Changing PEP 13 to remove the CoC responsibility from the SC

Committers
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Please note: This proposal is currently on hold, until we have fleshed out a better proposal to fill in the gap that is created by removing the CoC responsibility from the SC. Please see this message for details. I will send out a new email when the poll is ready to be rescheduled. Thank you for your understanding.

As discussed in topic Calling for a Vote of No Confidence - Committers - Discussions on Python.org, I am proposing a change to PEP 13, which removes the responsibility to handle CoC topics from the SC.

You can find the draft PR for PEP 13 implementing this proposal at PEP 13 Change Proposal - Remove CoC responsibility - Pull Request #4134 · python/peps. I will finalize the PR before opening the poll below.

Motivation

The reasoning behind this change is simple:

The SC was created to steer the development of the Python programming language and as such requires deep understanding of language design, knowledge of how Python is being used and a good sense for the Python community’s needs.

Conflating these main requirements with additional and orthogonal HR management skills does not do anyone a favor.

We want to have the SC focus on it’s main tasks and do those well, without getting stressed and side tracked, having to also deal with non-technical issues in a completely different domain.

Tasks related to guiding the community in questions of conduct and moderation to help steer clear of issues can well be managed outside the scope of the SC, eg. by people participating in discussions and, if needed, by those who run the communication platforms we use.

Change procedure

PEP 13 doesn’t specify the procedure on how to run votes on changes, but Guido had already run a change proposal for PEP 13 a couple of week ago, so I’m following the same procedure.

The poll for the change will be open for two weeks starting from Sunday, 2024-11-24, until Sunday, 2024-12-08 AoE. I will try to email all core developers to inform them of this poll.

TBD: Anonymous poll with the following answers


  • Let’s make this change
  • Please leave things as they are
  • I wish to abstain

Edit history:

  • Removed the “yes” and “no” from the poll items as per @hugovk 's suggestion.
  • Removed one additional spot where PEP 13 mentioned conduct issues. Thanks to @barry for spotting this one.
  • Put proposal on hold. See this message for details.
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2

Please let me know if I missed anything or need to further clarify things. Thanks.

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I tried to make this point in the SC self-nomination that I posted last night, but I just want to be absolutely clear here: I think this proposal, as is, is a bad idea. We cannot just ignore our responsibility to CoC enforcement. If it doesn’t belong with the people supposedly (according to PEP 13) in charge of making contributions “as accessible, inclusive, and sustainable as possible”, where exactly does it belong? We cannot just elide this part of PEP 13 and hope CoC enforcement just works out. It is counter to the goals of the SC (again, as described in PEP 13).

As I mentioned in my self-nomination, I’m not opposed to a different group (possibly with overlapping members) given the responsibility of community management, but it needs to be clear, deliberate and holistic. The CoC and how it’s handled matters to the community, and the community matters to the CoC.

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I don’t have an a priori opinion on who should have this responsibility.

However, given the SC has had this responsibility, I think a proposal to strip them of it would be better formulated as an affirmative resolution to explicitly move the responsibility to someplace else. (Explicit is better than implicit)

Phrased another way: While I’d be happy to vote for a resolution moving the responsibility somewhere, I’m unlikely to support one that appears to simply discard enforcement.

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I find this motivation both incorrect and disingenuous.

The Steering Council over the past five years has done plenty of both CoC enforcement and “HR management”. I can attest to both as I have biweekly meetings with the SC as the developer in residence. I also wear the hat of the CoC WG chair.

It’s pretty clear that this proposal is a reaction to Tim’s suspension. It would be more honest to say that in the motivation section. In any case, that situation involved three layers of people: core developers reporting to the COC WG, the COC WG making a recommendation, and the SC making an enforcement decision. If you feel this decision was incorrect, we should definitely discuss, but the first reaction shouldn’t be to remove the SC’s ability to enforce.

It shouldn’t be the first reaction as there were other SC actions over the years in terms of CoC enforcement, which did not create the same pushback. So clearly most actions are uncontroversial.

Finally, this proposal is incomplete without clearly stating who is supposed to be the CoC enforcer if the SC isn’t supposed to do that.

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I agree with Thomas and Alex. Having a different group take responsibility may well be a good idea, but I’d like to see a concrete suggestion of where that responsibility goes in such a vote rather than simply removing it from the SC.

About vote wording, I suggest avoiding questions including “yes”/“no” to avoid potential bias.

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I don’t think MAL has suggested they have not done that. The question is whether they are the correct group to actually be doing that.

I can’t speak for MAL, but my interest in this topic is my reaction to a number of issues over the last 6 months, all of which fall under a “CoC enforcement” umbrella. Tim’s is but one of these (and obviously the one shining the most light on the issue), but I’m not sure it would help the discussion by re-litigating them all here.

I do agree that this proposal needs more detail about how the CoC is managed in the future, but I am not sure a concrete plan needs to be agreed first - general agreement that a process is not working seems a reasonable first step towards a process which does. I look forward to MAL clarifying his thoughts on this.

The reason I’m even thinking about this is due to the communication around some of these controversies. The small amount of communication about these events have been credibly and directly contradicted by those individuals. The lack of followup from the SC is something I find troubling.

Haven’t people been trying to do that? People tried to discuss them but were told there was “information asymmetry”, that information individuals were “personally privy” to and respecting the privacy of impacted individuals mean we can’t know the full story and we should just trust the pcoess. But when other parties shared their side of this asymmetry, directly contradicted the small amount of information which was released and gave their permission to have an open discussion, the response has been either silence or more stonewalling.

So yes, we should continue to discuss this - but in my opinion, the onus is now on the SC to directly address some of the responses made by these individuals.

For these reasons I agree that the status quo is not serving the Python community. The SC doesn’t seem willing to directly engage with this, so proposals which look to address this are going to attract attention when they are the only proposal on the table.

Mark

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That’s a far-reaching claim after one case you find not to your liking. I don’t think we need to reform the entire institution of SC to address actions by a single one.

The SC will soon change, and voting for people who represent your values is an option that was on the table from the day PEP 8016 was chosen as the governance model for the language.

To be explicit, my main worry here is that removing the SC’s ability to enforce CoC without naming a new body to do so will create a vacuum that will be impossible to replace. How do you choose a new group of people to do this? Will there be another 2/3 majority vote to change PEP 13? What if there’s no 2/3 support for that particular idea? It would create a vacuum where CoC would not be enforceable. Sure, a few core committers would enjoy that. But that’s a bad situation.

I feel like tying the vote to a concrete proposal for replacement is required to make this an informed decision.

Don’t vote on hand-waving a replacement later. It might not happen at all.

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I would support this change if it stated a specific plan for who would be responsible for CoC.

While I understand and appreciate the desire for a change, swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction with no clear group or plan identified would be as problematic, if not more, than the status quo.

If the end goal is improving the current situation, our approach would be more effective to converge on a new solution before updating the PEP.

P.S. On a personal note, if the CoC is unspecified, I would recommend that all communications channels be public. In other words, there should be no private communications channels for core development activities. This would provide the most transparency since that seems to be one of the goals of this proposed change.

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I can’t speak for the whole Steering Council, but I can tell you why I haven’t responded to those contradictions: having a he-said/he-said fight would in no way improve the situation. (Also, nobody asked me or the SC directly to respond, and I definitely don’t want to jump into any conversation to try and correct impressions people have.)

As for the SC not being willing to engage, I’m sorry we gave the impression, although I’m not entirely sure how we could’ve done better. As far as I know, we’ve engaged with anyone who wanted to talk to us about it (individually or the SC as a whole). Is there a specific thing you would like the Steering Council to do to spur that engagement?

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I really tried to be clear about this:

I don’t see how you could read that as me being concerned about exactly one case.

My message also corrected your mis-characterization of MAL’s comment, suggesting he was somehow saying the SC wasn’t performing duties when he was clearly starting they were.

It would seem more helpful to engage with what we are actually saying.

Mark

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I would say it’s more that my ban was the “straw that broke the camel’s back”. MAL has been an active participant in ban discussions for years, has made many good suggestions, all of which were seemingly ignored.

Neither is this the first time SC members have expressed deep discomfort with performing tasks that are generally far outside their areas of core competence. But “information asymmetry” applies in all directions, and I’m not at liberty to disclose what prior SC members have told me in private.

How? I’ve done everything humanly possible to be as transparent and open about everything I know on my blog. Which by now contains dozens of specific claims, not a one of which, to date, has been disputed.by anyone, or even publicly acknowledged as having been made by any PSF representative.

The stonewalling is total. It’s also the case that I told the SC, in advance, about almost all the things I would be saying if they didn’t speak up first, and about how that would be perceived, and about how that would in turn increase community damage. But they never replied to anything I sent after Aug 8, the day after the ban was announced. I personally was totally stonewalled too.

So you can perhaps understand why I find “we should definitely discuss” disingenuous too. If “we” means PSF representatives, they certainly appear to be utterly determined to never clarify anything about my case.

For the rest, I too would like to see it spelled out who would do the CoC enforcement currently done by the SC. But perhaps nothing will ever change unless something forces change. Getting the SC out of the ban business first would certainly light a fire that would make filling that gap an urgent priority.

I was on the Board, and voted for the first CoC the PSF adopted. Enforcement was the Board’s responsibility then. That’s the most natural place for enforcement to fall. Whether the Board wants to set up another group for enforcement is, of course, up to them. But it should not fall on the SC. They hate doing it, “tach nerds” aren’t generally suited to this kind of work, and at least IMO they are in fact poor at doing it. Not starting with my ban either.

Perhaps they do a stellar job at resolving less contentious cases that we never hear about. But the total lack of transparency about CoC enforcement actions in general - even of that they exist - is another long-time complaint that’s never been addressed,

Right now is at least the third time over the years I’ll suggest the minimal level of “CoC transparency report” produced for PyCons would already be a huge improvement for the CoC WG and SC to produce.

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I apologize for mischaracterizing what you said. I will edit my post accordingly.

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I strongly agree with that. I will put this on the COC WG agenda for the next meeting.

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I think this is a very reasonable ask to have something equivalent to the PyCon CoC transparency report.

I also believe it is necessary for confidence in the process.

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I understand that desire, but that had in-fact already started once a set of concrete allegations against a member (who we now know to be Tim) were published. In response, Tim posted a detailed and concrete rebuttal of those facts.

Leaving the situation at that means every observer is forced to decide who to believe, and invites people to conclude the less credible of the parties is the SC.

IOW, avoiding he-said/he-said situation is a worthwhile goal, but when when the instigator of that situation is the SC itself it seems reasonable to me the SC engage to resolve it, or at least explain why they can not.

Mark

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Like some other people, I am not comfortable with this change without knowing who will then take over conduct issues (and I’m coming from a perspective that there have been issues if you look at a long enough timeline). I also think it’s fine to leave the responsibility with the SC and have them choose who to offload decisions to which is a similar result, just not one that forcibly moves the responsibility elsewhere in a way that’s hard to change later on if we don’t like the initial choice.

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We explained the rationale behind the decision. The key point here is that it was a decision, not a debate. The information asymmetry is real and is non-resolvable in a public forum.

Silence because it was very clear that many people in the space were not up for a discussion. They had already made up their minds and were just looking for a fight. Repeating many of the same problems that led to the situation in the first place.

The only winning move was not to reply.

Doing otherwise would be a waste of our precious volunteer time as it was guaranteed to be taken out of context and satisfy nobody.

The SC is open for office hours. That is a much more appropriate forum for this kind of honest frank discussion 1:1 than any public forum.

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We couldn’t. It wasn’t an appropriate use of our collective limited volunteer time. It was placing an undue burden on all of us to expect us to continue to engage with someone banned in part for excessive communication and endless debate in the first place.

If you want your personal reputation to be one of destruction, that’s on you.

Silence is not consent or agreement.

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Please. You couldn’t take a minute to send a message saying just that? “Tim, we will not reply to you until the ban is over, so please stop.” As I explained on my blog, at the start I had strong reasons for seeking more clarity about what it was you were asking of me. But I was just ignored.

If you read what I sent at all (how could I know?), you spent far more time reading things of mine than doing just that much once would have consumed.

That was extremely disrespectful of my “time & effort” (read that part of the CoC - and several other supremely relevant parts). Its privileged position doesn’t give the SC license to be inhumane either.

If nothing else, read what the CoC says about empathy. I’m unclear on what basis PSF representatives are exempt from following the CoC. On a human level, I was treated worse than garbage. I extended empathy to the SC more than once.

I understand that people in groups often do worse things than any member would do on their own. That’s why I bear none of you personal animus. I also understand that it’s extremely rare for any group, regardless of organization, to own up to the slightest specific mistakes. Just (corporate) business as usual.

Sorry, I didn’t follow that part. If the implication is that my efforts to engage the SC were intended to be destructive, well, I am, for once, speechless. I was only ever trying to limit the damage. Not to me, but to the PSF.

I did a lot of that, which I expect you don’t even know about. For example, when Guido posted some very mild shade at the ban in the “ranked choice” topic. his post got hidden “by community flags”. I woke up to email from press contacts asking what that was about. I took a look and assured them it was probably a nothing-burger, triggered by an automated subsystem (which, as things turned out, it was). They trusted me (trust I earned by only ever being honest and open with them too), and held off reporting it.

The post was soon enough un-hidden again, and the damage was limited to a few hysterical overreactions on, as I recall, Hacker News. The press people thanked me for sparing them from leaping on a non-story. Of course nobody in the PSF did. Nor did I expect them to. I’m retired and had little better to do than try to squash needless drama. I doubt most of you were even aware of these things - and were able to remain blissfully unaware because I was doing PR work for you.

And that totally lost me. Perhaps you can relate it to my “CoC violation” of “defending reverse sexism”, which I never said a single word about? Total silence was indeed sold as “defending” a thing in that case.

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