[python-committers] python-committers is dead, long live discuss.python.org

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 11:03:59AM +0100, Paul Moore wrote:

> I mentioned something similar on Discourse, but I'm going to add a
> comment here. This sort of dismissal of the validity of other people's
> long-established workflows is not very helpful.
[snip]

Thank you Paul.

Discourse may or may not be great, but this rush to change forums in the 
midst of not one but two community crises[1] seems ill-considered. Even 
if it works out in the long run, the way it has been done seems elitist 
and anti-democratic to me.

Its especially worrisome since it isn't clear to me who has the 
authority to make this decision, and on what basis. Hypothetically 
speaking, could *I* announce next week that the Discourse experiment was 
a failure and we're all going to move to a Reddit forum?

Well, I could announce it, but nobody would pay any attention. Why 
should we pay attention to this announcement? No offense to Łukasz, but 
how did he get put in charge of this?

If it had been put as "We want to change to Discourse, and intend to do 
so over the next few months. Any questions or objections?" things would 
have been better, but instead we get the change dumped in our lap as a 
fait accompli "the mailing list is dead, stop using it IMMEDIATELY, and 
go to Discourse".

That's not open, considerate or respectful. Maybe some people and 
companies treat their staff like that, but we shouldn't treat our 
volunteers the same way.



[1] Guido's retirement as BDFL; and the recent hostile, politically- 
driven bug reports and mailing list threads leading to bannings and 
potential burn-out of moderators.


-- 
Steve