The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: AW: Resignation

First of all: this is not meant as a personal attack on anybody. In  
situations like these, you can't seem to say this too often.

strombrg@hydra.acs.uci.edu (Dan Stromberg)  wrote on 27.02.97 in <3315A742.32F4@hydra.acs.uci.edu>:

> Folks, we keep saying we need Bruce as a leader, but then we don't let
> him lead.
>
> There was the CD-ROM thing.  There was the RC5 thing.  There was even
> the gated thing.  I'm pretty sure there were more.

Actually, this list demonstrates that "not letting him lead" is far too  
simple a description. (It's not completely wrong, either.)

What I missed in all this - and I'm sure I'm not the only one - were  
attempts to get input from the developers *before* decisions. (Just to  
make this clear, I have no intention of rehashing specific examples.)

Sure, someone should be able to have the last word.

But it being the last word somehow implies there being other words before.

A while back, this seemed to work quite good. From memory, we had a  
warning "we need to find a solution on X, please try to come up with one,  
otherwise I'll decide", and sometimes later "it seems there will be no  
consensus, so this is it". However, lately, at least IMHO, it has  
deteriorated pretty badly. We had more and more situations where, without  
any previous warning (at least that I could see), there suddenly was a  
fiat decision in a situation where it had not even been expected.

That's bad for morale. (And it also makes for the occasional bad decision.  
Note that not all the above decisions where bad, however.)

> Honestly, if we can't preserve a decent relationship with a good leader,
> the group perhaps doesn't deserve to HAVE a good leader.   It isn't
> quite enough to say "I didn't do anything to him."  You also need to
> back him up when people start jumping on his case for doing what he was
> elected to do.  That's more true for debian than most things,
> because...   folks on the net just tend to disagree pretty brashly.

Especially when they get commanded around pretty brashly. And this did  
happen.

My impression was that a while back, this was going a lot better from  
*both* sides. I don't know who made the original wrong turn here, and I  
don't think it even matters.

However, the blame is not all on one side. (Of course, it almost never  
is.)


So, my personal summary:

Whoever will take leading positions in the project (this goes for more  
people than just the project leader) - try not to give the impression that  
your decisions are made without input, without prior discussion.

And the rest of us, voice any objections in that prior discussion (and  
also any support); when it is over, and some sort of decision has been  
made, if at all possible, live with it and shut up. There'll be other  
topics to discuss.


MfG Kai