Things take time to notice and review? And it takes time to consider the concerns of those who flagged it? Just because Guido said it doesn’t mean it is not causing division so it’s worth considering. It’s not hard to explain that some things deserve time to consider and that doesn’t make it a great mystery.
And frankly, given the context, I think it would have made sense to remove. It didn’t add the the conversation, and was made at a time of turmoil. I’m fully confident that it was made lightheartedly, but the scope of this forum is wide and it’s ability to be interpreted in many ways. Being extra cautious is reasonable until emotions ebb out and empathy returns to be so readily available. I don’t think it’s particularly wrong that it was posted either. I can easily see both options, but most of all I can see the need to take time to think things through.
Pausing topics, taking breathers, and waiting is valuable. And it makes sense that it wasn’t an easy decision. Had the removed comment also removed the commenters name I wager that the decision to restore it might have been easier to make had the whole internet not seen “Guido had a comment removed” and force a team to all jump onboard and discuss stuff under the pressure of so many eyes at once. There’s humans involved here. I trust the desire to keep python lovely is a core part of all folks involved at all portions.
In general, sure. But in this specific case none of those apply, and off-base speculations muddy this specific case. You can read exactly (verbatim) what a mod said about it on my blog, although even there I left the mod’s name out of it. They intentionally left Guido’s post hidden.
Ironically enough, that was precisely the point Guido was trying to make: there was in fact no reason whatsoever to rush picking a new election method (it was already far too late to adopt a new method for the SC election in progress right now), and good reason to wait until I came back. For more details on which, I again defer to my blog. I already spent too much time writing up all the seemingly relevant details of this case.
And the details matter. “General principles” miss key points.
I’m going to be honest with you, that’s a nonsequitor. Your prior comment was saying, “how mysterious” and to that I replied. Suggesting that the goalpost is now, “This is what he was trying to say.” is kind of non congruent with both what you were previously saying, and the thread at large.
While you’re experienced, and well spoken and driven in the area of voting, because the deadline to set in motion changes to voting mechanisms existed, I disagree that the matter at hand needed delay on behalf of you. Additionally, there are many communities and experts to draw on regarding that expertise. I don’t think a single individual in this case is necessary to pausing an entire process.
I can interpret what he said as “aw shucks. My go to on this topic isn’t here at the moment” in an attempt to add levity to the situation at hand and if this wasn’t an exceptionally public venue for that comment I would have fully considered it benign in all context. I don’t think it was actually calling for a delay on action. Guido is welcome to correct me. I am frequently wrong, and am quite experienced at being so. Regarding the discussion at the time, the comment did not add value as you were suspended and because it was not directly a statement of, “we should wait”, it makes sense to me that it was not restored instantly to give time to fully review the situation. Everyone here is human, and it does in fact take time to consider the impact of things, and discuss sensitive, volatile matters at hand. The irony from your perspective does not mean the moderation team should have reacted more rapidly to fit your schedule.
I have read your blog plot, and it’s rehashing in many different threads, at many points on dpo via your comments.
I am simply saying it was no mystery why it took time to respond. These things are hard, and given the turmoil and my prior experience moderating communities, I would have removed the comment and not restored it. I also think this thread is straying into an off topic area that is better suited for our individual blogs, so I’ll leave it at that.
The talk is interesting. And I will reflect on it at length.
Sorry, I couldn’t follow that. I said that the real mystery is why his post remained hidden. And the answer to that is that a specific mod deliberately left it hidden, gave a user a surreal reply about “why”, and stonewalled (didn’t reply at all) when Guido asked them. In the meantime, the ongoing hiding was creating needless drama on external sites.
I’m unclear on what you’re talking about. The original topic post said nothing about deadlines. There was a deadline later, but only after Guido’s suggestion to hold off didn’t get traction, and Guido himself pushed a proposal with a deadline to vote on. There was no deadline of any kind in play at the time Guido posted.
We have years of experience with this. Guido thinks elections are vital, but has (well, had) no interest in election theory, and has little patience for discussions about election methods, finding them generally time-consuming in an area where relating personal anecdotes has little objective value toward reaching a resolution. He wouldn’t find any such stuff persuasive in the slightest.
So of course he wanted to wait until I could chime in. But he wasn’t going to argue about it. They would take his suggestion or not. They didn’t. So he did the next best thing, to minimize the total time he had to devote to it: get over his disinterest in election theory and drive the topic to a conclusion himself.
Note that even though I was banned, @gpshead posted a brief statement on my behalf endorsing the “bloc STAR” method anyway. Like it or not, my view of these things carries a lot of weight, due to years of serious engagement.
Which Guido leveraged in the background, to pick my brain via email to educate himself sufficiently to conclude for himself that “bloc STAR” was the best choice. Which he did push to adoption, without mentioning my covert role. Fine by me! Far as both of us went, the goal was to get a better election method adopted with as little bother as possible.
I’ll note that @ClayShentrup also helped. He’s a world leading expert on STAR, and engaged with Guido in a related topic.
And @larry also helped, by elaborating on what his own Python voting library does. He’s another who picked my brain over email when he was developing that code. He didn’t mention me either. Also fine.
My actual influence on the PSF’s election history is hard to overstate, and Guido knew that. The credit for the PSF’s original “block Approval” method, though, belongs to David Mertz.
He won’t. He won’t agree with you either, though. This isn’t a kind of topic he’ll say anything more about in public. He’s very protective of his time. Which is why he pushed the election-method topic to a conclusion himself to begin with.
But he was one of the earliest readers of my blog post, and if he had reason to object to any part of it, he wouldn’t have been shy about telling me in private.
I never mentioned “instantly”, or any other quantification, because I don’t know how long it remained hidden. It did remain hidden “long enough” for external sites to notice and start whipping up drama over it. That in itself is a bad thing for the PSF. While the mods may not have known about that, Guido and I certainly did, because “the press” was asking us about it. We did the “damage control”.
You said you read my blog post? Judge Dredd very plainly told their questioner that the matter was settled, was not open to further discussion, and that any further questions should be addressed to the CoC WG’s email address instead.
I see no reason to believe that “a team” was even at work here, just Judge Dredd acting on their own and declaring the matter over. The other mod Guido contacted did act at once, because to their eyes the hiding was unwarranted. But by that time Guido was also able to tell the other mod about the useless drama the hiding was causing the PSF, and about the time of his own being wasted trying to prevent more bad publicity.
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In which case the PSF would have suffered much worse external publicity. You can’t possibly imagine that the PSF’s image could escape without major damage if it censored the language’s creator merely for posting a polite and considered mild suggestion in a topic of direct interest to relatively few people in the world (those who can vote in Steering Council Elections)…
I too would prefer that.
In my long experience with him, David is always worth listening to. A real advantage to seeing him talk is that his calmness and reasonableness are apparent. His writing can come across as the opposite, but he’s still actually a peach even when spraying 30-syllable words at the speed of light at high imagined volume
Were there any other talks from PyCon Nigeria that stood out to you?
I’ve been loving talks about PyMC of late. But those relate to my personal focuses into making a smart-ish home. I’m always thrilled to hear of talks I should listen to outside of my normal search patterns.
Sorry, so far David’s is the only one I watched in full.
In some notion of “fair play” here, though, I’d like to see someone post a link to Deb Nicholson’s (the PSF’s Executive Director) keynote address at PyCon Africa (the later PyCon). I haven’t yet seen it. Deb and David seem at somewhat opposite ends of “how the PSF should build a global community” spectrum here, and it would be interesting to see both keynote addresses given near the same time at the same PyCon in the Global South.
Ah that’s a shame. I was hoping to hear more. I do have their playlist queued for this week while I’m on vacation though! Thank you for prompting it!
One of the talks I recently listened to which I found to be fantastic (though from a different conference) was, "Mykalin Jones: Child Prodigies and 6 Figure Salaries? @ PyCon Ireland 2023 ": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfZabrLQ0Hk
I highly recommend it. I didn’t realize the PSF channel was the place to post about conference talks, I had guessed it was more suited for the events channel. That said, on the assumption you’re like me, and love hearing great talks I recommend this one!
I really wouldn’t know, and don’t care which category this is in if a mod cares to move it. My reading of the “Events” category is that it’s for one-time announcements of future Python-related events. Which the first post here wasn’t.
And I don’t recall seeing a post about a keynote address before. Since the keynote address here was very much about the PSF and its relationship to Python communities, the “PSF” category seemed a very natural place.
Thank you for sharing one of your favorite PyCon talks. It’s definitely on my “to watch” list now
If this is really the flagged post, I don’t see anything offensive or disrupting. Anyway, even if we trust the words of David Mertz, and a post Guido Van Rossum was censored, who knows if this is really the post? Even if the post was hidden in past, now is completely visible.
I prefer to stick to the facts. David Mertz said:
It is not only me who has been exiled. My friend Tim Peters, creator of Timsort, the Zen of Python, and largely the co-equal creator of Python, was similarly banned, for similar polite disagreement. When organizations break down, lists of internal enemies quickly emerge.
As we know, David Mertz refers to this topic:
This is the list of Tim’s violations:
For what I know, this is the thread about the bylaws changes:
For what it’s worth, I can confirm that it was. But why you’d trust me when you don’t trust the other people who’ve said this was the content of the hidden post, I don’t know…
This has been covered at great length already. See my blog for all that will likely ever become known. Yes, Guido’s post was hidden, but is no longer hidden.
Skipping the repetition: it’s my ban announcement, with a list of 10 claimed “CoC violations”. They didn’t all stem from the bylaws topic, but since no links were given it takes a lot of guessing to imagine what some of the posts they had in mind may have been.
No. To date, nobody anywhere (not on Discourse, not on various blogs, not in “news” articles, not on various tech-gossip sites’ comment sections) has been able to find a “smoking gun” to justify any of them[1]. At least not that I’ve seen, and I dare say I’ve paid more attention to this than anyone ;-).
Chris McDonough made his best guesses about what they may have been talking about on his blog (linked to from Ethan Furman’s dissenting reply in my ban announcement). Much later, over time, I eventually wrote up my own best guesses in a variety of places, all linked to from this page in my blog.
I also note in my “Ban Q&A” page that I was never asked (by the PSF) to agree that I was guilty of any of those specific charges, or even to acknowledge they had any merit.
If anyone does want to post evidence, I’d love to see it, but this is the wrong topic for it. I posted a request for that here instead.
That was 18 days ago. Still not a peep.
in cases where which message(s) is(are) clear, the problem is instead that nobody agrees with how the CoC WG reads it - in some cases clearly misreading the plain meaning of plain English ↩︎
This has little to do with David’s keynote address, apart possibly from his observation that the social dynamics driving “fervent religious and political purges” are common across all kinds of schisms throughout history.
So please drop it now. The only answers you’re ever going to get are already written up at length in my blog, to which I added a tiny bit of new info a few days ago.
