[python-committers] How to calm down the discussion on the PEP 572?

[Carol Willing]

> On Apr 26, 2018, at 8:03 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org <mailto:guido at python.org>> wrote:
> 
> The way to calm discussions is to stop responding.

Hi Victor,

In the gentlest way that I know how, I commend you for considering the impact that emails have on PEP writers especially when "dogpiling" (i.e. folks jumping in without anything new to add to the discussion on a controversial issue). People are hard :( and wonderful :)

In my experience, people's actions (as Guido mentions) do more to calm things than technology. One slippery slope with a technical solution is that people then begin to game the technical system. Responding calmly, staying on topic by addressing the approach not the PEP writer, seeking to work toward a better solution than shooting down an idea, and slowing your response time are ways to calm things down and improve productivity. These concepts are well proven by the Harvard Negotiation project.

One constructive thing that we can do is to put yourself in the shoes of the PEP writer before pressing "send" and consider how you might "feel" if you received the message that you are about to send.

Warmly,

Carol


> 
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 4:02 AM, Victor Stinner <vstinner at redhat.com <mailto:vstinner at redhat.com>> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Since 2 or 3 years, I saw that that discussions on some PEPs get more
> and more emails every year. Maybe because Python became more popular?
> Openness is a Python quality, but shortly, the amount of emails
> becomes an issue, at least for the author of the PEP.
> 
> I counted the number of emails per day of the python-dev mailing list,
> using mbox archives available at:
> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/ <https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/>
> 
> My script:
> https://github.com/vstinner/misc/blob/master/python/parse_mailman_mbox.py <https://github.com/vstinner/misc/blob/master/python/parse_mailman_mbox.py>
> 
> In March, python-dev got 246 emails with a maximum of 31 the 2018-03-21.
> 
> In April, the traffic was between 3 and 27 emails per day until the
> start of the chaos:
> 
> ...
> 2018-04-17: 27
> 2018-04-18: 20
> 2018-04-19: 11
> 2018-04-20: 36
> 2018-04-21: 36
> 2018-04-22: 31
> 2018-04-23: 32
> 2018-04-24: 72
> 2018-04-25: 76
> 2018-04-26: 23
> 2018-04-27: 10
> 
> Current maximum: 76 emails received at 2018-04-25!?
> 
> I'm not sure that it's still possible to read carefully all emails to
> python-dev and write constructive replies. It seems like people are
> answering immediately, without reading past emails nor reading other
> emails sent the same day.
> 
> I'm also concerned by the general mood of the discussion. Are we still
> discussing arguments in polite way?
> 
> How can we calm down the discussion, and ask people to don't reply
> immediately but instead try to listen to the other people?
> 
> IHMO everybody had enough time to give their very important opinion (I
> wrote my own very important opinion, don't worry!) on python-ideas and
> then on python-dev. We are now turning around.
> 
> Can we give Chris more time to update his PEP? In my experience, the
> PEP is the most constructive tool to drive a discussion.
> 
> I chose to write to python-committers because I now fear that I would
> get too many replies on python-dev ...
> 
> Victor
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> 
> 
> 
> --
> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido <http://python.org/~guido>)
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