In this BoF, I want to:

* Name some positive types of interactions we've seen from other pepole

* Discuss hostile, unhelpful situations we find ourselves in on mailing lists and IRC

* Come up with concrete actions to address these situations

At moments of uncertainty, has anything nice happened to encourage you?

  dkg received immediate feedback, telling him that he was on the right track.
  
  ??? got lots of good feedback, encouragement, pointers from Gunar Wolf (gwolf)
  
Conversely, has wwnything happened to put you off?

  lindi - sending emails and not receiving replies is discouraging.
  
  dba - applying for DB - was asked for a list of what he'd done for Debian and this put him off.
  
  when someone reports an intent-to-package bug and people pile on and say "Why do you want to submit one more PHP web app?" - should others step up and say that the tone of the people who jumped on the OP was unacceptable?  asheesh thinks the nice-person police should act.
  
 
"Poisonous People in open source" - deals with this issue -

dba - sometimes people cross the line unintentionally, and then apologise - so we shouldn't be too quick to label people 'poisonous'.

  Debtags and Enrico
  
  Ask.debian.net has been a huge success, and maybe something like that could be made for contributors, not just users
  
ask.debian.net ??? (going for about a year now)

 a q&a forum modelled after stackoverflow.com

a team of roving nice people - choose lists and support newcomers?
 
gwolf - what do people long involved feel is the mood of the people that want to enter - we don't 
always get the picture

Enrico tries to be nice, and finds it begins to consume too much of his time - sometimes people are energy sinks.

be clear about how much hand-holding you are prepared to do.

??? will not rely to personal emails of a technical nautre - he always says please reply to the list - thus sharing the load.

??? feels that when someone writes a lot of emails to you asking lots of questions, you soon realise whether or not they are actually doing any work of their own.

enrico - it's hard to disengage without having created a monster - it should mandatory to have a ranting cabal and a hugging cabal - (cabal = irc channel).
=> #debian-rants and #debian-hugs on OFTC

private-hugs@lists.debian.org   or irc
private-rants@lists.debian.org 

pabs - tends to always hang around the same people at debconf, and is no longer going to - just say hi to new people.

last year a bof by the same name was held and it was a much noisier affair.

cameras and mics don't help shy people speak up

lunar - speed-dating like channel?
andrew - isn't that the ksp? (how about renaming it?)

dba - the ksp was frantic but it needn't have been so

 - cameras were not turned off -
 
 can't we help people to overcome their shyness - a self-confidence training session - as well as non-shy people, and Debian generally, trying to accommodate shy people.
 
the main channel #debian

#debian-mentors created to distract people from the main channel
 
every forum says - only unasked questions are the stupid ones - it has become meaningless.

gwolf - You can't say "it's now time for stupid questions" but...

martin - We do need to create an environment (perhaps only at certain times) where every one can feel safe.

martin - lca newbie-orientation walk
andrew - lca also maintains a document explaining what goes on

asheesh - KEEP TALKING about social issues outside this room


Out of my memory, a wonderful carnival moment: