[odf-discuss] Apology and proposal for moving forward from the personal attack issue

[Peter Vandenabeele]

On 10/1/07, marbux <marbux at gmail.com> wrote:
> And you still offer no solution to the problem of the banned subscriber
> being barred from participation in the dispute resolution process, which is
> an outright invitation for the moderator to inaccurately depict the banned
> subscriber's position.

The luxury of living in a free world and not having monopoly on talk is that
everyone always has the right to set-up his own new discussion list if he
does not like the moderators of this list. That is the ultimate "higher appeal".
If anyone feels that the moderators have really taken a wrong position, the
ousted person can just start his own list, be moderator there, define his
own rules, accept who he wishes to talk to and try to be more succesful
at it. And if he is "right" and the moderators are "wrong", most people will
follow him to the new list.

I assume the moderators would (actually gladly) allow a message (after
moderation) from the ousted person to the effect of "sorry guys, I really
can't agree to the way things work here. I prefer to discuss them on my
new list ______ . Please join my new list if you want to discuss things
my way."

That is the simple "higher appeal" everyone in free software and free speech
always has. So, I see no fundamental problem in the moderators having some
form of "ultimate power" over a list, since that power only goes as far as the
few people that are communicating over the list. Everyone can always start
a new list and escape the power of the moderators.

For that reason, I see little problem in giving quite a lot of "final" powers to
the moderators.

HTH,

Peter