All input is welcomed by me. Agree or not, provided it’s made in good faith.
Of course that’s true. I expect I know more facts about the distribution and demographics of “malcontents” than the Powers That Be, because some reach out to me in confidence. There are some (invisible) Kiraly supporters on d.p.o, but the level of support he got surprised me too. I also see a self-selected sample.
In most elections of any kind, most of the electorate is poorly informed.
Not unique to the PSF. Posts on Discourse are especially problematic, because they’re a form of self-selected public polling, “Preference falsification” can then go on to play major roles in creating a distorted illusion of public sentiment.
Nevertheless, in the last Steering Council election, just counting the number of hearts on candidates’ nomination statements on Discourse did a fine job or “predicting” the winners. In other similar elections, it didn’t.
There are no easy answers.
Just a fact of life. I’ll note that STAR voting is subtly designed to encourage more engaged voters. Things people aren’t even aware of. For example, ratings are of 0 through 5 stars. That’s an even number of choices. What if you want to express total neutrality? You’d need an odd number of choices to pick “the one in the middle”. That’s deliberate. They want to encourage you to think.
Also a nearly comprehensive illustration of “the problem”. The idea of mediation wasn’t new (as @ofek said, it was initially brought up in earnest by a former “person with power”, about 5 years ago), but was seemingly ignored. I know I replied immediately at the time it was first made, to support further thought. Then again, that person was in turn partly echo’ing an earlier suggestion of mine, but very helpfully fleshing it out with Jupyter’s actual implementation.
But Ofek’s topic was closed, with a note saying “[your feedback} has been heard and responded to …”, naming multiple “responses” that were all written before Ofek started his topic. Not a one of which even mentioned mediation, which was the primary thrust of Ofek’s topic.
So what could “has been heard” mean? There’s not the slightest sign that any bit of the feedback had been understood. Or, frankly, even that it had been read by anyone relevant. 5 years and still counting …
I’m with @malemburg with this. Apart from easy cases (“X said a bad word!”, “X, don’t do that again - you’re on notice”), we don’t have the core competences to presume we can do an adequate job at this. It’s hubris at its worst, which is of course common among computer nerds . You can’t sell me the idea that a 4-hour Zoom course on CoC enforcement even approaches adequate training for substantial cases, and not even our primary paid consultant claims a background in psychology or conflict resolution or negotiation (they’re an ex-Linux-dev, who switched careers rebranding as a “CoC consultant”, based on their own bad experiences as openly non-binary).
If you want professional results in hard cases, hire professionals. Without mountains of relevant experience, you can no more expect a well-intentioned Python person to jump in and improve the error distribution of math.gamma(). Or pick any area in which you’re an actual expert. The gap between your hard-won ability and “good intentions” is actually smaller than the gap in areas involving human conflict.
I could have quoted several other particulars, but overall I think we’re in vociferous agreement. Reading the election results only goes so far (although it is fascinating! ).
But I do want to circle back to the reason that I brought up the impact of uninformed voters, which is that the category you name here is probably not 11% if the electorate:
This intimates, probably correctly, that anyone who did support Franz experienced a speech chilling effect as a result of his ban.[1]
I don’t think that’s avoidable, but the reason that someone may have supported his candidacy matters here. There are a lot of legitimate reasons to have wanted him on the board, including, but not limited to
wanting the PSF to take on a more global sponsorship role
feeling that money is being ill-spent, especially on PyCon US
finding the public financial disclosures of the PSF difficult to navigate and opaque
wanting a less conventional, more iconoclastic board member to “shake things up”
Among others, these are very much valid topics and impulses. We should feel free to discuss them. I would hope – although I know it’s likely in vain – that nobody feels that these views are forbidden.
However, if you liked him as a candidate because of the abrasive manner of his conduct, his unwillingness to admit fault, and the demands – in my view, unfair ones – he placed on PSF staff, then… Well, yes, the ban sends a message that such conduct is not acceptable. I don’t think any of us should be subjected to abuse or mistreatment, and that includes paid PSF staff as well as volunteers and community members. Such speech should be discouraged in Python community spaces, in my view.
If this seems like a mischaracterization of his conduct to anyone, feel free to DM me. I won’t promise to respond, but I do promise to read.
Right, I think this is a serious problem. So much so that I stopped playing in the mud gardening to engage in this thread and try to push on it.
In my view, the treatment of that post is a symptom of something deeper, which is the lack of any clearly correct forum for CoC-related advocacy.
The CoC WG is already thinking about changes in the wake of this unusual election cycle. This is also an excellent time for them to consider declaring some desirable channel for community feedback. (Which, to be clear, doesn’t have to be on DPO.)
Or due to something other than his ban? The negative sentiment towards him which underlies support for the ban? Or maybe I misread your intention in those statements entirely. ↩︎
I’m too new to the community to have been on the mailing lists for these “Uncle Timmy sign-offs”, but I do enjoy reading them in the archives. It is a great delight to use one myself. ↩︎
For clarity, I was only talking about before the ban. People were openly wondering why there was 0 visible support for has candidacy, intimating that there was no reason any sane person could vote for him.
I quite openly supported his ability to post here, but did not openly endorse his candidacy. Nor did I oppose it. The last time I expressed an opinion about how I hoped a vote would go, I got banned
Seriously, I have 0 interest in telling people what to think, or what to think about. “Suit yourself!” has always been my only explicit advice in an election (including in the old bylaw topic, if people actually bothered to read what I wrote). I don’t want to (nor could I) control the outcome, but I’m a huge fan of free speech and open debate.
He’s also a noted Python lead developer in the AI world. And one of the most educated people on the planet. 4 (German equivalents of) Masters degrees (CompSci, physics, medicine, and math), and went on to earn 2 PhDs (in the last two). Legit, not from some shady diploma mill.
He’s exceptional on several counts.
I thought he raised some good and important questions, here and also in March.
Mine too. I don’t have a problem with the fact of the suspension. I do have a problem with the wildly different treatment different people seem to get, with 0 clarity about why.
BTW, Franz was also … challenging … to communicate with in private.. But I may be an extreme in respect of tolerating seeming hostility. People lash out when they’re in pain. If the attack doesn’t fit what I did, why would I take it personally? If it does fit, am I too self-satisfied to own it? The unexamined life is not worth living.
But I’ll cut this off before it degenerates into an endless string of "\me too!"s.
That was from back in the days when, whatever else faults they had, the mailing lists were fun, and people were genuinely friendly all around,.
We have since been informed
Some communication styles that were unfortunately common in the past are rightfully recognized as inappropriate today.
I was never clear on what that mean, and people asking for clarity went unanswered (stonewalling isn’t limited to a single PSF group - it seems to have worked its way into the PSF’s DNA), but best guess was that any form of irreverent playfulness is “inappropriate today”. So I suppress it now. Mostly. Still, it was a delight to me too see a hint of it poking through the grey concrete - thanks :.
I’m too new to the community to have been on the mailing lists for these “Uncle Timmy sign-offs”, but I do enjoy reading them in the archives. It is a great delight to use one myself. ↩︎
It was mentioned further up that after the rather… intense feedback on that particular capability, the mod team of this forum changed their policies to no longer use the ability to redact part of a post.
So it sure seems like they’re both listening and acting on feedback. Perhaps it’s the case that not everything someone thinks is a reasonable suggestion needs to be adopted.
Along with a clear reminder that not every petition will succeed, and that “we have heard this feedback and chosen not to adopt it” is a completely valid response which carries an expectation that the person who submitted the feedback will A) accept and B) assume good faith behind the lack of adoption.
And some of us have.
The Python Code of Conduct is a public document. The forum guidelines in force here are a public document. The moderation team has consistently posted explanations when they’ve taken action against prolific posters.
I’m not sure what you feel is missing here or what the barrier is to you understanding “why they’re doing things the way they’re doing”.
I will add, as someone with experience in moderation, that ultra-specific policies tend to be more harmful than helpful, because people start looking for loopholes and ways to misbehave without technically violating the letter of the posted rules. This is sometimes called the “I’m Not Touching You” phenomenon, after the meme of children doing things like “I touched his SLEEVE! You said I couldn’t touch HIM, but I touched his SLEEVE! I’m not touching HIM!” to try to keep fighting with each other after being told by adults to stop.
So it’s almost always necessary to have a fallback rule which essentially says moderators can take action at their discretion/on the basis of their judgment that someone is violating the spirit rather than just the letter of the rules. But that seems likely to be unacceptable to at least some people here.
Targets of who, or of what? Have you carried out a count of people who wouldn’t speak up against Franz because they feared being targeted by his abrasive posts? Do they get any consideration here? Or is it acceptable to you for them to feel chilled and silenced and threatened into not speaking up?
(more importantly: have you considered why those people might not feel safe contacting you to tell you what they’re feeling?)
The vast majority, who were opposing everything Franz posted in blunt ways.
Yes. 3. If you want a serious answer, lose the sophomoric “gotcha baiting”. I was on Usenet when trolling was invented .
There is no theory of social power dynamics I’m aware of that frets over the rights or feelings of a vast majority.in power. But I’m more a Golden Rule guy, and want decent treatment for all.
I don’t solicit contacts from anyone, but the dead obvious answer is that I have no power. People reach out to me when they believe nobody else will listen. They don’t expect I can help, but they do expect I’ll listen without attacking them. And I do. I would extend the same to anyone, but the “malcontents” see me as one of their only options for an empathetic ear. More “Contents” also contact me, but not about their complaints. There’s nothing I can to do help them with those, and they’re already getting empathy from others.
I’m reminded of what Julian Assange said when asked why WIkiLeaks never dumped any damaging info on Trump in the US 2016 Clinton-Trump election. He replied that WikiLeaks was a last resort for whistleblowers - anyone with dirt on Trump could shop it to, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post, who would eagerly publish it ASAP.
Nevertheless, he did have some dirt. Which he didn’t think was worth publishing, because Trump said things himself every second day out loud that were more damaging than anything WikiLeaks had.
Already covered. There was no response to that “intense feedback” until a Steering Council member publicly endorsed mods not making material edits to posts. Only then it did “become a thing”, and enacted not long after.
That’s not “community feedback” at work, it’s inside baseball among those with power. They have to care about what the SC thinks, because the SC is their only way to take action against a core dev under PEP 13’s “not a role model” clause, which purportedly gives the SC (and only the SC) the power to boot core devs (and only core devs) for not meeting the SC’s (not the CoC WG’s) idea of what “role model” means.
From a more contemporanous account (on my blog):
No, I never contacted a mod to ask that one of my (or anyone else’s) hidden posts be unhidden, let alone to argue about it. That’s their call.
I did publicly express disapproval of some moderator actions, but about others’ posts, not my own. That was before the current “Public posts confronting moderators about their decisions will not be tolerated.” rule was imposed, never after. I would like to (but don’t) believe that my feedback before then played a role in the mods agreeing to stop rewording posts.
Probably so. It’s the hubris of tech nerds that they can ignore millennia of human experience in struggling to create fair systems of community governance, and it will work out fine because they have good intentions, and - by gosh! - they’re so much smarter and learned and enlightened than their benighted ancestors. Heck, their ignorant ancestors didn’t even have iPhones - they knew nothing.
Bah.
The concept you’re looking for is “a judge”. An impartial overseer who is tasked with ruling on (among other things) which of “letter” and “spirit” should prevail as various points of contention arise. Distinct from the “prosecution” and “defense” roles, which human experience has demonstrated repeatedly must be distinct. Any number of human systems have (re)discovered this for themselves, albeit the hard way, at great costs in injustice and needless human misery.
I endorse this comment from Reddit, made during the drama I was sucked into:
The dominant CoC model in Open Source projects is especially toxic because it takes that dynamic and adds secret complaints, secret evidence, anonymous accusations, and sealed decision-making, without even the ability for the accused to hear the accusations made against them. It’s like you take everything we know to work about a working justice system and do the complete opposite.
There’s really just no way this system could ever produce good results, no matter who is in charge.
An interesting line of inquiry is how such an inherently and deeply broken model came to be “the dominant” one, even after it’s torn apart communities. I don’t have “the answer” to that, but I’ve picked up intriguing clues on lines to investigate. I won’t pursue that here, though.
What I’m after is an explanation of why they chose, for example, a 18 months ban rather than 6 months, 6 weeks, a permanent ban, or whatever else. Is it random? Is it a case-by-case choice based on fuzzy feelings? Are there more objective rules? If so, which ones?
Deciding on such rules, making them public, would actually help the moderators.
Sure, then they can say it publicly and explain why. This is how a community works.
Ok, but does this apply to any of the suggestions that were made here? Please be specific.
This seems to contradict the claims made by others in this thread that actually a majority does not like what’s happening with the PSF. Perhaps you and they could sit down and sort that out amongst yourselves, and then I can pick up that discussion again once there’s a consistent claim to engage with.
Is this as sinister as you make it sound, or was it simply a matter of feedback eventually coming from enough people, and enough different people, to make clear that it really was what “the community” wanted? Or perhaps just of a decision-making process taking longer than you’d have personally liked?
Also, it sure seems like this constructs a no-win scenario where the action is wrong no matter what: not adopting the suggestion is wrong, but adopting it is also wrong.
This seems to implicitly assume moderators cannot be “impartial”, which is not a claim I’d endorse (unless we’re talking about some level of perfect neutrality unachievable by humans; everyone has biases, the key is to try to be aware of one’s biases and work to prevent them interfering).
Also, my own experience as a moderator of various forums (again, the web-based kind) is that it consists almost entirely of responding to reports. That’s time-consuming enough for a volunteer without going out actively searching for things to act on unprompted. But your conception of how moderation works doesn’t seem to accommodate that.
That comment seems to engage in precisely the sort of one-sided railroading it claims to be against, so I’m not really sure what there is to endorse about it. Also, I’ve seen Codes of Conduct in action in multiple communities, and its claims bear no resemblance to the realities I’ve personally observed.
Since you say that what’s described in that comment is “the dominant” model, I’m sure you’ll follow up with evidence that A) it truly is “dominant” and B) truly does work just as that comment describes it, yes?
It’s a general observation on the perhaps-unexpected difficulties that come from trying to precisely specify a set of rules and policies and requiring them to be followed as written, offered because some people seem to be saying there should be more precise specification of the rules and policies. Such as yourself, in the quoted post.
I haven’t seen such a claim, and I certainly haven’t made it. I will claim there’s a significant minority.
We have no direct way to measure. We can only go by what we see. On my own suspension announcement, e.g., look at the hearts on the announcement itself (almost all of which came in the first few days) and on @stoneleaf’s brief but bluntly stated “this is total nonsense!” reply (the first reply, which came after 6 whole days passed, and continued to gather hearts the more of “my side” came out, none of which the PSF disclosed under a pretense of “protecting privacy of the involved parties”, which I explicitly waived to them within hours of being suspended). BTW, Ethan has also been a moderator in PSF spaces, and to my eyes a very good one. He, for example, took over python-dev moderation from me, and did a better job of it than I did.
Ethan’s dissent attracted a supermajority of those. Despite that people in fact feared to support Ethan’s post. I know that for a fact. Many people. You wouldn’t know. I’m sure some people on the other side feared too, but the temporal distribution of clicks is also evidence. The “yay!” clicks dried up before the first reply (Ethan’s), At that point, an illusion of universal approval was in play. There was apparently nothing to fear from supporting it, just social currency to be gained from virtue signaling “me too! yay us! we win!!”.
Another: Discourse grants a “Great Reply” badge to a post that gets at least 50 hearts. 17 have been awarded in d.p.o..'s history. At least 5 were throwing shade at my suspension. None favoring it.
Nothing dispositive. But suggestive and in the same direction. You’ll dismiss it as an insignificant but vocal minorly. If so, you can’t be proved wrong. Nor right. But you’re opposing then what people can and do see, I’m content to let people draw their own conclusions from the available facts. Confirmation bias has already made up most of their minds, but so it goes.
It’s just my best informed guess. Other explanations are certainly possible. Because there’s 0 dialog with the community, all anyone can do from the outside is speculate, You too. I’m here every day and pay a lot of attention. You pop up occasionally.
I’m unclear on what you’re trying to say, but suspect that if I could suss it out, I’d respond with a variant of my standard “there are no pure wins, only tradeoffs” refrain. Real life is highly nuanced.
Of course they can’t be. All humans are deeply biased. Which is precisely why systems of justice have evolved over millennia to explicitly counter that as best they can,.
It’s for the same reason science made steady and dramatic progress after adopting “randomized, double blind, and controlled” experiments (to the extent possible). To counter bias. And added “reproducible” as another safeguard against bad faith reporting of results.
… the key is to try to be aware of one’s biases and work to prevent them interfering).
All people acting in good faith believe they’re “being as fair as possible”. Which offers no actual protection at all against confirmation bias or “motivated reasoning”. Those are universal human cognitive defects.
Your biases are dead obvious to me. Mine are dead obvious to you. But our own are invisible to us. That’s how humans are wired. I spend a lot of time introspecting, and I suspect you do too. I’d say it helps a bit, and I’ve found that mindfulness meditation accelerates progress a lot. But as psychologists sometimes say, “insight does not imply a cure”. We’re still just human.
I think different (albeit related) issues are being conflated, which is understandable.
Everyday moderation.
CoC enforcement with minor consequences.
CoC enforcement with major consequences.
The extent to which various PSF groups are or aren’t meeting reasonable (or even minimal) expectations for openness, transparency, accountability, and engagement for a membership organization.
Sometimes observations made mostly in one of those contexts, are taken as being made in a different one. The lack of explicit message threading makes intricate discussion hard to follow here.
What it plainly said: you can’t expect to get highly refined (over centuries) rule-of-law system results from ad hoc rule-of-people systems crafted by people who appear to have gone out of their way to do the opposite of what the former systems have converged on.
The dominant model is the one started by the Contributor Covenant (CC), of which the PSFs CoC is largely derivative.
Contributor Covenant is the most widely adopted open source code of conduct in the world.
I believe them. The evidence of that is clear. If you disagree, go argue with them.
NixOS adopted CC 1.4 “with slight modifications”. While you may deny it, their community situation today is very widely viewed as a dumpster fire. They’re not the PSF, but as @mcdonc cautioned last year, the PSF appeared then to be heading in the same directions. I’m grateful for that at least our mods aren’t publicly calling posters “Nazis” and “fascists”. Which you should let drop now, since @mcdonc doesn’t post here anymore (by his choice)., and I have no interest in pursuing the merit (or lack thereof) of that comparison. Whether other people do is up to them.
For the rest, people can do their own analysis. Download the sources of various CoCs, and run them through various packages designed to detect plagiarism. The point of which here isn’t to detect fraud, just highly unlikely “coincidence” in structure and phrasing.
Two things all derivatives of older versions appear to have in common (last time I did this) is making no allowance for the possibility of mediation, or identifying neurodivergent people as a “protected class”.
That’s changing now; e.g, the current CC (v 3.0) added “neurodiversity”. Still no mention of mediation, but neither it does it forbid adopting less harsh measures than it prescribes.
The CC is “evolving” too. Will the PSF’s CoC follow? Remains to be seen. One thing nobody expects is a discussion with the community about it .
Let’s return to the text of the comment you quoted:
The dominant CoC model in Open Source projects is especially toxic because it takes that dynamic and adds secret complaints, secret evidence, anonymous accusations, and sealed decision-making, without even the ability for the accused to hear the accusations made against them. It’s like you take everything we know to work about a working justice system and do the complete opposite.
You assert that what is described here is the dominant model, and link to Contributor Covenant as proof. I don’t know, of my own knowledge, whether Contributor Covenant is the model adopted by a majority or plurality of projects. But merely linking to Contributor Covenant and calling it “dominant” does not sufficiently support the assertions of the quoted comment, which makes several additional claims.
So let’s be very precise. I’m looking for evidence that Contributor Covenant, by its own standards and documentation, does the things claimed in that comment. Specifically, the claims about:
“secret complaints”
“secret evidence”
“anonymous accusations”
“sealed decision-making”
“without even the ability for the accused to hear the accusations made against them”
And for my own part, I’m re-reading Contributor Covenant’s own documentation right now to make sure I haven’t misunderstood, and they certainly seem to emphasize the need to balance transparency and privacy. For example, they say in their model Code of Conduct:
Community Moderators take reports of violations seriously and will make every effort to respond in a timely manner. They will investigate all reports of code of conduct violations, reviewing messages, logs, and recordings, or interviewing witnesses and other participants. Community Moderators will keep investigation and enforcement actions as transparent as possible while prioritizing safety and confidentiality. In order to honor these values, enforcement actions are carried out in private with the involved parties, but communicating to the whole community may be part of a mutually agreed upon resolution.
The case at hand seems to have operated in that fashion. While we don’t have all the details of correspondence between the moderators and the affected party, we do get a public summary of what went on and how the incident was resolved, and why it was resolved the way it was. This type of balance is not unheard of in the types of court systems you seem to want to emulate; sealed case records are both a real thing and not all that uncommon, and other measures such as anonymizing parties to a case, or the “right to be forgotten” in some jurisdictions, go even further.
Contributor Covenant also links out to external resources for things like incident response, which go into detail on the process and specifically mention things like contacting the subject of a report and informing them of what was reported about them, and giving them the chance to respond and tell their side of things.
(it’s true that quite a few guides nowadays steer away from court-style direct in-person adversarial confrontation as a technique, but that’s not the same as what was being claimed in the comment you endorsed)
If you’re able to actually provide evidence that Contributor Covenant secretly does tell people to do what that comment claims, in contradiction to the public materials I’ve mentioned, I’ll look at it. But I was unable to find such evidence from reading their own documentation, so I must admit I’ll be coming in quite skeptical.
I’ll also add that in my own experience as a forum moderator, it’s quite common to hear people say things like “the moderators never told me what I did wrong”, when what they really mean is they were told, but disagreed with the judgment that it was wrong. As the joke is told in The Shawshank Redemption, every man in prison claims he’s innocent.
The comment, as I said, was made in the context of my particular suspension. All the claims made were “just so” in that case, from “secret complaints” to that the accused never even saw the charges until after they were suspended. I wasn’t even informed in advance that there was a secret trial.
and, to date, no factual claim there has ever been disputed by anyone. Note that I didn’t say “refuted”. Not even questioned. Although I was informed later, in the vaguest of terms, that at least one person had “reached out” to the CoC WG (which I took as a euphemism for that they filed a report, about ,… no idea).
I don’t know about the commenters’ knowledge of other cases, and perhaps they are mistaken. They were 100% true of the case they were commenting on at the time, and my overwhelming interest is specifically about the PSF. They also appeared to be 100% true of the other two bans that shortly preceded mine.
So my endorsement of what they wrote was based on exhaustive knowledge of my own situation, and high knowledge of two other contemporaneous cases, all in the PSF. I don’t claim it’s universally true, but I expect the commenter would if you asked them.
And I do thank you for exposing the over-generalization! You earned a heart .
I’m going to just step in as someone who has run multiple communities (including multiple Python user groups), and use modified CC for every community I’m in charge of. I am not associated with the Code of Conduct working group, so this is outsider with experience talking:
I have only once had to unilaterally act on a report without talking to the accused. Exactly once. The person was holding themselves out as a leader of the group and wrote extremely racists things on LinkedIn (where the name of our organization was listed as one of their current resume pieces.)
The reason we don’t share accusations publicly is to protect the accused and minimize harassment for the accuser. Depending on the severity of the action, we’re going to either hold that information (usually some kind of report and enforcement log), or we’re going to do a cursory investigation to verify. If that initial investigation turns out information that we deem actionable, we’ll start the enforcement ladder. A lot of the enforcement ladder in most groups is informal. It’s verbal warnings, “hey, maybe don’t” and often presented as neutrally as possible.
In most contexts, if I need to move to formal enforcement, it has already been going on too long. I wish I had good stories to tell, but often if I have to given a formal written warning, that person is going to be suspended in short order. If they need a suspension, the risk of a ban is great.
The great news is, working this way, with minimal correction, means the folks who do fix their behavior? It can’t be a black mark on their record because the community at large never hears about it.
The actual problem with Code of Conduct enforcement is that the formal, visible part is the last mile. The kinds of people who refuse to listen to gentle warnings, generally don’t listen to formal reprimands. And failure to enforce harms your entire community.
The kind of community harm a bad actor can cause is existential to volunteer organizations.
I’ve been working all day writing a larger reply trying to summarize, support, or respond to the ~30 comments between when I was last able to do so and now. It’s difficult because I write slowly in sections, read more of the thread then delete large blocks I’ve just written when I feel someone else has covered it, and need to go back and reword sections in hopes that I’m coherent. I know I’ve been asked questions and this doesn’t reply, but in the interest of saying the below while it’s timely, I’m posting this first and will either post the rest later (here or a blog as appropriate) or just not at all if I feel I no longer add anything helpful.
I don’t know what the mods here are going though, but if this took place on reddit while I was a mod there, I’d not engage in the thread but desperately want to give the answer, “We are trying. This has never happened before and we tried to prioritize ensuring all voices in the election had space, but this was unlike other elections and it was really hard to balance everything. If something feels disproportional it’s probably because other incidents which had many examples we could draw on are very different in nature and are incidents we’re able to address more rapidly thus the person doesn’t rack up numerous incidents. A board candidate violating our community guidelines is not something we have guidelines to address. Balancing everything is hard and we know we weren’t perfect and we’re trying to navigate it in a fashion that allows the community to feel comfortable commenting here. A constant discourse of, “Everything the mods do is wrong and how dare they not be perfect” reply each time we try to explain what we did makes it impossible to communicate what went into a decision, because we have to be mindful of our obligation to protect those who have made a report, and protect those who have been moderated on, thus cannot say everything.”. I’m only comfortable saying this because I’m not a mod here and don’t know anything about what went on internally.
The mods definitely pay attention, and Tim: I think your point about the absence of a list of Code of Conduct violations demonstrates that the team has taken feedback and adjusted how they handle particularly public moderation actions.
And It’s why I feel strongly about not publicly saying everything that went into a decision:
This is a difficult thing to balance, and by avoiding making public statements it helps avoid forcing people to tie their identity to a moment of heightened emotions with a large audience. We all make mistakes and having to stake a flag in the earth of the hill we’re dying on isn’t all that great. Moderators refraining from making grand statements is also important because it’s much easier to adapt a policy to reflect the feedback they’ve heard and tailor things to the current environment/emotions of the community.
Given my experience, I think I can empathize with the difficulty of moderating this situation. And the desire to wait until the election was over prior to seeking feedback on policy: if it happened in the middle of the election it could have swayed votes. and for better or worse there wasn’t a predefined way to handle this so once the board nominations were announced there was good reason to stay in a holding pattern.
I may or may not necessarily agree, but that feeling is distinct from thinking they did wrong. They did the best with what tools they had and guidelines they had to go off of, and are now seeking feedback. And while I think this is an inappropriate way to give the mods feedback because of it’s impact on the moderated person, it has certainly happened here so there’s at least a few channels to give feedback. Messaging the mods feels like a better approach.
Frankly, all things considered I think they did an exemplary job while being respectful of the impact of public statements. This was a highly unusual case. And the reasoning here and look to growth/creating better defined rules is what I would want to see from any team.
I don’t know how it works in your groups, but there’s a related but unintended consequence in the PSF: if all the community ever hears about is public executions, it should come as no surprise if the community comes to believe that executions are all the enforcers do. Sure, “those on the inside” know better, but the community at large is not telepathic.
For that reason I’ve long advocated that the PSF groups produce the minimal level of “transparency report” routinely produced by PyCon events. No names, no details, just raw info that X number of reports, in the vaguest of terms, were received, and, also in the vaguest of terms, how they were resolved.
Which, last time I repeated that, actually got a positive reception! Not yet implemented, far as I know.
There’s lots of enforcement actions that are nearly silent or invisible in the world but we all know they happen. To pretend that these don’t happen is a lie of omission.
Regarding a transparency report:
I’ve seen those kind of aggregate reports creating witch hunts all on their own as people speculate about who and what. It requires a large volume of people and reporters to mask with any meaningful level of privacy.
If you have 2 actions and 4 reports and there was one big blow up in the last period, it’s pretty obvious who and what went down.
And, thankfully, the PSF leans to the “less drama” variety and therefore would have this problem.
The observation itself was made in good faith, but, yes, points out that large segments of a community do views things without a presumption of good faith. “Explicit is better than implicit.”. They only go on what they explicitly see.
I think you overestimate peoples’ presumption of good will in this respect.
Burt, suit yourself. My intent was just to suggest, not to persuade. The Powers That Be in the PSF appeared to believe it was a good idea for the PSF. In your groups it may not be. I don’t presume to know.
I do not, no. That’s why I made the suggestion. While I do not, I’m aware of that some others do.
Yes. In a similar way, I don’t believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, but there’s no “bad faith” involved in pointing out that a surprisingly high percentage of Americans do.
No. No interest at all in fighting. As already said, the PSF took the suggestion as intended. For example, here from the chair of the PSF’s CoC WG:
If you don’t like it, as already said that’s fine by me. I was hoping to make a useful suggestion. I failed.
You can, but it would be wise first not to leap to conclusions based on preconceptions. It’s part of the Community Guidelines here to assume good faith. In my view I did not give you sufficient cause to take such offense. But happy to just to let it drop, with my apologies for unintended offense.
I would like to request that the community stop having this conversation in this current form. Not as a moderator report, but just as a general collective action.
I would request instead that a private group with a common aim get together and discuss a concrete, specific, comprehensive proposal for some set of actions, do the work to write up the whole thing, then post it in full somewhere (maybe, if it would make sense, as a PEP, but maybe as a bylaws amendment or something else, depending on what said group determines is appropriate) before continuing the forum discussion.
Numerous people have referenced this conversation to me either obliquely or directly in the last few days, with a nearly universal sentiment of exasperation with varying degrees of upset. Having now read it I have to say my emotional response is the same. Whatever the topic is here — and after literal hours of attempting to parse it, I’m not sure I even fully know what the topic is — it seems to me that this is clearly an unproductive use of time. I think I can identify factions here, but only barely, and only by personality. So for the sake of brevity I will call them “Team Tim” and “Team James”.
What I see happening is a sort of conversational tennis. Each faction lobs forth a point, and the other attempts to bat it back. Each post attempts to score some points by making a claim, referencing some facts or deploying some rhetorical flourish. Since points may be scored by veering slightly off topic to bring in yet more points of disagreement, there is a lot of veering going on and an ever-expanding circle of disagreement, largely defined around ideological lines, making everyone angry.
To use another mismatched sports metaphor, I don’t want to hide the ball here. If we are signing up to help with our team, I am Team James all the way. I think Team Tim, having taken the first “serve”, is being disruptive and disrespectful towards the effort of the moderators (and the board, and the COC WG, among others). I want to be clear about that because I don’t want to be disingenuously both-sides-ing the conflict when that’s not how I feel, but please do not take this as an opportunity to try to convince me otherwise; with 79 posts already in evidence that have firmly convinced me of this view (not to mention reams of previous discussion), it stands to reason that we would end up at a minimum of 158 posts to shift the balance of evidence in the other direction, and I promise I will not read all that.
But it also seems like Team Tim has some specific grievances which are getting lost in the noise, for which they seek some remedy. The fact that both the grievances and the remedy are being presented in a post-by-post drip-feed, liberally mixed together with (IMHO: overwrought) legal metaphors and innuendo about procedural impropriety and abuses of power, makes it extremely difficult to identify any points of consensus, make any meaningful progress, or even satisfyingly reject the proposed change in a way that might allow the aggrieved faction to gracefully accept defeat.
If, instead, we could ground the conversation around an explicit, specific set of procedural changes, then we might be able to make progress. Team James could analyze the whole thing, and then rather than going back and forth over a single post with unsupported claims, could identify a direction for discussion. “we are vehemently opposed to paragraphs 3, 7, 9, 10, and 11, but maybe we can find some common ground on 1, 2, and 5. let’s see if we can hammer out a compromise on that subset before we go back into the areas where we disagree”.
Both factions would also be able to benefit by having some defined bounds for the conversation, and when it starts to veer off track, there is a mutually agreed upon known track to move back to, rather than just keep expanding our disagreement in order to even the score.
This is a reason that the PEP process, and its many cousins (XEPs, JEPs, TC39 proposals, etc), exists. Governance is work, and the work is not merely expressing opinions repeatedly but writing well-reasoned, clearly-argued, evidence-backed documents that meet the standard of being worth the community’s time. Maybe there’s even a meta-proposal here for future contentious community-governance discussions like this that wouldn’t fit into a PEP, so we can consistently bring that approach forward into the less technical aspects of the community rather than re-enacting the Argument Clinic sketch about it every time. But I think before it can be a formal process it needs to be a community habit (for the same reason that the IETF wants to see multiple working interoperating prototypes before a draft becomes an RFC).
Not every discussion needs to have this level of formality of course, but if it’s upsetting people — and I think it is long past clear that people are upset in this case — then it merits some more care and a higher level of effort.
To summarize: the topic of this thread is “Suspension of Franz Király”. That is in the past. If the goal here is actually to re-litigate that suspension, just stop it. That decision is already made, and that’s not what I see people talking about here, anyway. If there is something to be done going forward then let’s have a discussion about that, whatever it is, ideally after defining what “that” is.
. You can’t sell me the idea that a 4-hour Zoom course on CoC enforcement even approaches adequate training for substantial cases, and not even our primary paid consultant claims a background in psychology or conflict resolution or negotiation (they’re an ex-Linux-dev, who switched careers rebranding as a “CoC consultant”, based on their own bad experiences as openly non-binary).
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