Blame me for this being in PSF. I asked Ethan to use this category. I like hearing from everyone. You may think this ban only affected 100 core devs (the SC’s flock), but the effects go far beyond those elites. I identify more with the hoi polloi anyway.
This drama supposedly started in the PSF category, but there’s a much stronger reason to put the topic here. As I said in my Ban Q&A blog post:
That’s why I want everyone to be able to post: if someone out there feels I violated the CoC against them, I want them to be able to tell the world even if they aren’t a core dev. For SK[1], the case for banning became much clearer (at least to me) when people in the open discussion volunteered new information.
I’ve always tried to help the SC make the strongest coherent case it can, and this is no exception[2]. If the SC had taken my strongly urged advice on September 17 (basically, be open and straight), it’s possible this topic would never have existed. That was two weeks before I had ever created a web page in my life, and this topic exists only because I started to tell “my side” to the public in my blog. If you read what I wrote then, you couldn’t possibly be surprised at the reaction you’re getting now.
[email from Tim to the SC on Sep 17[ Word to the wise: posting that list of “offenses” was a bad idea. You didn’t need it to ban me, and over time it’s increasingly destroying trust in the CoC WG and in your own judgment for parroting it. … the announcement leaves the impression that I’m some kind of serial CoC terrorist who repeatedly refused to cooperate with the CoC WG. Which is false. I had 0 interactions with them. Not even one. For now you’re still enjoying the benefit of peoples’ good-faith presumptions that “due process” was given, but they’re unjustified in this case. People will eventually learn that, and feel they were misled.
To continue from my step back and still hoping to take a step forward, it seems like the logical next step is that if an official response is to be expected, that it should be requested in one of the official means Greg kindly pointed out above.
@tim.one if you don’t mind me volunteering/requesting you to consider what that looks like, to you, since I’ve read (on discourse) that this is something that you want to see (as well as others of course), and because your stature and proximity gives you most “right” to these requests.
I think that would be a productive next step for this discussion which ensures that lack of communication cannot possibly be due to making requests in an inappropriate manner.
(And if I may make one suggestion, it would be to kindly request that an acknowledgement of receipt be made along with a loose expectation of when to receive official response, so that folks can set expectations accordingly)
This is how I feel as well. On the one hand, I think some of the posts from people who are upset about this have focused unduly on the circumstances of Tim’s ban in particular, rather than on other bans as well as the general lack of transparency in moderation. On the other hand, responses from moderators[1] have, in my view, not helped matters by not acknowledging even the existence of a problem and not taking even the smallest steps towards acknowledging that transparency is a primary good in any kind of governance.
One reason I’m trying to maintain a sense of good faith is that I get a sense that some of these matters may be “growing pains” associated with shifts in the makeup of the community as well as the multiple purposes of this discussion forum. There are two aspects to this.
First, there are a lot of comments about moderators being stressed or burdened by these kinds of decisions. That’s certainly understandable. However, it also indicates to me that perhaps the responsibilities of certain positions (e.g., SC membership) are not what people thought they were signing up for. That is also understandable, but it indicates to me a need to think structurally about how such decisions (e.g., moderation and bans) are made and who makes them.
With a project like Python that has such a huge and varied worldwide community, it is guaranteed that issues like this will arise. That means that everyone who has to make such decisions should know what they’re getting into. Having the decisions made by people who don’t want to think about such matters isn’t good either for those decision-makers or for those who are affected by their decisions. That’s one reason I like the spirit of @malemburg’s suggestion in another thread to have professional moderators/mediators. It’s good to have such decisions being made by people who don’t feel like making them is taking time away from something else that they’d really rather be doing!
Second, I increasingly feel that some of the tension here arises from the multifaceted purposes and constituencies of this forum. On the one hand, there are core devs here who are trying to “get things done” in some sense. On the other hand, there are a lot of people here who are not core devs, some of whom are just looking for help with Python, and some of whom can give useful input into core dev matters, comment on PEPs, and so on, and among all these there are a range of backgrounds, levels of technical proficiency, “centrality” (i.e., core devs vs. maintainers of widely used tools vs. maintainers of more niche tools vs. users, and so on)
It’s great that the process is so open and I think a lot of great input comes from a range of participants here. But from the occasional comment here or there I get the sense that some closer to the “inner circle”, so to speak, regard at least some of the other stuff as a distraction from “moving forward” with technical matters. I’m not here to make any statement on that. But the relevance of this observation to this thread is that the right level and style of moderation may differ depending on the purpose of each discussion. I’m not sure what the right move is, but just my sense is right now that different people have strikingly different visions of what this forum is, who it’s for, etc.
For me, personally, no there isn’t, basically because of what I said above. The issue is precisely that I have lost a significant amount of trust in the moderation/governance process, and that can’t be resolved without a response from those who control that process.
Then the problem will never be resolved and my trust will continue to erode.
I would like to assume that too, and like I said above, I’ve been holding out some amount of hope in that regard. But with each passing day it becomes more difficult. Good faith goes both ways. Good faith means interpreting dissatisfaction with moderation as an opportunity to improve that moderation and with an open mind to the possibility that mistakes may have been made and should be admitted if so. Instead I see a fair amount of comments either insinuating or outright stating that opposition to various moderator actions is “toxic” or otherwise inherently unacceptable, or that it indicates a rejection of the ideals of the CoC (rather than a rejection of the way it has been interpreted or implemented).
It would be extremely easy for any of the people involved in these decisions to come forward and say any of the following:
Yes, I agree that the moderation policies have not been transparent enough.
Yes, I agree that we may have interpreted the CoC in ways that do not align with the way some significant subset of the community sees it.
Yes, I agree that transparency in governance is a primary good.
Yes, we are working on a response to try to take everyone’s perspectives into account and we anticipate making a statement at Date X.
Yes, stonewalling all attempts at communication is a bad policy and it is our goal to not do that in the future.
Yes, the fact that the people who could say these things feel they cannot say them for some kind of procedural/policy reason undermines the spirit of good faith and openness in the community and is likely to send community-mod relations into a downward spiral, and we are working on ways to get out of that vortex.
I have not seen anything like that. As @Rosuav mentioned, it has been a few months already. That is plenty of time for someone to say one or more those things, if they agreed with those statements. The longer we go without any such statement, the more I’m forced to assume that the reason people aren’t saying those things is that they don’t believe them, and that really dampens my faith in the future of this community.
In “moderators” I mean to include anyone with some kind of official power to ban or sanction users, so this includes the Discourse moderators, the SC, and the CoC WG — and maybe more, but who knows? ↩︎
No, thank you. The one thing I haven’t tried is “office hours”. I don’t do “video calls”, period. I’m so old and in the way I don’t have a webcam, or even a cell phone. And given the lack of good faith I perceive, I won’t communicate in a way that I don’t have a permanent verbatim record of, under my control. I type “X” and hear back “see? He screamed ‘Y’!” too often, and even pointing to the post where I typed “X” is dismissed as irrelevant and already covered ad nauseum. If it ever gets to an actual court, ya, “look: I typed ‘X’” will be dispositive.
Other people could post their stories if they like. I’m an open book about myself, but hold things others tell me in confidence, without their explicit permission to disclose them.
I have been told stories from people who did have one-and-one, face-to-face, convos with SC members. I don’t know what to make of those. They related things the SC has never said in public, or to me in private. It’s in the category of hearsay, though, so I won’t say anything more specific. Suffice it to say that my “informants” didn’t find them persuasive either.
How about you try? You seem to be a sensible person, not yet on anyone’s bad side.
I’ve addressed the social dynamics of group stonewalling before:
I’ll add that “accountability” to most people means more than just “if you don’t like it, vote us out”. Even if every member of a group understands that, it may not survive in what the group says in their official unified “corporate voice”.
It’s important to understand that “just people talking” ends when a corporate group is involved. Then there’s massive power imbalance, and, amazingly enough, it’s the group that will often claim they’re “the real victim”.
Notwithstanding which, oh ya, they do have a tough job. I told the SC more than once during this that I would rather be in my shoes than theirs. Still true even more so now. But when I had group power, I didn’t identify with “the group”, and would openly disagree with what the group decided. Very rarely happened, though - in fact, the only concrete example that comes to mind at once was about removing a package on PyPI.
The Steering Council has great power over the project, and as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. They are responsible to the community, and to the core team that elected them, to explain their decisions and show their reasoning, especially for decisions that are highly controversial and have already generated tons of bad PR for Python. Being volunteers does not absolve them of responsibility for their actions. Meanwhile, they have failed to post a summary of their actions since August, and their August summary was posted in late October — what has the SC been doing since then, and why is the community not regularly informed on their actions?
I don’t expect the SC’s statement to address all issues raised by the community until the minute it was posted. It is understandable that such statements take time to write, and probably need to be checked by a lawyer first. But they still have not addressed concerns about the accusations against Tim listed in the August ban announcement — concerns that were raised back in August.
The Steering Council has a hourly meeting every week. Even if the whole committee were to participate in writing the statement, and even if they did not want to have any extra meetings, it should be enough time to respond at least to concerns raised in August.
Has the SC made an official, public announcement that they are aware of the community’s concerns and are working on a response?
What do you guys expect to come out of this official response beyond the we will not violate the privacy of those who made complaints that they’ve already given several times to an unaccepting audience?
It’s pointless for them to reply. As is explaining why they consider it pointless. And now it comes with the added bonus in that any response made has a high probability of ending up on a high profile blog under the heading Dysfunction. Why would anyone willingly engage in a conversation like that…?
Do you have information on them needing extra time to address my concerns, i.e. giving explicit quotes and the interpretations they put on those quotes leading to their announcement of Tims ban? If it is speculation on your part, then stopping asking for transparency could be seen as acceptance of their actions. Are they indeed preparing a response? For when? When and where was this communicated please?
I don’t have any faith in the process here. I’ve experienced my own words being twisted by a member of the CoC WG in a moderation context, who am I even supposed to raise that to when it happening to a core developer around as long as Tim is stonewalled and why should I believe things will be any different for me?
They can use the title of the office they are a member of to state that this quote By Tim “…” was given this interpretation; This “…” and this “…” were interpreted as …
… on the basis of those interpretations of quotes from Tim, we, the members of … decided our action.
I don’t see how it needs to give the name of individuals, indeed, if some members were not in accordance they could state that it was a majority decision.
And what will happen if you (or someone else) disagrees with the interpretations? Will you all leave the matter as is or carry on demanding for an official response to your next round of objections, debates on tolerance and pleas for more evidence?
As far as I’m concerned, the entire process is damaged to the point where I can’t raise an actual issue with what I felt was an inappropriate interaction.
You can’t make specific public claims about behavior that don’t match what people know and then hide behind wanting that to be private. It was someone’s decision to publically announce things that people don’t believe based on what they witnessed and, at least in my case having also experienced this, with the belief that it requires someone to have intentionally twisted the meaning beyond what was written.
If the specific CoC WG member in question has an issue with what I’m saying, they know who they are, and unlike them, I’ll gladly make the interaction in question public knowledge if they take issue with public claims without public evidence.
With the claims against Tim in particular, If they wanted it handled privately, the specific claims shouldn’t have been published and it should have been handled privately.
This discussion was locked by the moderators unfortunately but I think there were actionable ideas to improve the situation rather than continuing here as is without a plan.
edit: note that I said to please stick to the topic a few times in response to comments that were deleted I just realized, in case it’s confusing (I just got confused myself)
There’s a very specific issue on the table here now: whether the charge against me about defending “reverse Xisms” is even possible to read as being an accurate complaint. I explained on my blog why I believe it isn’t: it’s, for whatever reasons, a failure to grasp the plain meaning of plain English. It not only can’t pass a “reasonable person” test, it can’t even pass a “can read English” test.
Resolving that has nothing to do with anyone’s privacy. I assert that the claimed offense is dead false on the face of it.
And it’s very telling to me that nobody here has disputed that. The only reply here that addressed the issue directly at all agreed with my deconstruction of that defamation.
It’s actually counterproductive for them to reply if it’s just once again to refuse to address what’s actually being said. There’s been a lot of that, starting with Gregory’s straw man reply to Ethan’s dissent on my ban announcement.
The Dysfunction section is entirely links to what other (than me) people have written about PSF issues, and regardless of whether they’re related to my case. Another evasive or straw man reply wouldn’t merit inclusion there. Unless someone else published a piece relating it to a larger context. Then a link to their piece may become a candidate for that section.
By the way, my blog may or may not be 'high profile" here, but best I can tell (I’m not a “web guy”), it gets a trivial amount of traffic. Although I have no real idea of what the “Insights → Traffic” graph is purporting to say.
I would have liked instead to create a blog with a comment section, where people could push back freely against me too. But that’s apparently impossible using “Github Pages”. So I settle for what I have. If I had any interest in writing a blog, I would have started one long ago.
I think the answer to that is pretty obvious. Don’t name names, as other people have mentioned.
But I am not really concerned about Tim’s suspension at this point, and I don’t think it’s the most important issue at stake. In the future, it is obvious to anyone who isn’t day-to-day involved with Python governance that some change needs to happen in order for controversial suspensions to not have the probability of creating a PR problem.
Frankly, were I the SC (or any other body tasked with issuing suspensions), the next time I needed to suspend someone, I would give absolutely no information at all why it happened. That would be the cleanest and dumbest way out of the current set of controversies. Obviously, it would invite a range of other controversies, probably worse. It is in the SC’s power to do just this; I hope they don’t.
The most glaring, fixable issue with the current controversy is that the CoC enforcement process was just not followed. The SC seems to have asked the CoC WG for advice; at that point, under that set of procedures it was encumbent upon the CoC WG to have a dialogue with Tim. They did not. Who knows whether that dialog would have borne fruit, but it could not have hurt. Maybe it’s presumed that CoC enforcement for core committers is somehow materially different, but that’s not written down anywhere.
The SC didn’t need advice or permission from the CoC WG to issue a suspension, but since they asked, the rules should at least be followed. Presumably they exist for a reason. A response from the SC and/or CoC WG would at least acknowledge this error. Otherwise, future enforcement actions will invariably be interpreted as done in a fit of pique by members o he small groups that do not follow the rules they created or are tasked to abide by.
The specific complaint could in fact be tied back to a person based on the exact text of the complaint (and thus you’re falling back on simply presenting the rephrased complaint, which is what is already present)
The specific complaint could be related to a private interaction (for example a DM interaction)
Now, I don’t really have a great argument for “somebody complained about specific public posts, and Tim is comfortable with those being revealed” except for the moderation-related “now we are litigating whether this post ‘is offensive’ by some given metrics”.
I do wonder about what interactions could have been taken pre-ban to try and give Tim an opportunity to adjust, but in the hypothetical where this is related to private interactions, I do not believe there is much to be done here. Having Tim know who reported him is an obvious problem generator[0].
And the maximalist position: Given that revealing whether or not it was related to private interactions is not information that one wants to reveal, then even if the interactions are public one cannot reveal them, as it would otherwise set a precedent that future violations could use to establish private comms being the source of the complaint.
[0]: people in this thread make a lot of references to “justice systems”, but the analogue here is not the State’s judicial system, but a company’s internal HR system. Why? Because we are not talking about depriving people of life or liberty, but access to a community and the “core developer” bit at most.
I personally do not think any formal complaints by civilians were made (the SC does not need any to suspend anyone, and the relations of the infractions themselves were so strange and beyond any plausible reading save the posting-too-much one that they seemed to have come from a single someone), and I don’t think anything about this particular case is so sensitive that identities of complainers couldn’t be protected even if there were, but it doesn’t really matter now. What matters is the public perception of the process in the future. The SC and the CoC WG should follow their own rules in order to improve that perception, and acknowledge that they were not followed in this case.
I would agree with you if:
I thought any civilian had reported Tim.
I didn’t think identities could not be obscured in some response.
I have a hard time not reading what you wrote as a bad-faith response. Do you seriously believe that I think that a rule should exist, but that I shouldn’t be covered by it?
I happily acknowledge that “posting too much” is a nebulous rule, and am 100% fine with it. Perhaps that means that the SC, with some vendetta on me, will “get me”. Or, more graciously, that they decide to be super overzealous
I do not believe that the SC is in that mindset (as proven by this thread still existing, which would not exist in most fora)
I also believe that if I have ended up in a situation where the SC is in some vendetta against me then… well that’s what that is, and it’s a sign for me to take my ball and go home. Yeah, sure, speech is chilled etc. But if everything gets to that, things are likely already a major mess. Too much of one for me.
This comfort with a qualitative rule is likely an axiomatic difference between you and many people you disagree with in this discussion, and likely a sign that there is very little space for agreement in this context.
But at the very least please try and assume that other people are talking in good faith. This isn’t the first time that idea hits reality in terms of moderation of a distributed community, other people have also given this a lot of thought.
I’ve already acknowledged that the apparent tone of that post wasn’t what I originally intended it to be. But I did not edit my post, because I don’t believe in lying to everyone about what I said. My words stand, and so does my acknowledgement a bit further down.
Perhaps, like you, I assume this at first, and then update my assessment based on the posts people make?
If that’s all there were to this, I would have stopped here with my first two posts after I came back.
But there’s more to this: the shrill list of 10 claimed “CoC violations” broadcast to the entire world, and apparently destined to remain on display for the rest of my life.
No company’s “internal HR system” would do that. That’s what drags “State justice” into it for real: libel is in fact a matter of US civil law, and defamation of EU criminal law. You try to damage someone’s character with highly public accusations, and you’re flirting with real legal trouble. HR departments know better than to go there.
IMO, the PSF would have been far better off skipping that list and relying solely on the 100% opaque “not a role model, dark patterns, secrets, trust us” spin.
Posting a list of specific “violations” that are widely disbelieved has so far just resulted in mounds of bad publicity (both internal and external). I don’t know where it will end.
BTW, no, I’m not “threatening” legal action. I haven’t even asked a lawyer practicing in the area for an opinion. It’s not something I want to pursue. But that’s a set of tradeoffs subject to changing judgment as time goes on.
Even in this worldview, the PSF is not a court of law or the judiciary, but just an HR department committing serious missteps. So … again, I think that the analogies to a judicial system to be misplaced.
Business news is littered with HR departments defaming people in a very “this is going to turn into a lawsuit” fashion. The remedy there is not “the HR department should be run like the country’s courts”.
I am very sympathetic to the listing of charges being character damaging. I have a hard time saying anything absolute on that choice because I do not have all of the information, but it’s a decision that I have a hard time absorbing!
I do think that this is part of the trickiness here… some people are calling for transparency. These charges are part of that. Would it be more transparent to not have the charges posted? At a basic level, no. This is part of the fundamental trickiness, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way of handling things of course.
