"trouble maker"

[James Seng]

Melinda,

What you been telling me so far is that you acknowledge the problem but 
disagreed with the phrasing of my wordings. While it is easy to say "I 
dont like the wordings", you can be more constructive by putting your 
counterproposal.

There are many ways a "trouble maker" could make life very difficult for 
the working group (1) They could re-open issues again and again (2) They 
could make statments to discredit their opponent in public (and the 
smart one can do it without been libel) (3) When they fail, they nitpick 
on the wordings ("the wordings is confusing" or "I agree with the 
concept but I disagree with the wordings") (4) They could hijack the 
document author (5) they could threaten appeal on process ground (6) 
they could delay further by carried out their threats (7) they continue 
the disagreement in other mailing list & forums. And there are many many 
more ways

Unfortunately, Working group, wg chairs & ADs have very few tools to 
stop these DoS. (so this is yet another problem).

Now, we could try to anticipate what the "trouble maker" could do and 
set procedure & process to deal with the action but you can not capture 
all possible things they could have done. And I dont believe we should 
set dragonian policy to deal with a 80/20 problem...it is not worth it.

Bottomline, there are trouble makers and they could do 101 things to 
make life difficult for you, all within whatever rules you can set. What 
we need is a specific process we can use when and *IF* we can identify 
them. All we have right now is to revoke posting rights for a period of 
time and that is not sufficient.

ps: No, I dont think we can re-engineer human behavior.

-James Seng


Melinda Shore wrote:
>>So, why are we avoiding stating P1 and instead trying to frame it at 
>>one/two degree removed problem of P4 to P7? Why?
> 
> 
> To be clear, we're not avoiding it.  We're talking about
> it.  I'm just really not that sure that it's useful to
> identify "obstructive individuals" as a problem - to me that
> feels a little like identifying the considerable distance
> from Ithaca to Vienna as a problem.  Human behavior is
> pretty much of a given, I think, and it's how well we
> cope with it that is or is not a problem.  It's really not a
> question of being candid, but of keeping the document
> focused and producing something that we can act upon.
> 
> I'm going to create a ticket in the RT database derived from
> your initial post, but while I agree there's a big problem
> here I still don't agree with your exact formulation of it.
> 
> Melinda
> 
>