Shutting down the sounder mailing list

We have regularly been made aware of recurring problems on this list.
The tone and atmosphere are unmatched in other Ubuntu mailing lists. At
one point, Mark reached out [1] to remind everyone how we want to
communicate with each other. Still debates kept getting out of hand and
were mostly wildly unrelated to Ubuntu. Alan reached out again [2] and
made clear that the list had long moved away from its initial focus and
welcoming atmosphere. No solutions for the problem were brought up in
the list discussion or in the Community Council meeting.

In the meeting on April 19th the CC decided to shut down the Sounder
mailing list. In essence, this is a decision to prune areas of the
project which are offtopic or ungoverned, on the basis that they
distract from our shared community focus on the goal of delivering free
software in the best possible state, on particular terms (free of
charge, cadence). While we appreciate that the Sounder list (and
possibly other, similar forums) provide a particular social release for
those who use them, we think there are better forums for each of the
varied topics discussed there. Some of those are inside the project,
most are elsewhere.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2009-December/013663.html
[2] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2011-April/016351.html

Thanks for all the fun moments on the list, see you elsewhere,
 your Community Council

Looks like it's closing time. Lets move the party.

Given that sounder is closing, those of us who still think this
sub-community is worth preserving could move to
   http://groups.google.com/group/bikeshed

Any objections?

I have put up a draft description:

"This group is for informal discussion between people who identify as
members of the Ubuntu community. This group is not affiliated with the
Ubuntu project, does not represent the official view of anyone, and
probably isn't representative either of users or developers. Try not
to feed flame-wars."

I don't claim that is the best possible description of the group. Nor
do I claim to know whether the group needs moderation, or needs to be
more inclusive etc. Such issues could perhaps be decided by discussion
between people who care enough to show up at the new mailing list.

--

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted

Dead community walking

Dear Community Council

Dissent, disagreement and debate are not bad. Inclusion does mean
inclusion. Monocultures are inherently flawed. Consider some
introspection.

You are the Community Council. Good for you. Sounder members are part
of the Ubuntu community. That is, or should be, far more important. As
a result what your decision to close the list says, louder and more
clearly than anything else is this:

"we, The Community Council, get to decide who should and should not be
members of the community. We, The Community Council, don't like the
Sounder list, nor do we approve of the attitudes of many of the
members who frequent it. We, The Community Council, think inclusion
means to include those we approve of and exclude everyone else. We,
the Community Council, want everyone who is not like us or does not
hold our narrow political views to be eliminated from the community
forthwith"

But inclusion is about tolerance; not your weird narrow view of
tolerance, but actual tolerance. Inclusion is not about including some
identified groups while excluding others, grouped or otherwise. In
fact identifying groups is inherently anti-inclusion: those people
(who are not like us, this group) need to be specifically included
(now we have identified them as a specific group who are different and
need special treatment).

"It’s important to remember that a community where people feel
uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one" Ubuntu CoC

Re: Dead List Walking

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Michael Haney <thezorch <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> Canonical is causing more trouble for itself by closing Sounder than
> they are resolving any issues.  In other words, this decision will
> come back to haunt you.

I think there is some confusion here. It's not Canonical who is
shutting down the list, it's the Ubuntu Community Council[0] which
came to the decision, most of us don't work for Canonical.

[0] https://launchpad.net/~communitycouncil/+members

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com

--

-- 
sounder mailing list
sounder <at> lists.ubuntu.com
Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/sounder

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An open letter to Alan Pope

Dear Mr Pope and the rest of the Ubuntu Community Council,

Alan, you have displayed your true colors today.  After assuring me
that this item would be brought up at the next community meeting
rather than today's, I decided to disregard the inflammatory rhetoric
about your character, and put my trust in you as a representative of
the community.

That trust was obviously misplaced.

I say this because I feel that on top of you misleading me (and
others) about the time of the meeting, you also chose to deliberately
mischarachterize a number of my statements and selectively present the
evidence I so exhaustively prepared, so as to bolster your own opinion
that the list should be closed.

I call foul.  I call foul on the entire CC.  Because if you voted to
close the list you did so because it was your opinion that it should
be shut regardless of community input and evidence to the contrary OR
because you neglected to do your duty and investigate the information
put forth by Mr. Pope (he was kind enough to link to original messages
while quoting out of context, isn't that nice?)

Whether it be negligence or malfeasance, I stand disappointed in your service.

Due to this misconduct, and other recent flagrant missteps by the
Ubuntu community, I will be looking elsewhere for my Linux needs.  I
have no need for a community in which someone so dishonest and
underhanded gains a respected and representative status.

Thank you and good day,
Samuel

Re: Dead List Walking

On 04/19/2011 07:44 PM, Michael Haney wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 7:34 PM, Mike Basinger<mike.basinger <at> ubuntu.com>  wrote:
>> The CC is not in a "out to get you mindset" if that is what you mean.  If thing get out of hand here now, I will put
the list on the moderation until the list in closed.
>>
>> Mike
>>
> To make it short, closing down Sounder is a Bad Idea.
>
> You can claim the decision wasn't emotionally motivated or a political
> decision all you want but its what the community will "think the
> reasons were" that counts.  The wise and more level headed decisions
> would be to moderate the Sounder list than to close it completely.
> That way the CC could avoid the "appearance" of impropriety and not
> loose any of its credibility with the community.  As it is, word will
> spread and there will be rumors and rumors are very hard to stamp out.
>
> Canonical is causing more trouble for itself by closing Sounder than
> they are resolving any issues.  In other words, this decision will
> come back to haunt you.
>
  Well I am sure sorry to see this.  Off topic is likely the biggest 
problem with e-mail lists. Most list don't allow the group to stray of 
topic.  This means that arguments generally can't go anywhere or settle 
anything. A list that allows real destructive flaming and one that allow 
absolutely no off topic always fail. These will close because it 
frustrating to not be able to carry and argument through and the same 
for not being able start an argument at all. Flaming does not address 
the subject but instead disgusts everyone and eventually the flamer. 
Nobody gets much satisfaction out of either one. Very few arguments can 
stay on a strict topic and achieve anything so authority is need to 
bring it back to some resemblance to topic.  A list can't be a 
conversation list without conversation and that can't exist without some 
argument.  Set five people in a circle talking and an argument will 
break out, if it doesn't, tomorrow someone will say those guys don't 
talk about anything and he won't be back and the next day, and next day.
     I was very happy to find Sounder and I thought I had found a place 
for discussion.   Discussion where everyone agrees is less than 
worthless. Sounder has been a place to feel a part of a community with 
varied as well as Ubuntu interests.   I think a few were aggravated 
simply by their lack of control and there was a small meeting and most 
only had to agree. That's always easy and never good. Closing the list 
is not a solution it is a failure.
     My thinking is that a conversation list needs a certain amount of 
guidance to keep it within some boundary but it should not be too heavy 
handed as this decision seems to me to be.  I feel as though though this 
community is being bullied and I don't like it when Government does it. 
I don't like it when religion does it and I don't like it when my 
software group does it.  I will find some place to carry on conversation 
on line. It just probobly won't be an ubuntu group if there is none to 
talk on.   All I can say is I hope this group made as much difference to 
some others as it did for me.           Doug

Re: Dead List Walking

Dead List Walking

Heh, my first, and last post to this list.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityCouncil/TeamReports/11/April

Meeting 2011-04-19

    CC decided to close the Sounders mailing list. In essence, this is a 
decision to prune areas of the project which are offtopic or ungoverned, 
on the basis that they distract from our shared community focus on the 
goal of delivering free software in the best possible state, on 
particular terms (free of charge, cadence). While we appreciate that the 
Sounders list (and possibly other, similar forums) provide a particular 
social release for those who use them, we think there are better forums 
for each of the varied topics discussed there. Some of those are inside 
the project, most are elsewhere. 

Transcript of IRC meeting log here:
http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/04/19/%23ubuntu-meeting.html

--

-- 
sktsee

The OOo, LibreOffice Tale Should Be a Warning To Canonical, Other FOSS Projects

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/04/oracle-gives-up-on-ooo-after-community-forks-the-project.ars

Oracle is throwing in the towel on OpenOffice after the majority of
the community jumped ship and sided with The Document Foundation and
LibreOffice.  This move by the community to fork OOo due to Oracle's
heavy handed handling of the project should be a warning to not just
Canonical, but any other major Open Source project that runs things
like a totalitarian regime and fails to listen to the cries of its
community.

Anger the community enough and they will fork the project, and the
community will leave the original to molder and die.

That's the beauty of Open Source, if the project you love is being run
by a tyrant who isn't listening to your suggestion or complaint you
can fork the project and build a new community based on higher ideals.
 There is a growing sense that Canonical isn't listening to its
community.  There's been several issues which haven't been addressed
for some time, and when they're brought up they're usually blown off.
One of the big issues is the removal of the monitor model selection
feature from the screen resolution system preferences window.  This
has left a greatly underestimated number of users in a quandary, and
since the majority of them are newbies to Linux most give up and never
give Ubuntu a second glance.  This in turn is hurting Ubuntu's image
as a "user friendly" Linux distribution in the eyes of those whom the
project depends the most more so than developers ... the user
community.  Without the users Ubuntu would be Linux distro that simply
exists but isn't being used.

Unity is another issue.  Given time Unity may turn out to be a great
desktop for Ubuntu, but it still needs work.  Canonical is really
gambling with their future releasing Unity in 11.04 and making it
compulsory in 11.10.  I understand the releases in between the LTS
distributions are meant to perfect new features and technology for the
next LTS release, but Canonical should have made Unity voluntary only
and gave users incentives to use it to help the dev community make the
necessary improvements.  Thus, once the next TLS release came around
Canonical could release Ubuntu with a version of Unity that was rock
solid.

The moral of the story is, if you fail to listen to your community
they'll fork the project, and abandon the original to die in
obscurity.  If it can happened to Open Office it can happen to Ubuntu,
and Gnome too.

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