Mailing List Archive: Two videos FYI: Handling difficult people

Many of us talk/think a lot about how to reduce conflict in our
projects. For those who're interested, I was recently pointed towards
two relevant videos -- I'm posting them here in hopes they might be
useful for others.

So, for whoever's interested, here is:

* Donnie Berkholz's recent talk at Open Source Bridge, titled
"Assholes are killing your project." Donnie, a council member at
Gentoo Linux, advocates establishment of a friendly culture including
a code of conduct, and maintenance of that culture via simple
mechanisms for problem reporting and resolution, plus a clear focus on
mission. Unfortunately the audio here isn't terrific, so it's not
super-easy to follow. http://blip.tv/file/2444432

* Two open source engineers at Google, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian
Fitzpatrick, with a talk called "How Open Source Projects Survive
Poisonous People" Upshot: Preserve your project's attention and
focus, build a healthy community and fortify it with good community
practices, be on the lookout for problems, and disinfect where
necessary, including marginalization/ignoring of difficult people, and
booting them out if you need to.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSFDm3UYkeE

Personally, I have also gotten some good value out of Bill Eddy's book
High-Conflict People in Legal Disputes. Bill is a mediator, lawyer
and former social worker who found himself repeatedly encountering
destructive people in his work, and not knowing how to disarm them or
disengage from them. He wrote High Conflict People to help other
mental health and legal professionals recognize, understand and work
productively with various types of conflict-seeking personalities --
but IMO its usefulness extends way beyond the legal system; it's
relevant for our work too.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0981509053/ref=cm_li_v_cr_self?tag=linkedin-20

Thanks,
Sue

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ï»¿Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation

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Excellent comments Sue. I personally am fond of the direct approach for
the simple reason that I am capable in this area, and because other
approaches are less honest. I was on Medcom for several years and found it
was not too difficult to deal with any personal or editorial disputes if I
understood the substance of the issues involved, and was able to make a
simple qualitative points about what concepts each person was missing.

Sometimes individuals are both highly valuable contributors as well as
highly antagonistic toward others. For example the subject of our first
major Arbcom case was for years quite antagonistic toward people, and yet
people did not know how to deal with him, and in a certain way they just
failed to do so. My role in that was to help bring about a formal concept
of how to basically deal with everyone (WP:CIVIL), and a concept of how to
deal those who get into disruptive or aggressive behavior (our first
"community case").

Unfortunately even Arbcom can at times have difficulty separating issues
of substance from the personal characterizations, which is why I proposed
a separation in how we handle personality disputes and editorial disputes
(WP:DRREF). But I wrote that in 2005, and it got little attention - mostly
because of "difficult people."

Regards,
-Stevertigo

> Many of us talk/think a lot about how to reduce conflict in our
> projects. For those who're interested, I was recently pointed towards
> two relevant videos -- I'm posting them here in hopes they might be
> useful for others.
>
> So, for whoever's interested, here is:
>
> * Donnie Berkholz's recent talk at Open Source Bridge, titled
> "Assholes are killing your project." Donnie, a council member at
> Gentoo Linux, advocates establishment of a friendly culture including
> a code of conduct, and maintenance of that culture via simple
> mechanisms for problem reporting and resolution, plus a clear focus on
> mission. Unfortunately the audio here isn't terrific, so it's not
> super-easy to follow. http://blip.tv/file/2444432

> Personally, I have also gotten some good value out of Bill Eddy's book
> High-Conflict People in Legal Disputes. Bill is a mediator, lawyer
> and former social worker who found himself repeatedly encountering
> destructive people in his work, and not knowing how to disarm them or
> disengage from them.

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