Re: [RFC] [Draft] Adopt Code of Conduct

On 1/8/16 12:31 PM, Paul M. Jones wrote:

On Jan 8, 2016, at 12:16, Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote: On 1/8/16 11:28 AM, Paul M. Jones wrote:

On Jan 7, 2016, at 23:52, Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote: Do you think we can find 5 people in the PHP community that we can trust to make fair decisions (NOT that we would always agree with, but that are fair) that don't fall too far into "thought policing", in *any* direction? If not, then the community is already lost beyond all hope and we should all just give up now. I do not believe that to be the case, at all.

Too long spent in a position of power, and even the most fair can become unfair. As I have suggested before: *if* there is to be a response team, let it be randomly selected on per-reported-incident basis from the pool of voters. Then there is no possibility of a charge of continuing bias, and it distributes power among the pool, instead of concentrating it into a few members. Proponents of the response team: thoughts?

Randomly selected: Absolutely not. I wouldn't randomly select someone to make Ultimate Decision(tm) on a technical RFC, either. But if a question about, say, a parser bug came up there are absolutely certain people that I would trust with that question more than others, and defer to their analysis/opinion more readily.

Certain people *you* would trust more than others, but that *others* would not trust more. Also, this is a social/political realm, and not a technical realm; would you not trust, say, a randomly-selected jury to hear and decide on a case? If not, why not?

As many people, including both you and I, have said, we don't want to focus on the "jury" aspect. Rather, we want to focus on conflict resolution and mediation, not on hammer dropping. And conflict resolution and mediation is not even remotely a universal skill. No, I would not trust a "select a person at random" as a "defuse a situation" role, not even a little. -- --Larry Garfield