Planet Fedora guidelines?

[Máirín Duffy]

On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 09:37 -0500, inode0 wrote:
> Whatever happened to the days when the planet was a place for
> contributors to express themselves, both personally and
> professionally, "warts and all?"

At least a couple of things have happened since those days:

- our community has gotten bigger, unwritten social rules aren't as
easily known anymore

- the privilege of being a member of the planet has been extended to
anyone who signs up for an FAS account. From my POV, it used to be on
many if not most planets that you had to work within the project for a
while and become a well-known contributor before you were extended an
invitation to be added, which was considered a sort of honor. (Obviously
there are problems with that older model, like who gets to decide and
when)

I enjoy reading about Fedora contributors' lives outside of Fedora, and
I don't think anyone would advocate that posts to our planet must be
Fedora-only. 

That shouldn't give any one person carte blanche to post whatever they
want, however. There are many Planet contributors who filter out
particular posts from reaching the planet because they actually care to
consider their audience. That kind of consideration for other people is
a good thing.

> Given that the Fedora Planet is a fine place to express political
> views about what is going on in one country or another I can't believe
> we are now talking about policing posts that appear to actually be
> about free software.

Seth mentioned the possibility of policing the post. I think the post is
a problem but I don't know if policing is the best way to deal with it.
> 
> When I asked on this list about discouraging political rants on the
> planet because it makes us all look like idiots to new readers I was
> given the "warts and all" explanation of why that is fine. I accepted
> that then and unless it was complete BS this doesn't bother me in the
> least.

I don't think I read that discussion - I don't remember it. It's kind of
hard to draw a strong line. It's easy to say "Fedora posts only" but I
don't think anyone wants that. I also think there are several valid
cases for Ubuntu-related posts on the planet, and such posts have
happened before without issue. 

But how about sexualized photos of scantily-clad women? I'm not cool
with that. Maybe some people are, but I don't want to have to stop
reading planet Fedora because I'm afraid of what might come up. If I'm
browsing planet Fedora during the workday and a big picture of Lucy Liu
in a wet white bikini is on my screen, according to my office's sexual
harassment policies, I'd be in trouble! To folks who don't work for Red
Hat, such an incident might be reason for their work in Fedora to no
longer be sanctioned by their employer.

To me it seems there are clearly classes of posts that aren't
acceptable.

> > Maybe we don't need policies and enforcement (I certainly think they are
> > an annoying overhead on top of anything they are applied to), but I
> > certainly do not want to have to tolerate this kind of crap and enable
> > people to be less than excellent *just* for the sake of not having
> > policies and enforcement.
> >
> > The person is apparently a new FAS account holder and a recent Planet
> > Fedora addition, and just may not understand. And how would he if we
> > don't have any guidelines written anywhere?
> 
> He will learn the ropes by having other contributors "be excellent" to
> him by making a stink about commenting on the Ubuntu manual project?

First of all, did you take a look at the link he provided? To me, it
appears to be a commercial page looking to grab a lot of detailed
personal information about people before offering anything of use.

Secondly, are you criticizing me for bringing this up at all? How have I
been not excellent in bringing up the issue here? Should I have kept my
mouth shut? Is what I've written in protest really offensive or hurtful
to the poster in question?

~m