Moderating and Code of Conduct

Background: Ubuntu Community Council’s decision (linking to awesome LWN) to remove Jonathan Riddell as the leader of the Kubuntu project.

To me there seems to be a lot of similarities between above and personal experience with moderating. Basically: don’t moderate in threads you’ve participated in because you’re biased. If you think you’re unbiased, guess again and have fun dealing with the fallout if you still take a decision. I thought a few times that I really could be unbiased and was proven wrong each time.

One thing I really like from the GNOME Code of Conduct is:

Assume people mean well

I really like this one because even if you think the person is the worst ever, easily the biggest troll around, no good for anything and basically is just nothing more than a poisonous person who should be kicked out of the project for the good of the project: think again.
I’ve read some of the email communication, and I think there’s something missing in the communication between the various people involved. It would be nice if at least someone would state that the objections they have are not personal. There might be heavy disagreement, but that’s because both want the overall project to succeed and grow.

Something else that would help is expressing the feeling directly to the other person. There’s an anonymous email and the person who wrote it comes across as someone who is trying to do everything the person can and getting frustrated because it feels like the persons work is being considered as bad and nowhere good enough. I’m guessing if people would directly express their frustrations, the other person would quickly apologize for making them feel that way. This can be done while still keeping everyone opinion the same (started with some legal stuff; it’s not about this though).

Not liking some outcome is separate from being able to appreciate the person or persons. I really hope the focus can be on expressing that everyone has the best intentions. Best intentions might’ve lead to frustrations and whatever not, but hopefully once the intention is clear people can apologize and move on.

Ubuntu project is for human beings / humanity to others. I really like this. You can pretty easily recommend Ubuntu and it has pretty heavy brand recognition; so much that people automatically use Ubuntu. For a tv show technical linux is showing some terminal with dmesg; anywhere an easy Linux is needed people suddenly seem to somehow found www.ubuntu.com. That said, I contribute to Mageia and everyone (users+contributors) should switch to it 😛

I don’t think the current path is good for the Ubuntu project so hope above can be taken into consideration.