Of hall monitors and slippery slopes

Since its inception in July of 2009, the Fedora Hall Monitor policy has had mixed reviews. The intent of the policy is to promote more civil discourse on various Fedora mailing lists—to embody the "be excellent to each other" motto that is supposed to govern project members' behavior. Questions were raised about the recent "hall monitoring" of a thread on fedora-devel, because, instead of the usual reasons for stopping a thread—personal attacks, profanity, threats of violence, and the like—it was stopped, essentially, for going on too long.

Kevin Kofler's open letter about why he was not going to run again for a seat on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) was the starting point of the problem thread. But the focus of the discussion was mostly on the update process for Fedora, something which has been roiling the Fedora waters for several months now. Kofler strongly believes that the proposals requiring more "karma"—votes in favor, essentially—in the bodhi package management system before pushing out updates are simply bureaucratic in nature and won't prevent problems with updates. Other FESCo members, apparently the vast majority of them, disagree. As FESCo member Matthew Garrett put it:

But Kofler believes that package maintainers should be able to make these decisions, without hard and fast testing requirements imposed by FESCo, or the Fedora Packaging Committee (FPC). Kofler and others are quite happy with the status quo, whereas other community members—both FESCo and not—see that problems with upgrades are giving the project something of a black eye. Kofler is adamant in his response to Garrett:

Most of these arguments are familiar to those who follow fedora-devel. The participants in the discussion are often the same and the positions they take are fairly predictable. But the content was on-topic and the discourse wasn't descending into personal attacks or insults, so it was something of a surprise to many when hall monitor Seth Vidal stepped in and closed the thread:

The last line turns out to have been somewhat premature as the thread continued, only it switched to focus on the hall monitors' decision. Toshio Kuratomi asked how the Hall Monitor policy—which is undergoing some changes as a result of this issue—could be applied to redundant threads:

Vidal quoted a blanket provision in the policy that allows thread closure posts for "aggressive or problematic mailing list threads" as the reason the action was taken. That didn't sit well with a number of folks. Kofler complained: "This vague paragraph can be abused to justify censoring pretty much everything." Adam Williamson had a more detailed analysis:

Evidently, three users and two hall monitors had complained about the thread, which was enough to constitute "repeated complaints". But, because the topic had (mostly) shifted away from the update process and into things like hall monitoring and Fedora's "purpose" (or goal, i.e. "what is Fedora for?"), it was allowed to continue. In the end, the "thread closure" led to roughly doubling the size of a thread which may—or may not—have been winding down on its own.

In a post to fedora-advisory-board, Kuratomi requested that the board look into the issue with an eye toward clarifying the policy. He suggested three ways to resolve the issue: restricting the hall monitors' remit to just insults and personal attacks, specifically calling out redundant threads as an area for the hall monitors to police, or allowing thread closures based on the number of complaints received. Kuratomi is in favor of the first option, "as the others are taking us too far into the realm of giving a few people the power to decide what is and is not useful communication."

At its May 6 meeting, the board did discuss the issue. While it is clear that several board members are not in favor of having hall monitors, and were surprised when this particular thread was "clipped off", as Mike McGrath put it, there is more to the problem than just the policy. At its core, the problem is that Fedora is still struggling with its identity.

Some community members would like to see Fedora be a well-polished desktop distribution that gets released every six months and is relatively stable from there—a la Ubuntu. Others see Fedora as a refuge for those who don't like the Ubuntu approach, want to get frequent package updates, and live closer to the "bleeding edge". It is, at the very least, difficult for one distribution to support both of those models, but in some sense that is what Fedora is currently trying to do.

Because the project hasn't made a firm commitment to a particular direction, at least one to the exclusion of the other, there are advocates on both sides who are trying hard to pull the distribution in the direction they want. Kofler is loudly, and repetitively, making his case that Fedora will lose a sizable chunk of its users and contributors if it becomes more conservative about updates. Others argue that update woes are driving users and contributors away.

McGrath is firmly in the camp that Fedora should first decide what it is and what its goals are, and then ask those who are "chronically unhappy" with that direction to leave the project. That would lead to less contentious mailing list threads among other things. It's a hard problem, he said, and "we don't want everyone who's unhappy with Fedora to leave"

In a discussion that lasted for more than an hour, the board looked at various facets of the problems, but hall monitor Josh Boyer brought it back to the particular thread in question. He asked if there was "anyone on the Board that thinks the recent hall monitor action was inappropriate". Matt Domsch and McGrath were both surprised at the action, while John Poelstra was not, and the rest of the board was non-committal. No one said that they found the action inappropriate, but Domsch suggested that the board recommend "that hall monitors provide additional latitude to long threads that may be redundant, but that aren't violent".

Poelstra wanted to see some "overall objectives for having this policy" added to the policy document as well. Both he and Domsch took action items to edit the policy for board approval at its next meeting on May 13. The changes that were made seem much in keeping with what the board members were saying, so it seems likely that the board will approve them.

Seemingly arbitrary thread closures are clearly a concern to some in the community. Trying to determine which threads are "making progress" versus those that are just repetitive is difficult—and extremely likely to be contentious. While the goals of the hall monitor policy are generally good, it isn't clear that making decisions on specific threads to try to stop discussions getting "out of hand" is a good way forward. It is something of a "slippery slope". There are too many fine lines that need to be drawn—and then challenged by dissenters—that it may just be an exercise in futility.

For the current problem thread, at least, the real underlying issues have yet to be completely addressed. As Fedora moves toward implementing the new packaging rules, which may slow down the usual Fedora update stream, the decline in users and contributors that Kofler envisions may occur. The opposite could happen as well. Only time will tell.