Improving the list climate [was Re: Fwd: Fedora Weekly News 228]

[Máirín Duffy]

On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 16:56 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> George - I think that you are very offensive towards people who
> volunteer their time. It's easy to understand why Fedora contributors
> don't actually want to participate on the user lists and get abused by
> unappreciative, sarcastic and combative users.

How do we fix this?

- moderation?
- a code of conduct?
- ?

I've found some of the behavior of a few on this list to be quite
embarrassing. To me, it seems an alien island in the middle of the
Fedora community that I know to be a genuinely warm, friendly, and
welcoming place.

Do we want new users to witness this kind of behavior? They are directed
towards this list right now via a number of different pointers. My team
is planning to redesign the Fedora website for Fedora 14, and I'm not
sure we can in good conscience continue to point new users to this list
[1].

Does anyone have any ideas on how to improve this situation? We've had a
small few but notable trolls in the past 6 years on the Fedora
art/design lists, and the one solution that seemed to work best was
placing badly-behaving folks on moderation for a few weeks. I don't know
if that would be the appropriate solution here, though. For example, do
we have anyone willing to take on the responsibility of moderating?

~m

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-help