New subject: Comment on the content, not the contributor - with staff?

3 Jul 2014

Hey, all. Bit of a question, here.

Basically, how does "comment on the content, not the contributor" apply 
to staff and contractors? What can we, as volunteers, do when we believe 
staff have gone too far (besides create drama on a mailing list)?

In many of our communities, we have a saying: "comment on the content, 
not the contributor". When working with others, this is quite useful, 
and something we definitely want to remember, because it reminds us to 
cooperate and find use for whatever content is good, and it also helps 
us to avoid making personal attacks and other generally unhelpful 
comments about the people involved that tend not to be relevant to the 
situation.

Of course, this depends a great deal on the situation itself - this 
applies to an edit dispute or a bug report or an RfC about content or 
features or what have you, but what about when the contributor IS a 
relevant topic? In volunteer circles it generally boils down to a 
question - is the contributor causing more trouble than they're worth? 
If so, an appropriate committee or whatever can do something sanctiony, 
and the situation will be resolved for the time being.

But what if it's not a volunteer? What if it's a staff developer who is 
consistently ignoring project consensus and needs, or a team that 
refuses to justify their decisions even in light of scrutiny, or a 
contractor hired to do something specific and community-facing who won't 
actually do it, and on top of that won't let volunteers do the needful 
either? With a volunteer, it's often a pretty simple matter to simply 
remove an individual or group from a topic or project, but with staff, 
the situation is a lot more complicated - not just because they're paid, 
but also because they have specific obligations and requirements, as 
well as the power and authority the position grants. Volunteers come and 
go, and answer to other volunteers. Staff are supposed to do things, and 
paid to be doing things, and answer to staff (and also the board and 
crap, but at the level I'm talking about it's basically just other staff).

There's a very real disconnect here, and though community liaisons are 
supposed to be bridging that gap, this works far better on content 
projects than in development, where developers and designers and whatnot 
need to communicate with each other, no matter who they are, in order to 
get things done. And indeed, most staff here are pretty great about this 
and you can totally go right up to them and talk about their work and 
collaborate and what have you, but sometimes they aren't. And that's a 
problem.

So what can we, as volunteers, do in such cases? What are our channels 
for bringing up issues with staff, so that we don't just wind up 
bringing it up somewhere completely inappropriate, where we really 
should be commenting on the content itself?

-I