On 7/16/19 7:09 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:
On 7/16/19 2:39 PM, Doug Royer wrote:
You can not achieve your goal when you quit. How important are your
goals to you?
It seems to me that driving away people with energy and
ideas because they're not willing to deal with the tone of
discussions here (and let's be clear: there are no longer
very many organizations in which abusive language or behavior
is tolerated) and leave, either to focus on implementation
or to take their work to another body, the IETF is the loser,
not the person who left. I worry about several factors
degrading the quality of our output and this is certainly one
of them.
I would really like to make a clear distinction between "tone" and
"abusive language or behavior" because they're not the same thing at
all. IMO, "tone policing" is nearly always destructive, and sometimes
itself a form of abuse (sometimes also inappropriate manipulation of a
political outcome).
Having said that, I certainly agree that when we deter useful
contributions from people by whatever means, we do ourselves a
disservice. That goes for tone policing as much as anything else.
I wonder how many useful contributors of the past we've scared away by
trying to curtail their earnest efforts to contribute discussion of
frustrating technical problems?
Keith
