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.”

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