Hi everyone,
For transparency, the Board is aware of the discussion taking place here, and we are working on a collective response to some of the broad issues raised about Change #3, and we’ll have it in front of you here in due course.
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Also, I posted a response to MAL’s questions about Changes 1 & 2 over on psf-vote. For transparency, my reply follows
On Sun, 16 Jun 2024 at 11:49, Marc-Andre Lemburg <> wrote:
Combining managing and contributing member classes:
The wording used in the new section 4.7 creates a strange situation for volunteers:
Any software or other works of authorship produced as part of a
Contributing Member’s certified volunteer work must be made available
to the public at no charge under an open source license.This literally means that Contributing Members are required to release anything they create in their volunteer time must be made available to the general public. For people working on open source software, this is mostly doable, but for people managing e.g. a conference, this may well be in conflict with privacy or corporate law. Think of e.g. someone working a contract with a venue – those are typically not made available to the general public.
It’s probably best to simply remove that paragraph, since contributions can be many things, not only creation of works. The main driver should be to further the mission of the PSF.
The phrase “certified volunteer work” is the key here. The “Certified” work referred to in the amendment is the 5 hours per month of work that a member commits to in their self-certification. It is not clear to me that performing a certain amount of private work in the service of the work you’re using to certify yourself (which no one expects to be public) is a barrier here. It certainly has not been in the past.
The intention here was to maintain the spirit of the existing Contributing Member class, which was awarded on the basis of “giving back” to the community by doing work on open source software distributed without charge, but the changes extend that to other works of authorship. The intention is that works designed to exclusively enrich the applicant do not count towards becoming a contributing member (that’s what the Supporting Member class is for).
Note that section 4.7 of the bylaws allows the Board to add alternate eligibility requirements to the Contributing Member class, which could include clarifications to the existing language, should there be overwhelming concern that the language is inadequate. As mentioned, we received legal advice on the text of this proposed amendment.
Adding the possibility to waive the yearly voting affirmation requirement:
Comparing a35a6071de181adbb7a160d5d1447e7b0272359c...7d80264 · python/psf-bylaws · GitHub
The wording
The corporation may choose to waive the affirmation requirement for any
member who has voted in the most recent preceding regular Board of
Directors election.does not make it clear how the corporation may choose to waive the affirmation requirement.
As mentioned in the original post, this text is written to allow the Board the option of waiving the requirements, but not requiring it. Even though we intend to broadly apply the waiver in 2025 should this amendment pass, it is worded like this because there may be technical limitations on us applying the waiver in any specific way, and we do not wish for our elections to operate outside the terms of our Bylaws.
And per the original announcement:
The Board believes that voting in a PSF election is a good indicator that a member is likely to vote again, and including them in the quorum calculation is unlikely to put our quorum at risk.
Again, we received legal advice on the text of this change, and we understand that it will function in the way that we described in the original announcement.
Thanks again for your questions,
–Chris
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Yes, I picked up on that the first three times 
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No, but I haven’t suggested making any changes to the bylaws. The burden is on those who are. I’ve already said I’d go along, provided it switched to requiring Board unanimity.
The most realistic way to approach a hostile takeover isn’t to target the Board but the groups tasked with recommending and carrying out actions against members. As already said, it’s of comparatively little value to them to strip a label (like “Fellow” or “\Member”) from a target’s name, provided they can arrange bar them from participating in community dynamics.
It remains unclear why so much importance is being attached to the label here.
I would not think that, no.
How could it possibly be otherwise? Under the current rules, the only way to terminate someone’s membership is by supermajority vote of the total voting membership. I don’t believe that’s ever happened. And I doubt it ever will.
A few years back there was a CoC case that effectively :“unperson”'ed a member that appeared to many to be motivated by dislike of that person’s political views. Which were passionately expressed, but to my eyes they weren’t any more abusive to others than others were to them.
They’re still a member, but were permanently scared away from participating in community life. I know of at least one Fellow who relinquished that honor in silent protest of how that person’s case was handled. “Silent” because they didn’t want to be "unperson"ed too.
Things are not always sunshine and unicorns, not even in our generally remarkably healthy community.
By all means, suit yourself. I think I’ll move to the psf-vote discussion, where even a former PSF Board Chair appreciates that there are real things here to be very wary of.
No, but I don’t see any plausible analogy to anything in this thread.
Nice wordplay! I enjoyed that 
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Thanks Tim. You are spot on. Even in healthy communities facing change, individuals will not always find sunshine and unicorns. Healthy governance serves a collection of individuals. Various viewpoints are expected, and it’s important to listen and reflect on viewpoints that differ from one’s own view. That is the cornerstone of collaboration and improvement.
I think @barry covered well what the Steering Council follows.
One challenge with CoC cases is that things may “appear” to be related to one incident. While that is sometimes true, there may also be a pattern of incidents and corrections that may be less visible than the last incident. For example, a person may have been offered corrective actions or removal, and they may have chosen removal instead of corrective actions which would prevent removal.
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Thank you, Carol - your good grace is appreciated 
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And nobody will ever really know what we’re talking about, because neither of us will ever betray things told to us in confidence. The Fellow I had in mind may not be the one you may assume I’m talking about (multiple Fellows converted to emeritus status around that time) - or maybe the opposite. We’ll never know either .
That highlights why I want unanimous approval of the Board to kick someone out (and I do want them to have that ability). None of the “plain old members” will ever be told all the facts of a case, and the Board will become their last hope. Most of the things the Board votes on are routine procedural matters, as reflected in the rarity of any dissenting votes (I’ve linked to the records before here).
Kicking a member out of a membership organization should be at least slightly painful for the Board too.
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I am not especially fearful of having future evil Directors. I’m fearful of having utterly well-meaning Directors who become dramatically overzealous and misguded in protecting against “toxicity.”
The occasions in which drastic action is needed to “save the PSF” are difficult to imagine, and rare at most. The occasions in which a sanctimonious few decide to protect us from ourselves are far more numerous.
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My initial polite and professional reply to James Bennet was “deleted by community” for reasons I cannot determine within the Discourse interface (a lot of why I like mailing lists better).
What I had written was that I do not fear a future Board being “evil” as some commentators have characterized the concern. Instead, I fear that some future Directors will be utterly well-meaning, but driven by a excessively paternalistic concern over “protecting the vulnerable” from dangers that are distant and abstract.
I suppose this comment might likewise be impermissible. The removal of a post here rather emphasizes the very concern I expressed in the first try, and again in this comment.
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Yes, it was deliciously ironic It showed as “flagged by community” for me, not “deleted”, and I could still click on a button to see the original post.
I’ve never clicked on the “flag this post for attention” button, so don’t know what happens next. It’s possible (although seems unlikely) that’s the only thing the objector needs to do, and that someone clicked by accident.
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Hey David! I took a look at the flagged post, and I can see why it was flagged. It really doesn’t read as polite or professional to me, implying that people on the CoC team and board are “dramatically overzealous and misguded” and “sanctimonious few decide to protect us from ourselves.” Your new wording of “excessively paternalistic concern” doesn’t come off much better. I’ve restored the post, but perhaps there’s a kinder way you can word your views?
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But it’s about a hypothetical future board, not anyone who currently sits on the board?
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I made no comments about current or past Boards other than to praise them.
However, the linked (by another commenter) description of NixOS community is an example of what I worry about.
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I actually read the very long linked post about NixOS, and found that it did not in fact involve rogue leadership “purging” the community. In fact, as far as I can understand it, what happened was that many in the community rose up against one or more people in leadership. Which is perhaps not the best example to bring up when the concern is supposed to be the community being helpless in the face of evil people in leadership roles. If a group of Fellows published an open letter calling for members of the Board to step down/aside, would they want to be characterized the way that post characterized the people calling for change in NixOS leadership? The way this thread has characterized them?
Because I noted the language used both there and here in this thread. And the nicest way I can think to describe it is: this is not the sort of language that one typically uses when one has solid rational arguments against one’s interlocutor.
Of course, it’s emotionally satisfying to be able to portray Our Side as the Stalwart Heroes Who Are Standing On Principle, and Their Side as the Stubborn Zealots Who Are Shackled To Their Ideology. But it’s not particularly helpful or productive to do so. And it’s even less fun to realize that Their Side thinks of Our Side as the Stubborn Zealots and themselves as the Stalwart Heroes. Can you believe it?
(but that realization, and the empathy to see the other side’s point of view that comes from it, can unlock a lot of progress if we let it happen)
In the spirit of such viewpoint-flipping, I’d like to ask about something that has not really been discussed here (though it was brought up in the PSF-Vote email thread): what about the opposite case of what’s being talked about here? What if a prominent/high-placed/long-time person has clearly done bad things but a supermajority or unanimity or other similar requirement makes it impossible to meaningfully take action against them so long as they have just enough supporters in the right roles who’ll stick with them no matter what?
That is something that arguably has happened in at least one case I can think of involving an open-source (well, maybe they wouldn’t like that term) foundation. And it is a distressingly common scenario in the broader world that people rally around and protect a bad actor out of (putting it charitably) a misplaced sense of the obligations of friendship, kinship, or other forms of community.
That’s the sort of thing that would be made much easier by the sorts of supermajority/unanimity criteria being asked for in this thread. Is that a risk we want to take with the PSF? Because from where I sit it is a more commonly-observed problem than the “ideological purges”, and thus is the more realistic threat to worry about.
This also gets back to a few comments, here and on PSF-Vote, which have expressed concern about the PSF becoming “exclusionary”. If Person A does a bad thing to Person B, probably one or the other will end up feeling excluded – Person A will feel excluded if the community takes action against them, but Person B will feel excluded if the community doesn’t. So we don’t have a magic wand that lets us ensure nobody feels excluded by the response; all we have is the ability to choose whose inclusion we prioritize. I know my choice on that matter, and in line with my choice I continue to support giving the Board – which is accountable to us, the voting members – the ability to take action if and when needed to remove Fellows, without requiring supermajority or unanimous votes, because I believe the potential harm and exclusion such a requirement would do is more likely than and thus outweighs the potential harm of a Board going rogue.
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You did refer to a “future” board, not disputing that. Despite that, it still comes off as a pretty aggressive remark, and difficult for me to interpret. You say you support past and current teams, but say that even this hypothetical future team will be “utterly well meaning.” So it’s left to others, like me, to interpret what you mean by that. At what point do you go from “I support this well meaning team” to “this well meaning team was overzealous and sanctimonious”? Presumably (to me, based on how I’ve read what you’ve written and liked on this topic), at exactly the point that you believe they made the wrong decision, regardless of process, regardless of unanimity. It would probably help clear up misinterpretations like mine if you were a lot more specific about what you feel distinguishes current and past teams from the hypothetical future team. It’s additionally confusing because you say you’d be ok with a unanimous vote, but that shouldn’t matter if you think the team making that vote is overzealous and sanctimonious and paternalistic, and we’re voting on the number of votes, not the potential disposition of the voters.
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Quick PSF disclaimers:
- I’m a member of the CoC WG and have been for years
- PSF member since 2003 (voted in at the first PyCon), which means I’m a Fellow
- Served on the board multiple times, including as the executive vice president
- Received the community service award and the Frank Willison Award
- Had a 2 month contract to create what became devguide.python.org way back when
I am voting for change 3. I understand where the concern of having a higher bar for the votes, but I personally don’t view this as so unique as to change the requirement. To me, the way you control for a board you may disagree w/ how they apply this is to vote in people you think will vote the way you would. Otherwise the mechanisms for keeping the board “under control” should be used instead of special casing this instance (and before anyone raises concerns over controlling the voting roles, the number of people who would have to be ejected to influence voter outcomes would make the move a bit obvious).
As for why this is important, think about a Fellow who gets banned from e.g. discuss.python.org and PyCon US due to their CoC violations. To me that demonstrates that person is not upholding the values of the PSF. And yet, that same person could be posting somewhere else while stating in their bio how they are a Fellow and thus trading on the PSF name as if they do represent all of us. I for one don’t want that to happen, and so I want us Fellows to be held accountable for our position in this organization in terms of visibility and impact as representatives trading on our status and the PSF name (and if the title didn’t matter we wouldn’t put it on our résumés, so I don’t think this concern is w/o merit).
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Actually, seems that’s more the rule than the exception in US national politics. People routinely support liars, sexual predators, con artists, war criminals … provided they’re from “the right” party.
To them, it’s not “misplaced”, but more of a “lesser of evils - and the other side is so much worse” tradeoff.
So it depends on specifics of the case at hand. For example, not to pick on him, but Guido is Dutch. As such, for cultural reasons he’s prone to a certain directness and honesty that often strikes (among others) Americans as brusque, rude, and/or insensitive. “Meh” to me - so it goes.
And I lost count of how many times an executive at a startup I’ve worked for was charged with sexual harassment. The outcome was always the same: nothing actually happened to them, but the entire company was sentenced to days of “sexual harassment prevention” training, as part of the deal the bigwig cut to get off easy. By now I must be one of the most highly trained people on Earth in that specialty .
That’s how the world works. In your case, vote out the supporters standing in the way of the outcome you want. But be forewarned that you’ll probably find that relatively few others will join you. Most people, most of the time, don’t want to rock the boat. Not even if it’s sinking.
Overall, yes, I favor making it harder to terminate membership. You favor making it as easy as legally possible (I think - would it actually be legal to say rejecting a motion to kick someone out would require unanimous “nay” from the Board? if so, you should push for that).
I don’t believe there’s an “objectively right” (or “wrong”) choice to be made there. De gustibus non est disputandum. Either way, there will be winners and losers.
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Whoa! I am hopelessly over the hill. I had to look on the web to see whether I was “a Fellow”. Turns out I am! Cool - and belated thanks .
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It never occurred to me to list it on my resume. But I’m a newcomer compared to Tim and Brett. 
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In this case it’s more the cunning and viciousness of age worki9ng for me. I’d never put “Fellow” on a resume, but I do sign mine as “Python Software Foundation” instead of my name. That always gets their attention - which I assume must be favorable
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I’m +1 on (1), (2), and (3) here; they’re all solid changes.
For (3) especially, I appreciate that it will allow the board to be non-unanimous when faced with decisions that are likely to be controversial. I’ve watched other communities fracture because they had no means of holding their most revered members to account. I don’t want that to happen to Python too.
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Note that specifically isn’t a danger even without #3. #3 is just about formally revoking PSF membership. It’s already the case that any member can be, e.g., banned from posting on PSF forums, barred from attending PSF events, and kicked out of the Github development process. Those are mostly (all?) Steering Council decisions, and the Board isn’t directly involved.
That’s not just “in theory”. Multiple members have been thusly treated, The controversy, when there’s any, is already history by the time the new #3 would kick in.
According to the current bylaws, the only way now to finish this process (i.e., to formally revoke membership) is by a 2/3rd vote of all voting members. But nothing in the bylaws spares anyone from being effectively purged from “the community” before then. All that remains is to strike their name from the relevant member roster and voting roll (if applicable).
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