A couple of concrete proposals, then I will shut up (because I do support the decision made, and I think enough has been said on this whole matter).
As I said, for each claimed violation, please state in which kind of space it happened and/or which kind of proof was gathered. For now, you can see people going through past public discussions and trying to find out whether there’s enough justification for the sanction. You can probably agree that’s not optimal.
What does the suspension mean? I need Tim’s expertise for some issues, what should I do?
It’s not different from if someone is on vacation, or busy, or out sick, or disappears for whatever reason. Find someone else with expertise, or become the person with the expertise, or wait and hope they come back. (Gaining expertise isn’t a bad idea anyway, it’s a good thing to have multiple experts on any given topic.)
Surely Serhiy can try to contact whomever he might need help from?
This is not so easy. In one case, Tim is the author of the code, and we need to discuss possibility to reconsider the decision made more than 20 years ago (either extend it or deprecate and replace with other solution). Only he can have background details about it. In other issue, he is one of few core developer (besides Mark Dickinson and me) who worked on that and adjuncted code last years, and my expertise here is limited. I planned to write code on the border of my qualification and would need his review. To reach his level, 17-year-old me would need to spend several years for specialized education and several years for practicing. Today’s me would need more time, and I am not particularly interested in this area.
As a last resort, I would start general discussions, but under the circumstances it would be unethical to start them without Tim.
Looks like the only option is to put these issues off for another 3 months and hope for the best (if I remember them after 3 months).
It seems that while Tim was blocked on Discorse, his GitHub account was not completely blocked on GitHub (only his rights to commit and close issues were suspended). If it is not an oversight, we can continue discussions on GitHub.
I am not trying to challenge the committee’s decision. I believe they had good reasons. I don’t even understand enough about what it’s about (I do not know what is “reverse racism” and “genuinely funny”) and I’m not going to delve deeper. I was just worried that this would not only punish Tim, but could bring inconveniences to all of us.