Re: Tolerance

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 7/16/19 7:09 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:

> On 7/16/19 2:39 PM, Doug Royer wrote:
>> You can not achieve your goal when you quit. How important are your
>> goals to you?
> It seems to me that driving away people with energy and
> ideas because they're not willing to deal with the tone of
> discussions here (and let's be clear: there are no longer
> very many organizations in which abusive language or behavior
> is tolerated) and leave, either to focus on implementation
> or to take their work to another body, the IETF is the loser,
> not the person who left.  I worry about several factors
> degrading the quality of our output and this is certainly one
> of them.

I would really like to make a clear distinction between "tone" and 
"abusive language or behavior" because they're not the same thing at 
all.   IMO, "tone policing" is nearly always destructive, and sometimes 
itself a form of abuse (sometimes also inappropriate manipulation of a 
political outcome).

Having said that, I certainly agree that when we deter useful 
contributions from people by whatever means, we do ourselves a 
disservice.   That goes for tone policing as much as anything else.

I wonder how many useful contributors of the past we've scared away by 
trying to curtail their earnest efforts to contribute discussion of 
frustrating technical problems?

Keith