** I am speaking as myself **
Let me start by saying that I am sympathetic to how you feel and deeply sorry if how we handled this situation in the SC has made you lose all trust and made you think that a vote of no confidence is the best course of action.
I think it’s important that core developers and the community can hold us accountable and tell us if they believe we have made mistakes. In this regard, I can promise you that as with any other matter that has been brought to our attention, we have dedicated all our efforts to act the best we can and to honour PEP 13 and the responsibilities we have within our capabilities.
I think it’s not a surprise that the emphasis and the skillset of the SC is to help advance the Python programming language and help the core developer community advance and solve problems (technical or not). I think we have been very good at facing and navigating technical challenges, helping to solve disagreements, unblocking discussions, aligning the vision of the language, helping and facilitating the creation of working groups and managing to find funds, bootstrapping and guiding multiple core developers in residence.
I do not think a group of 5 people are the best group to make the ultimate decision for CoC incidents for core developers (remember that the CoC working group is the group that does the analysis and the recommendation that then is sent to the SC). The reasons are:
- I do not think core developers should be different from anyone else in the community regarding these events and how they are handled. When the CoC working group has a ruling it directs it to the SC (instead of the board as like everyone else) only if the person is a core developer. I think the process should be the same for everyone whatever the process is.
- We are already over the limit of what we can do. We had to double our meeting time to cope with all our responsibilities which now include managing 3 developers in residence, keeping track of the work, securing future funding, reviewing peps, addressing petitions and feedback via email, help creating working groups, and much more.
- We are more biased than other groups because all these events are about core developers from the community we represent and all of this is extremely emotionally and mentally taxing. Separating our personal opinions to what it’s the best course of action for everyone like we do when we review PEPs (we try to represent what its best for everyone, not what we think) 's ridiculously hard.
Let me repeat that I am not trying to wash away responsibility. We made a decision and we are responsible for the decision. If you think we haven’t handled aspects of this correctly I hear you and I promise you that I (and the rest of the SC) take feedback very seriously.
It’s clear to me that we need to discuss together how we want to handle these situations and how we can be better here, and I think we should discuss what everyone thinks we (or future SC members) can improve here in terms of responsibilities (with changes to PEP 13) and communication.
Independently on the suspension, It looks like multiple folks are disappointed about some aspects of how we have communicated this and I can tell you that we are taking this feedback very seriously so we (this SC) and any future SC can improve here.
I don’t want to encourage you to drop this vote as it represents what you think is the best course of action, but in the same way that you pointed out that learning is a key point to manage this better in the future, so do I.