

> focus on the actual problem, the fact that there might be a group that is above the laws/rules and possible solutions I just find it hard to understand on how you are suppose to see if the group is above the rules or how you can find any possible solutions, when what is supposed to have exemplified the problem is kept in the dark.

They are saying that if those people keep it up, they can't have a Mod Team. It is an expression of an incompatibility between expansive power residing in the Core Team and the existence of a Mod Team. You don't really need a specific situation to see how that could obviously happen (classic power struggle), or to believe it has recently happened. Story as old as time.

At its height, this resignation constitutes (a) a plea for people in power to exercise it better, and (b) for those people to voluntarily become more accountable for some pattern of behaviour. (A) might be effective, if only because Rust governance so far prides itself on all the things that come with having a Mod Team. Not having one is embarrassing.

But point (b), which is indeed the focus of the resignation message, is plain magical thinking to my eye. Accountability I understand it is the acceptance of responsibility, by someone, for some thing. Someone else fundamentally needs to know what that something is for that to happen. It cannot happen if the thing is kept completely under wraps, but it can be approximated with limited but trustworthy disclosure, and this is the basis for the levels upon levels of that in e.g. national security regulation. That is a very difficult problem in its specifics, but the theory is simple: inform someone trustworthy and neutral, and then tell everyone else that you informed them.

What this message lacks is any indication of which people do know what the specific acts by Core Team members were and who did them, and what position those people are in to verify if anything is done about it. If you are unwilling to muck-rake in public, you need to give everyone else a proxy by which to gauge your generic claims. In normal governments this takes many many forms, including ministers, Inspectors-General, privileged parliamentary committees, etc. But you do not need a formal role, you simply have to nominate someone outside your group and your opposition (ie appears neutral on the face of it) that is aware of the facts. Without that, everybody who sees this will have to gauge your claims on the extremely minimal information provided plus your own reputation, but with no credible claim to neutrality on the issue. Even one such person would be better than all of the co-signatures on that letter combined.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#270
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible for a message to have an intended audience and still be viewable by others...

"viewable by others" And I'm sure that the authors of the message are aware of that but made the decision to write what they have written anyway.

Yes? This is posted to the Rust Org's issue tracker: that is an appropriate place to post a resignation notice for an open org with heavy community interactions, and it's an appropriate place to inform the Rust community in general about their decision. That it happens to be public outside of those groups is beside the point. Do you often show up on Open Source projects complaining that their public scrum boards or pull requests don't document their entire decision-making process? Do you show up in people's IRC logs demanding that they provide context for everything they say?

The mod team isn't asking for public debate, they're informing the org about their resignation and briefly listing out why. They don't need to convince you of anything, they're just telling you what their decision already is. This isn't a persuasive essay, this is a notification.

I swear, this kind of "if anything is public, you're now suddenly accountable to me, and I should have full access to everything" attitude is exactly why so few organizations are open about any of their internal processes or decisions. It shows up in a lot of places: Open Source and game development in particular. Sometimes people have public conversations in forums/groups that are still intended for specific recipients. Sometimes people share a small part of a process or decision, and not all of it. Sometimes people muse about decisions openly, and their musings aren't intended to be a formal essay to be picked apart or debated. It's fine.

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