| 24 Nov 2021 |
 joepie91 🏳️🌈 | many people in tech communities are, but that has also shaped the culture around tech to consider 'dealing with humans' optional, which has a lot of ramifications not just in terms of moderation, but also project management, etc. | 10:48:23 |
 @zimbatm:numtide.com | a good example of this is the decision-making process in the Nix community, for technical things | 10:49:41 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | I noticed that things tend to be worked on alone | 10:50:10 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | it works fine for package bumps | 10:50:21 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | when the topic gets too large, we often end in decision-paralysis | 10:50:41 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | yeah | 10:50:54 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | typically what happens is that there is a lot of armchair commenting happening, and that one alone person gets discouraged | 10:51:22 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | right, because we don't really have constructive collaboration structures in place | 10:51:41 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | this is one of the biggest problems of the Nix community, in my view | 10:52:28 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | it's a part of why I think we should expect people to learn about communication and community management, despite that not being the dominant culture | 10:52:31 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | it leads to a lot of burn outs | 10:52:46 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | it's simply necessary to keep the project healthy | 10:52:47 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | but that feels almost separate to moderation | 10:53:15 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | well, that depends | 10:53:24 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | it is separate from punitive moderation, for sure, but that is not really the priority that we are going for here | 10:53:38 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | that's the thing I was wondering about | 10:53:52 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | what if mediation and moderation were separate teams | 10:54:04 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | but constructive moderation, in terms of de-escalation and mediation and constructive feedback and such, overlaps very strongly with project management concerns | 10:54:10 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | I'm not sure how people take the feedback from somebody that can ban them | 10:54:35 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | of course they might decide not to listen, which is why banning is requested as a tool | 10:55:19 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | that is a complicated dynamic, for sure. but the alternative also has its issues; if the two don't function as one, things will fail both ways... moderators will interfere with a mediator's process in some cases, and fail to ban people who refuse the mediation process in other cases | 10:55:35 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | the flipside is that people will not be open because of the ban threat | 10:55:44 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | so you'd need a degree of coordination between the two that makes them de facto one thing | 10:55:54 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | right, I would expect the moderation team to take inputs from the mediation team | 10:56:28 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | as in; "we tried everything we could" | 10:56:49 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | right, but then you ultimately haven't changed anything about the dynamic of "listen to the mediator or risk a ban", you've just added a layer of potential communication signal loss | 10:57:03 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | I understand the problem you're highlighting, but I don't think that just splitting up the two would solve it | 10:57:50 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | I'm not sure it is solvable, in a literal sense | 10:58:20 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | because that dynamic affects different people differently; it can make some people hesitant to engage, but it can be the trigger that's needed for other people to actually stop and listen (and quite often is, IME) | 10:58:56 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | you can probably massage the dynamic in how it's presented to people on a case-by-case basis | 10:59:55 |
