I am outraged by this as well. gnokii is an extremely productive senior member of the
design team, and he continues to contribute and mentor other designers effectively even
with his challenging internet situation and timezone differences.
There recently was a meeting in one of the #fedora-meeting channels that I *needed* him to
attend because I wanted his design advice, and I came to find out then that he could not
because of this ban, which seems to be based on a personal pet peeve and not any
intentional bad behavior on gnokii's part at all.
The feifdom of #fedora is one thing, because it at least does not impede on
contributors' basic workflows and getting things done. But to ban a productive, active
contribuor from *all* meeting channels (where contributors get work done) because -
essentially - they live in a third world country is problematic on a number of levels.
This would be akin to a Red Hat facilities person banning me from entering any Red Hat
conference rooms in my office because they were annoyed that I wore noisy high heel shoes
and they dont like the click clack sound.
The productive contributor base channels on freenode should *not* be opped in the same
manner as #fedora; I believe commops would be a better fit for the governance of general
contributor channels like the #fedora-meeting channels because they are a contributor
focused organization and managing contributors is not the same as managing end users. And
individual team channels like #fedora-design should be opped by those team leaders and not
the irc sig.
If we had the same rules that governed #fedora for #fedora-design, we'd have no
contributors... many of the designers we recruit have their very first encounter with IRC
through our team, and they don't know anything about join/part messages or configuring
proxies (not an option for everyone! Even if we offered such a service it's a
challenge to configure as my interns learned this summer) and they honestly shouldn't
have to worry about these things at all.
When Hubs is deployed, we're going to have integrated chat based on fedora's IRC
channels. As a result, a lot more non technical users without any IRC experience are going
to be using our channels. We are trying to shield them from a lot of this drama via the UX
design. The thing is, we *want* these people to join us. We *need* their perspective and
their talents and their skills. I get the feeling this isn't a shared goal. Until we
solve that fundamental disconnect, and work together to welcome new people into our
community, this problem is going to persist. And when Hubs is deployed, it may get worst
depending on how we choose to move forward here.
And, btw, we're never going to get new mods to run a channel when any potential new
contributors are chased away by rudeness and any potential exisiting contributors have
also been mistreated and warn others away from getting involved. So the problem *cannot*
be solved with more manpower. I recognize there have been many heroic and thankless
efforts to clean it up including introducing the ticket system but after 6+ years of that,
if someone like Bee can't get some friendly technical help and has an almost identical
experience to my last one in 2010 (right down to the ticket filing and meeting) it's
clearly not working.
IRC op privs should *not* be awarded like a badge of honor. Telling someone to back off
but letting them keep the privileges is wrong. Ops are *not* a status symbol they are a
responsibility and if you can't handle it you shouldn't have it.
Banning gnokii from the meeting channels? Irresponsible.
~m
------- Original Message ----------
But being banned from the meeting channel or as FAmSCo
member from ambassadors is an outrage.
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