The CoC WG is taking action when appropriate, as is the CoC committee at PyCon, the CoC committee at PyCascades, and so on. This bylaw change adds another tool to the tool chest. Sure, right now the CoC WG can take action and prevent someone from participating in events, commit privileges can be revoked, and so on. But, as I said above, any PSF Fellow who is a bad actor, and is removed from our community spaces, can simply move on to adjacent communities, and use their PSF Fellow status to gain the trust of other people, and perpetuate more harm outside of our community. They can also continue to perpetuate harm within our community. Someone may not be allowed to attend PyCon anymore, but any local user groups, or regional conferences, wonât know that, because CoC reports are typically kept private.
Unclear why this seems impossible to get across: given that, do you agree with the âthere are, in fact, Fellows who repeatedly flaunt the CoCâ claim? If so, how can that be? Whoâs asleep at the wheel?
Iâm aware of several cases in which âremoved from our community spacesâ applied. They were in fact extremely visible within the community. If they somehow escape the notice of adjacent communities, itâs a meaning for âadjacentâ with which I may not be familiar 
.
But banning decisions arenât. No details are typically given, but the SC does record them as a matter of public record; e.g.,
- SC discussed the code of conduct situation with M.S. and decided on a one year ban.
is part of the SCâs public records. âM.S.â isnât much of a disguise, and easy web search will uncover the name for those who donât already know (although my recommendation is âdonât botherâ 
).
I recognize thereâs value in removing their names from PSF membership rosters and voting rolls too, but sincerely doubt other communities are checking those anyway.
BTW, I donât think you really need to pound the pavement. The participants in these threads already seem to be unanimous in supporting giving the Board power to revoke PSF membership (including me). People are arguing over details.
Itâs probably impossible to get it across because itâs not grounded in any kind of reality. Nobody is asleep at the wheel. Everyone is doing the best they can with the tools they have.
It sounds like you think the CoC and CoC WG enforcement is a well-defined, obvious thing. The CoC is a clearly marked line, and when you cross the line, youâre done. Gonezo. Everyone agrees you crossed the line, a bunch of enforcers come in and kick you out, and youâre gone forever. Itâs basically never that clear-cut.
Hereâs the more realistic picture: the CoC is a vague, blurry line, and nobody agrees exactly where itâs drawn. Thereâs a line-shaped splodge of fading ink, painted with a very broad brush, somewhere in the vicinity of consensus where the line should be drawn.
Then someone comes along and crosses the line. Letâs call them Sam. Maybe Sam toes the line a bit, maybe they clearly smash through it. Then what happens? A few people are uncomfortable about the line crossing. Maybe the space has active moderators, or members of the community who step up, and they talk to Sam directly, in private or in public, âHey, you seem to be crossing the line, maybe donât do that.â Many people who are bothered by it wonât try to address the situation, they just feel uncomfortable. Maybe they go do something else, somewhere else, instead.
Then Sam does it again, and maybe again, and then someone decides to let the CoC WG know. The CoC WG looks at it, tries to evaluate how egregious and intentional the CoC violation is, and sends Sam a private message. âHey, you should know, we think this is crossing the line, please keep the CoC in mind.â Maybe Sam responds, maybe they donât.
Then a few months later, Sam crosses the line again. Maybe someone complains to the CoC WG again, although a lot of people will be thinking âsheesh, there goes Sam againâ and move on. Maybe some people think âthere goes Sam againâ and they just avoid interacting with them altogether. The CoC WG looks at it again, tries to determine if this is Sam trying to start something, or just being insensitive, or maybe itâs a cultural problem, or they were having a bad day, or whatever other factors are in play. They decide to send Sam another private message. âHey, this is still not good, can we find a better way to do what youâre doing so that it doesnât become a bigger problem?â
Maybe Sam responds, maybe they donât. A few months later Sam does something in a different forum, in a different way, that people think crosses the line. Maybe thereâs a new set of people involved, who havenât seen the other interactions. They feel bad, but they donât want to confront Sam. Maybe someone sees it and does inform the CoC WG. The Coc WG looks at it again, reconsiders everything again, and maybe takes the big step of recommending to people with authority over the spaces Sam is active in that Samâs access be temporarily suspended. This also involves yet more communication with Sam. âLook, this is a real problem, weâve tried to address it in other ways, tried to help you improve the interactions, but now we really have to take action.â
Maybe Sam comes back a few months later, or maybe Sam starts operating in different spaces. The same interactions happen again: Sam does things that people consider crossing the line, it makes them uncomfortable, perhaps uncomfortable enough to report it to the CoC WG. The CoC WG looks at the past reports and the new reports, tries to decide whether thereâs anything that can be done to improve the interactions between Sam and the rest of the community. Past communications havenât worked. The CoC WG finally decides to recommend a ban of Sam to the spaces involved, maybe permanent, maybe until Sam shows some kind of improvement or willingness to address the problem. âIâm sorry, we tried, but this just isnât acceptable behaviour.â
Now, I talked about flaunting the CoC. I havenât mentioned any motivation behind Samâs behaviour. Maybe Sam doesnât care about CoCs and just wants to ignore them, doing their own thing. Maybe Sam actively fights CoCs and is intentionally crossing the line to prove that theyâre a bad idea. Maybe Sam just thinks being angry at people, or being âedgyâ, or shocking people is a normal way to interact in the open-source world, because thatâs what they see from everyone else. I consider each of those flaunting the CoC, and Iâve seen examples of all of them. But thereâs nobody âasleep at the wheelâ here.
Lest people think Iâm complaining about things happening this way, Iâm not. The âsoftâ approach, with a lot of communication and consideration of people as individuals, as human beings with flaws and good intentions, is absolutely necessary. Itâs a complex social problem that needs to be handled with empathy and care. And thatâs being done.
And just to belabour the point of the Bylaws changes, after all that effort to try and get Sam to play nicely in our community, ending up finally with a ban from (potentially) all PSF spaces, they are still a PSF member, because trying to remove them as member would do more harm than good right now.
Hi all,
Just wanted to make you all aware of an additional forum that weâre having next week on the Bylaws changes. This is in addition to the existing forums for communication on the Bylaws changes, and we still welcome contribution here.
The PSF Board is running an additional Election related Office Hour session to connect with the community about the proposed bylaws changes. We invite you to join us next Thursday at 1PM UTC on the PSF Discord for a constructive q&a discussion!
Relevant social media links:
- x.com
- Python Software Foundation: "The PSF Board is running an additional Election râŚ" - Fosstodon
- Python Software Foundation on LinkedIn: Join the Python Software Foundation Discord Server!
Also, just to re-assure, we are working on a response to the discussion on proposed change 3, which we expect to have ready well before the office hours session next week.
I can say it very much does play into what gets recommended; no point in suggesting the impossible in terms of enforcement. But the discussion has been had as to whether we would have recommended expulsion from the PSF if possible (and if I remember correctly the answer was âyesâ in at least one occasion).
Thanks, Thomas! I fully agree itâs a highly nuanced and complex area. Which is precisely why I was baffled by the black-&-white, no-room-for-nuance, obvious-to-the-most-casual-observer nature of the telegraphic âthere are, in fact, Fellows who repeatedly flaunt the CoCâ claim.
But, as you said now, âItâs basically never that clear-cutâ'. Although Iâd say sometimes it actually is. Itâs for the latter cases Iâd reserve âfactâ. âI consider each of those flaunting the CoCâ clarifies that itâs your opinion, which I havenât the slightest problem with. Your opinion is valued by me too. But opinions arenât dispositive - facts may be, and opinions arenât the same as facts.
The original context:
That did read like âa complaintâ to me:. You framed the problem as being so severe that nothing the PSF could do right now about the Fellows you already have in mind could be adequate. Nothing hypothetical or conditional about it. There are Fellows here right now for whom the only adequate action would be to revoke their membership.
Which may, or may not, be true, but is - to my eyes - far from established âfactâ.
Iâm not sure I understand why there is so much discussion RE change #3. The Python community, made up of PSF members, elect a board to serve the communityâs interests. One of those interests is defining what conduct is and is not acceptable within the community. Another of those interests is handling issues that arise when members of the community display conduct that is not acceptable within the community. This seems, to me at least, to be integral to the job that the board of directors has as a whole.
If a member of the community is acting in ways that consistently demonstrate conduct that is not acceptable to the community they should be removed from the community. That is one of the ways the community stays healthy. I trust us as a community to have a CoC working group that investigates issues thoroughly and makes reasonable and reasoned recommendations. I trust us as a community to elect a board that is capable of reviewing those recommendations and acting accordingly.
Most of the responses Iâve read that speak against the proposed change talk about potential future leaders in our community with malicious intent. While I acknowledge that that is something possible it is not something I think is likely. Limiting the boardâs ability to deal with problems that have been seen but not appropriately dealt with (and based on some of the comments on this thread, this is the issue that the bylaws change is meant to addres) because of potential future bad actors does not strike me as the correct way to proceed.
Iâm hampered by privacy concerns having been involved in these conversations, but I will say itâs obvious to me.
In the sense of the full context of the post of mine youâre replying to? I dislike repeating everything, so I wonât, and you didnât quote enough for me to be sure of precisely what youâre endorsing.
In that context, these offenses by (unnamed) current Fellows were framed as being so egregious that revoking PSF membership was the only adequate response. Does your endorsement include that part?
If thatâs the case, then my original question remains unaddressed: if itâs that cut-&-dried, why has no other visible action been taken? For example, bans are very visible. While the PSF itself doesnât appear to keep a publicly visible record of them, there are summaries elsewhere, inclduing full names and dates. And turns out I was already aware of all the actions those accounts record.
Iâm not talking about Fellows âpoking the bearâ. Of course that happehs. That doesnât strike me as sufficient reason to revoke membership unless itâs carried out to an extreme. In which case, I would absolutely expect to see some kind(s) of ban first. Going nuclear should be the last visible action, not the first.
According to me. But I bet I could find at least two others who agree .
Yes.
Because your list of places is not exhaustive for the entire Python community; some things are hyper-local.
As I said, to me, some of the things brought to the CoC WG clearly calls for losing membership. Beyond that Iâm afraid you have to decide if you trust my opinion on this or not.
Thank you, Brett! Thatâs as close to clarity as I ever hoped to get .
True (to both parts).
Youâre a peach. Of course I trust you.
But if the PSF has a PR firm on retainer, they should be fired. That thereâs already a list of Fellows slated for possible termination via change #3 is supremely relevant information that should have been pro-actively disclosed up-front. Itâs not a good look to have left that unsaid.
It makes a great deal of sense of much of what seemed strained, and even downright weird, in this announcement. For example, why it was presented as a fait accompli with no prior community discussion, no possibility to change a word before voting, and with a sense of urgency that was left with scant rational motivation.
Maybe this will surprise people, but that thereâs believed to be immediate real need for this makes me more likely to vote for it, and leave hypotheticals to later revisions.
People donât report things when they believe no good will come of the report based on collective past experiences. This is systemic failure that erodes trust and destroys a community. This is not the wouldâve-been-reporters fault. This is the fault of all of us for not empowering the enforcers to accomplish their job.
This vote improves upon the situation by seeking to giving the board exactly the power they shouldâve had all along.
The better conduct actions are handled, the more reports happen, and the healthier our community becomes.
FYI, as things turned out (read more), in these cases the behaviors were reported, and the PSF did âdo somethingâ about it, but they were local (Brett wrote âhyper-localâ) matters not visible to the general Python community.
First, for credentials and context; I am a PSF fellow, a community service award recipient, and I support the bylaws changes.
The discussion thus far has been voluminous, and so I apologize in advance if I am retreading ground covered by others already. I have tried to read as much as I can, and I have not seen these issues raised.
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PSF fellowships are not personal property or human rights. Their removal is not a sanction so severe that it needs this level of deliberation. They are an honor and they should be hard to obtain and easy to lose.
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The amount of verbiage that has been poured into this discussion, particularly in opposition to Change 3, will unfortunately read to marginalized people as power protecting power. I donât personally believe there is any malicious intent here, just tinkerers who enjoy playing with complex rules trying to logically test a system. In a less self-aware era of my life I have written similar sorts of posts. But, in the proposed hypothetical scenario where there is a powerful person (the fellow, who wants to maintain their existing prestige) and a marginalized one (their accuser, who wants accountability without attracting a hate mob), it is worth asking oneself why one would reflexively identify exclusively with power, and how this reflexive identification (and supporting this reflex with the efforts of writing thousands of words in its support) reads to an outside observer.
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I strongly believe Change 3 does not go nearly far enough. Over the last few years, on multiple occasions, I have been summoned to conversations where a PSF fellow was being prominently unkind on social media, and I needed to both emphasize that âPSF fellowâ in someoneâs bio does not mean that person speaks for the Python community, and also to provide a representation of kinder and more thoughtful communication on behalf of the community as a fellow myself. None of these have risen anywhere close to the level of a CoC incident, but these personal experiences have amply demonstrated to me that we do have a broader problem within the membership that the board needs more tools to address. (I feel it is important to note that unlike other participants in this conversation I have not served on the CoC committee, nor on the board, and so if even I am randomly happening across these sorts of interactions because I have a follower count in the low 4 digits, they cannot possibly be rare.) If the title of âfellowâ comes with this level of implied prestige, it must also come with a commensurate level of oversight.
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If you feel that this is mostly reasonable but that the boardâs discretion should be reined in (with a unanimous vote, with a supermajority, or with some other due process restriction), I would humbly submit that you can vote for Change 3 and then propose new bylaws changes later, rather than allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good here. We can ship something and iterate, it does not need to be perfect in order to be useful.
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To synthesize my 2nd and 4th points, even in the worst case scenario imaginable, where the cabal of a majority (but not the entirety!) of the board immediately seizes power to vote out a bunch of fellows with CoC reports against them⌠somehow unfairly, it seems eminently clear to me that the harm of removing those fellowships is far exceeded by the vastly more likely harm of being perceived to care more about unlikely hypothetical scenarios than about fighting against a culture of pervasive deference to abusive high-status individuals. Remember that âabusiveâ is priced in here: Change 3 is specifically about code of conduct enforcement, not about booting random fellows.
I have a lot more feelings on my third point but as I said in my second, there have already been too many words written here, so in the interests of brevity I will leave it at that.
Had I known that my fellowship had been fraught with so many responsibilities outside the Python community, golly, I might not have accepted it. Did I even accept it? I think I might just have been told I was a fellow one day and I thought like thatâs super cool, and Iâm sure I told whomever notified me that I appreciated (and continue to appreciate) the tip of the hat.
But I certainly never intended to impose on the board some responsibility to cosign my behavior outside official spaces forevermore. If thatâs the responsibility, please take it away from me. If people are trading on their âfellowshipâ outside the purview of officially moderated spaces immorally, although they are as uncool as a disco shirt at a sex pistols show, I think caveat emptor to a certain extent.
But outside that, the (possibly misunderstood, due to my own cluelessness about recent goings-on) weird concentrating on âfellowsâ (which the granting of the name may have been handed out like candy in the past, if I am any example), a well-defined way of kicking members out of the Foundation is definitely important.
I think at some point, we all just have to defer to the more-informed people we trust about this particular thing.
So (editorial) we are worried about an unlikely Board ousting folks unduely.
I couldnât tell precisely from the above, would the result of the ousting be public?
To me, thatâs the missing piece in this doomsday scenario. If a person or people had their title stripped by the board, and we knew about it (save for the gory details, âperson X was stripped of title because of Yâ) isnât the board beholden to a membership vote (which someone above said can be called by the members as well)?
Iâm voting for, regardless. But I think this clarification makes the unlikely doomsday scenario have even less of a bite.
I have followed with interest the discussions both on the PSF-vote list and here. I have learnt lots of things whilst being entertained 
Thanks for that.
Joking apart, the approach I take on this is very simple and somehow it has an engineering mindset.
Bylaws, like code, is never going to be perfect and it might contain some pitfalls (bugs) that might be occur or not.
We can make every effort to optimise it but there will be always something that can be changed/improved. Not for the reason of seeking perfection, I would stop implementing incremental, and maybe not so perfect, changes.
Do these changes, although not perfect as you expect to be, go to the right direction? If so, vote for them and Iâm sure there will be more opportunities to improve them in the future.
Put them on a scale with potential risks and draw your conclusions.
I personally going to vote for as I think it is an improvement from the current situation.
I am voting against change 3, for the same reason of over-zealous directors who could get misguided pointed out by @DavidMertz . While on the board this almost happened, and the power can be weaponized. I believe some of these things are what can lead to examples like the open letter from Africa.
If it passes I can trust that some directors might spot these anomalies, if the board prioritizes consensus rather than individuals swaying the whole board, this change can actually be a good one for us as a community.
While true, I believe we have the ability to remove a fellow with other instruments, I donât think it is very necessary that the board gets this power, especially now.
This is aside from the measures themselves, but Tim, would you kindly stop implying that people who draw different conclusions from you didnât read things? Itâs condescending.
Iâll keep an eye out for that - thanks. I donât think Iâm especially prone to that, but it does happen. No offense intended in cases where it does, but a better phrasing was certainly missed.