Support and Administration

Reasonable Person Principle:

• Everyone will be reasonable.
• Everyone expects everyone else to be reasonable.
• No one is special.
• Do not be offended if someone suggests you are not being
  reasonable.

Reasonable people think about
their needs, and the needs of others,
and adjust their behavior to meet the goals of a common good for the
community, i.e., expressing

what you want to say, but accepting and
accommodating the needs of others. Mary Shaw’s explanation:

The Reasonable Person Principle
is part of the unwritten culture of
CMU computer science. It holds that reasonable people strike a
suitable balance between their own immediate desires and the good
of the community at large.

As applied to bulletin boards,
this would include things like observing
the explicit or implicit ground rules about subject matter or tone.
These vary from one bulletin board to another but usually include
sticking to the expected subject matter and refraining from personal
attacks. There are exceptions, though. For example, cs.opinion is
no-holds barred and often both agressive and personal.

Not all people share the same
model of reasonableness, so disagreements
inevitably occur. Under the reasonable person principle, the first
thing to do is work it out privately (perhaps in person, since e-mail
is known to amplify feelings). Indeed, many people would find it
unreasonable to bring in third parties before trying personal
discussion.

More generally, the
reasonable person principle favors local, unofficial
actions over formal administrative ones. It assumes that people will be
responsive when reminded of a conflict or asked to re-examine their
behavior. It encourages requesting rather than demanding. And it leaves
some room for difference of opinion.