I’d welcome that too @pf_moore - if it’s done properly it will help draw a line under this, but done in haste it risks inflaming the situation instead. I suspect that’s why the higher powers are keeping relatively quiet at the moment, and that we’ll hear more once the dust is allowed to settle.
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I would love to be able to assume good faith on the part of everyone involved, but it is becoming harder and harder the longer we go with silence. If it was a good faith mistake, say so (whoever made the mistake or is responsible for it) and we can move on. I’d much rather have people in positions of power who can admit to having been wrong than people who just ignore all criticism.
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Depends on what “resolved” means. Many people now have lost confidence in the ability of the CoC WG to judge fairly, and for what they believe are compelling reasons. The CoC enforcement process is so entirely opaque that “blind trust” is essential for the community to accept it. In the absence of clarification, that trust won’t be regained.
Damage to trust was done as soon as the ban was announced, and regardless of whether I ever mentioned my ban on Discourse 3 months later. Damage increased the more of “my side” was made known. As related elsewhere, I told the SC that would happen, and urged them to try some openness of their own before people felt I was their only source for straight answers.
"Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus’ is how people think. And that applies not only across my specific list of violations, but will continue to apply in future public cases.
Is that a meaning of “resolved” you accept? That damage will persist even if another word about my case is never typed again.
I addressed the social dynamics of group stonewalling earlier, and agree we’re unlikely to get more clarification (not unique to the PSF - it’s a “corporate norm” regardless of organization).
Perhaps the CoC WG would say “we didn’t publish that list, the SC did - we just made a recommendation, & it was the SC’s decision to publish it”.
And perhaps the SC will say “we didn’t say the claims had merit, we were just following the recommendation of the topic experts, and had no real standing to question them”.
Not all parts of which are purely coming from my imagination.
Corporate inter-group “hot potato” is part of why stonewalling is the norm. Groups not only find it imperative to speak with a single voice of their own, but also find it imperative to rhyme with a single organization-wide “corporate voice”. No group pushes back against any other group in public either. Also not unique to the PSF.
My motto has always been “sunlight is the best disinfectant”, and I’ve been as transparent as humanly possible, exhaustively disclosing “my side”. I recommend the same for every party involved. But the process of disinfection can be painful & embarrassing too. So it goes. It’s still the Right\ Thing™ to do.
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I’m sure there are some folks who’ve lost trust, but I haven’t lost trust in them, and I doubt I’m alone. You are the person spearheading this line of conversation. There’s a few folks here who agree with you sure. But I think your suspension was justified.
Additionally, the equivalency that is being made between suspension, and “ban” is really disingenuous. You were suspended for 3 months due to your persistent behavior in that thread after many other community members made multiple attempts at reigning in the bombastic language used there. You say you weren’t contacted, but multiple times people tried to help reduce the high emotions in the conversation. It might have been soft skills, rather than “an official moderation statement with a moderation tag in a big moderation font” but it was still an act of moderation.
I object to the notion that there is not trust, and I object to the constant equivalency between “ban” and “suspension”. With respect to suspending you from the project vs dpo: By your own comments, you evaded the suspension:
You’ve been here for ages. I can, easily, see moderators going, “Hey we want to stop the hot emotions on our forum and give time for people’s emotions to cool off and empathy to return. But we don’t know if blocking some of the users we’ve had reported to us from DPO will cause them to jump to github issues to evade the moderator action. And given their history in the community, we have reason to believe that may happen.”. The scope of the suspension might have been large due to your behavior on DPO emphasizing you won’t change your ways in this space.
It also might have been large in scope because, by your own words, you carry a lot of weight. And the impact of your behavior might have been much larger than by a random user. You’re at least aware of the impact of your words and how it’s larger than an average user.
As to why an action was taken at all:
There may be valid reports from users in private explaining how some behaviors have made them feel unwelcome. There are people who have not engaged in these conversations who paid attention, and likely have chosen not to participate here. And it’s possible there’s a reason some of their reports aren’t being made public. That might not be something that the Steering Council, Conduct Workgroup, or moderators are ethically allowed to disclose on behalf of a reporter. Whatever took place, those three bodies made of multiple people in our community all agreed on the actions.
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Very briefly:
There at least hundreds on each side, sure. Note that Ethan’s dissent on my ban annoucement is one the most-liked replies in the history of the PSF’s Discourse, and despite that people feared reprisal.
Perhaps more that I’m just old 
Until you mentioned it just now, I had never consciously noted that my “ban announcement” actually said “suspension” instead. I don’t know what difference exists in your mind. None exists in mine. This kind of thing was almost always called “a ban” before. Even Victor Stinner’s external history fell back into calling it a “ban” after quoting “suspension” from the topic’s title. Victor has been around a long time too.
Lost me there. There was no prohibition whatsoever against communicating with anyone whosoever for the duration. Guido (among others) & I corresponded frequently. It was “covert” in this case to keep focus solely on the goal of bringing the election-method topic to quick resolution. It would have served no purpose to mention my name again, but could well have worked against the goal. I didn’t care about who got “credit”. Neither did Guido.
Once the poll was open, Gregory Smith (one of the SC people who voted to ban me) posted a brief “bloc STAR” endorsement statement on my behalf. He sent email to me first in that case, albeit by mistake. He wasn’t “evading” my suspension either, and neither was I when I replied to his email offering my endorsement and saying it was up to him whether to post it, whatever he thought best.
I’m kind of lost again. I wasn’t at all suspended from Github. The PSF has no control over my Github account. All along I continued to comment on issues and do a bit of code review on pull requests. What I couldn’t do for the duration is close issues, or close or merge PRs. In that sense it was just making a bit of extra work for those with commit bits to do that stuff.
For the rest, my focus here remains on the specific list of 10 claimed “CoC violations”. I accepted “the ban” (or, if you must, “the suspension”) and won’t discuss that part anymore.
If someone else wants to discuss that with you, fine by me.
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I apologize, the points I was trying to make seem to have been lost in the length of the post. I’ll put it more briefly.
Given the scale you have in this community, if there were users who had valid reports, a 3 month suspension makes sense to me after the use of soft skills failed to reign in the prior thread. The claimed reasons are sufficient enough to me as an explanation given your influence. But maybe there are other reasons to the suspension which are specific to individuals who made reports. But those reasons can’t be made public because they’re not ethical for a body to put a reporter into a spotlight.
Perhaps a large part of our dissonance on this is in the difference in our reaction being ban vs suspension–
I view the suspension as something similar to a mute button, just a forced “let’s take some time and breathe”. And similar things, like removing topics and posts on a topic are really helpful to make a forum ease off of a topic while everyone’s emotionally heated. Giving time to relax is super helpful, the topic is fine but in the context of when the discussion is taking place, the topic is too prone to causing heated emotions.
I think that difference between us on “suspension” vs “ban” might actually really help explain why we feel differently about this as a whole.
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I highly doubt it. Three months of being unable to access the site, vs “a three month ban”. It’s a distinction without a difference, and I don’t think anyone here is fighting over the word “ban”.
More important here is WHY the ban happened. You talk about “users who made valid reports” and “use of soft skills” etc. But the original message made a number of claims:
It’s those claims, not “attempts to reign in the prior thread”, that were used as justification for the suspension. This was not trying to “make a forum ease off of a topic while everyone’s emotionally heated”. When that happens, the FORUM MODS, not the CoC WG, take action (putting a thread into slow mode, for example).
So regardless of whether you call it a “ban” or a “suspension”, it’s those purported crimes that are under discussion, and those are the ones for which there’s been no communication and certainly no litigation. Please, go through that list and show us where anyone attempted to “use soft skills” to deal with things prior to the ban.
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That’s a start, but let’s split the burden. I’ll happily enough take the ban time. That wasn’t much worse than an annoyance.
Think about that one, though. I’ll take the time, but you have to live with a long list of defamatory “CoC violations” associated with your name, apparently on public display for the rest of your life. That’s what gets my goat. Because I find them almost wholly unjustified, and so do many others.
Will I let that go? Probably not. And I don’t think you would either. It’s not just for me. It happened before my case, and there’s no reason to hope it won’t happen again down the road unless real changes are made.
Then again, the rest of my life is almost certainly much shorter than the rest of yours, so I’d agree you’d be getting the short end of this stick.
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My trust in them is diminished, but is theirs to gain by detailing their reasons for their actions as I have stated earlier.
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Maybe they could be persuaded to address just one, and see where it goes from there? The first charge I set out to refute was soooooo off base I was provoked to extreme bluntness, and was so agitated by the injustice of it that another week went by before I could stomach typing up a refutation of another charge.
WARNING: the link here is to something exuding outrage. If that’s not something you can tolerate, don’t click it. No profanity, but no attempt either to disguise anger under a temperate tone.
- Defending “reverse racism” and “reverse sexism”, concepts not backed by empirical evidence, which could be seen as deliberate intimidation or creating an exclusionary environment. click here
During the ban, I saw someone mention the very same charge in this topic, and ask how it could be justified. That was around October 9, although no traces remain visible to us now. They were civil but their post got hidden by flags, and they tried to post it again. That violates “the rules”, and their Discourse account got suspended (for 2 weeks, as I recall).
The questions they asked then bear repeating:
I’m content to stop there on this charge, but for some others I’d go on to ask “is this something a reasonable person would consider to be a CoC violation?” For example, this very post contains the word “content”. That’s evidence. Saying that it contains “content” is fair and accurate. But a reasonable person would not consider the appearance of the word “content” to be a CoC violation. Notwithstanding that some person may sincerely believe it is.
Regardless, I’d be fascinated to hear that anyone found this charge to be justified. Same ground rules: if you do, and say so, I’ll gratefully take it into account, but won’t reply unless you say you want to discuss it. Everyone play nice, please 
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I read Tim’s page. It’s really clear that he has a real complaint.
- He didn’t mention reverse sexism.
- He didn’t defend reverse racism. He did the opposite.
And that’s also what I remember from reading his posts last summer.
How can people be comfortable with leaving false charges stand? How can the PSF be comfortable saying nothing about it, month after month?
More than one thing seems very wrong here.
I’m not a PSF member, but have contributed money. I’m regretting that now.
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This is also one of the reasons why I revoked my former PSF membership as PSF Fellow.
Some committees and some individuals of the PSF acted in a toxic and intransparent way against the community and against individuals of the community.
As a Python user since 1993, I do not care anymore much about organizations. Python is about the programming language and the people. It’s not about organizations and committees. People and committees came and go.
Also, the PSF as an US-based organization reflects a certain morality and has certain views on what is wrong and what is right, applying their moral view to the whole world wide community. This only works to some degree and I made my choice to leave this organization that no longer represents me.
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Stepping back for a bit, I hear that more than a few people are varying levels of upset or frustrated or confused (or a mix). One rallying cry I read is a lack of communication from one of more of PSF/CoC WG/SC.
Does anyone know (let’s not speculate) the right way to reach these groups to request information/communication? Has that been done already?
Regardless of my own feelings on the matter, I do worry that folks here will (and already have) make decisions based on the lack of communication here in discourse from one or more of these groups, when discourse was not the proper/correct place to be requesting public communication.
I fear folks will sour waiting for something that will never come, not because people decided it shouldn’t, but because of a missed opportunity. That would, to me, be a monumental tragedy for the community.
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Email apparently doesn’t work, search for “ghosting” in Tim’s Q&A page.
SC office hours was suggested in this post. Not sure if Tim has tried this.
Though doesn’t look like the calendar link posted there works anymore, I see this if I open it:
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They posted their decision on Discuss. They know.
, or its like we’ve delivered a letter but they may choose not to read.
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- The SC can be emailed questions or emailed to schedule office hours (we’re already aware that Google broke the calendar - the next SC will pick a new system).
- The PSF board has office hours as well as just email the PSF.
- Read Brett’s blog post explaining the Conduct WG - If you email the conduct-WG as outlined in the CoC you can ask specific questions.
Understand that all of those are demands for time from high latency organizations (assume a month or more at times). Critically they don’t owe most anyone specific answers or time but I trust them to do their best to address what makes sense for the community as a whole (for example: public posts clearing up who does what and how decisions are made and why). So please I urge everyone here to ask yourself what you really want, and only to pose questions of any such groups in good faith as a matter of respect for their time.
For me personally, the high % of toxicity in this public “anyone can post” moths-to-a-flame PSF category section our forums means I now generally refuse to engage in any thread in this channel. The number of bad faith actors attempting to claim they’re owed a bunch of volunteer time or a response which they’re already unwilling to accept and generally have been covered elsewhere ad nauseam in various threads across the forums is sadly high. (ex of “covered elsewhere”: most recently rehashed in the Committers forum in a thread that has repeatedly been pulled off topic)
(edited to fix typos)
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Calm down please, unless this is an attempt to fuel toxicity by name-calling (bad faith?)
Unwilling to accept what? Nothing has been offered.
You attack with generalities. I asked for quotes and the interpretation put on those quotes, Although they may be volunteers they should expect to be seen to serve the community - especially when they might falsely impugn the character of a lauded member of our community of long standing.
They have it in their power to give the information asked but chose not to. If it were where you stated then you could quote it - but have not, and knowing that the discussion is here, and their announcement was here - there answers should not be scattered elsewhere.
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Do you owe it to yourselves to have a positive reputation? Everyone is inviting you to have your say, instead of being judged in absentia by the court of public opinion.
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The important point to note from @gpshead’s comment is that any official response from the SC, PSF or CoC WG is likely to take anything up to a month or more. And speaking from personal experience, I can confirm that this isn’t an exaggeration[1] - volunteer groups take a lot of time to come to any sort of unified position, especially when there’s limited or no opportunity for face to face discussion. And that’s when there’s a specific, actionable request - “having their say” in the face of the sort of accusatory discussion going on here, where things are changing daily, is going to take even longer, if it’s even possible to frame anything coherent which isn’t outdated before it’s even posted 
Having issued the invitation for the various parties to have their say, and having had a response pointing out how long it could take for any such statement to be prepared, are we not obliged now to put the discussion on hold and wait for that response? It’s not much of an invitation if it’s withdrawn as soon as the invitee says “thanks, we’ll need some time to respond”… (And continuing to judge the SC, PSF and CoC WG while they are preparing a response is hardly what a good faith invitation looks like, to me at least).
I know of specific cases where the pip maintainers have taken over a month to come up with an answer to a simple yes/no question
↩︎
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The start of this thread was the beginning of October. It’s been two months. The ban happened at the start of August and people were asking for responses within the first week.
Please elaborate - what creates this obligation?
Is that an official statement? I would accept “we are preparing our response and will publish it in January 2025” or whatever date the SC chooses. That would at least be a response of some sort, something that would give us some hope of actually hearing back.
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