I'm trying to get my head around today's Rust keynote mess (https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023).
I could be very, very wrong here, as I don't know volunteer org dynamics properly, but:
Why aren't names being named?
Who said what, on behalf of whom, in what role, is important to have transparency & accountability for power. (If you don't want your name on it, maybe it's not good?)
Obviously there's some over-simplication, as demonstrated by the TM fiasco...
Setting individuals up for a dogpile is bad, so giving ownership of contentious decisions to a committee seems reasonable - but by doing that you get to make sure it really is a committee decision, and the ownership remains clear.
OTOH, I don't get why the TM proposal was so badly communicated, but the most likely explanation for that it's hard & I'm missing something.
Still... there seems to be a transparency issue, and I can't tell how to solve it without identifying decision-makers.
I found fasterthanli.me's view interesting: https://gist.github.com/fasterthanlime/42da9378768aebef662dd26dddf04849
It's spurred a few thoughts in me:
1) I'm not pessimistic about the Rust org yet. A 100% SLO on human behaviour is unrealistic, what matters to me is the incident response and improvements.
2) Oh darn, a blameless incident review focusing on systems, not people, is hard to reconcile with the transparency of naming everyone involved.
In a normal IR at work, names can be used because of the assumption of good intent...
but that's not going to happen on an open internet discussion, even if everyone thought they were following process or doing the right thing.
(I'm assuming no-one was trying something they thought nefarious, because how dumb would you have to be to think no-one would notice, given all this?).
And... even in a "blameless" incident review, very occasionally there's just bad behaviour that needs addressing. (*)
(*) Concrete example, paraphrased:
"We are only allowed to do X in an emergency. I want to do X, I think it would be good, overall. Can I gently nudge the system into emergency so I can do X?"
"No. If you do that, deliberately finding a loophole to bypass policy you disagree with, 'blameless' will not save you."
They listened, it all turned out fine. Sometimes it's worth checking the odds on forgiveness even if you're not requesting permission.
Anyway, 3) I believe in back channels.
A lot of this mess seems to have come with the misuse of back channels.
As a manager, I spent a lot of time chatting with individuals or small groups about stuff involving a large group. It's efficient and effective.
The point, though, is that the public, wider discussion is genuine: If a decision is made with a wider group, it really is made there. They're not bypassed, it's no rubber stamp.
Back channels should only assist official channels.
https://hackmd.io/@joshtriplett/Hyd7SGX82 is really interesting.
It looks less like "people bypassed governance mechanisms" and more like "there are no governance mechanisms". Despite the fact that decisions are clearly being made ad hoc by a few individuals, the reluctance remains to name people beyond those who've self-identifed.
And... reading it, I could see myself making the same mistakes, because that's the system they've built.
Also, the idea of approving keynote speakers, but not speeches, boggles me.
An obvious improvement that seems to suggest itself here is to increase transparency: pretty large distortions seem to have happened in a game of telephone of length 3. If we are in a world where people miscommunicate a lot, decreasing lengths of games of telephone by making more things public/talking in larger shared spaces instead of having people convey them between smaller spaces sounds like an improvement.
I wonder whether you'd disagree; I'm probably missing downsides of doing that (or missing reasons why they wouldn't help that much).
@robryk I agree with your solution, but not your analysis! :)
In one view, it wasn't telephone: the message "downgrade this talk" was transmitted too well! Two people didn't push back, a shorter chain would be worse.
The problem was lack of clarity around authority & lack of opportunity for people not acting as message-carriers/implementers to disagree.
And that's where the proper use of shared spaces *and formal decision processes* come in. Otherwise unilateral actions continue.