When Consensus is Appropriate

Posted Mar 16, 2020 16:39 UTC (Mon) by hartmans (subscriber, #135969)
In reply to: Handling attacks on a community by mvdwege
Parent article: Handling attacks on a community

I'll admit to being somewhat confused. I never tried to build consensus between people who believe systemd is the focus and people who wish more of the project to focus on alternatives.
Consensus was not possible there, and it was obvious to me by the time I was elected that was true.
Similarly, I have never tried to engage with Daniel Pocock in a consensus discussion while I was DPL.
Why didn't I fully ban Daniel from the project earlier? Honestly, by the time I became DPL, I thought that had effectively been done.
I didn't consider that he'd use the bug tracking system in that way until he did.
Why didn't we make a public statement about Daniel earlier?
For a while, we weren't sure it was necessary. Especially during the first part of my term, I was deferring to others.
Later, though, we weren't quite sure how to do it. But then the time for immediate action was at hand and I made that statement because it was necessary.
In no point was this about building a consensus with Daniel.
Some parts of Debian's response did involve waiting for consensus to emerge within teams responsible for handling harassment. And some decisions aren't entirely the DPL's to make and so I waited on others to come to their decisions.
Consensus is a valuable tool, but I assure you it is not always the right answer.

When Consensus is Appropriate

Posted Mar 17, 2020 15:32 UTC (Tue) by mvdwege (guest, #113583) [Link]

Oh, I've read enough of your contributions on the mailing lists to know that you're not *endlessly* searching for consensus. And in fact I like that you are judicious; I myself am a black-and-white kind of person.

That difference in personality also means that sometimes I thought when a discussion was exploding "I wish Sam was a little more decisive". You do eventually come to the conclusion that consensus is impossible, and then you are decisive. I just think that you left it a few iterations of discussion too long on occasion.

And yes, I picked the recent flare-up of systemd as an example, because on debian-devel and debian-project you were focusing more on process issues and less on keeping the Devuan supporters in line, IMO. I could have read that wrong, that's inherent in non-FtF communication. In that case I apologise.