Thread 58093 ("Why I’m leaving discuss.python.org"), post 42
(BTW: judging by post IDs, a post was indeed removed between this one and that one.)
Brett Cannon (@brettcannon), in post 37:
I personally don’t consider that a bad thing. One of those types of comment can be hurtful while the other isn’t. I think you should always put more effort into your words if they can cause harm for someone else.
And I actively don’t want to be in an environment where leadership feels that way, because I understand how destructive that ideology is.
I know this must be difficult for some people to accept. But the vision of inclusivity you describe - the one in the Code of Conduct - is actively exclusionary.
Including to people who consistently try their hardest to get along with others, believe in FOSS principles, affirm that the author’s identity can never disqualify a piece of code, have “real-world” political views well within the Overton window, and have not even the slightest interest in discussing those views where they would be off topic.
I know that you consider it off the table to “not enforce the PSF CoC”.
I assume that rewriting it is also off the table.
Which is why I’m not offering constructive suggestions on this point. Because there is nothing I could possibly offer in the face of a values conflict this fundamental.
Brett Cannon (@brettcannon), in post 37:
Why do you think that? My membership is public and I’ve personally confirmed I’m a member multiple times.
I thought that, because the listing you cite is tacked on to a charter document (not the most obvious place to find a list of members) in a “ConductWG” subsection (which doesn’t even have a proper index page) of the PSF section (labelled as “private”; I can read your direct link, but I have no idea how I was intended to navigate to it) of the wiki (which is very poorly advertised).
The fact that there even is a work group isn’t mentioned on the wiki page about the CoC, never mind that they’re the ones responsible for enforcing it. Also, as of my writing, that article was last edited in 2013. It predates the WG (formed in 2018) and was approved by the Board of Directors, not the WG.
Instead, I found out that the WG exists through the CoC itself. But the CoC does not offer any information about WG members, nor about how to find out who they are. Indeed, it’s written in a way that quite strongly implies that the reader is not intended to know who those members are. If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to re-read it.
If I put who enforces the PSF Code of Conduct
into a search engine I don’t get a direct answer. Although I do, admittedly, get your wiki link. But not with a summary that even remotely implies that I’d find the answer at the bottom of the page.
I get the impression that the Board of Directors, the core dev team, etc. believe that typical Python users are well aware of the wiki on the main Python web page. I believe they are extremely mistaken, if so.
Just for a sense of scale: the recent changes page tells me there have been 9 edits to the wiki in the last month, none of which creating a new page. That compares to about 6 thousand questions asked about Python on Stack Overflow in the same time frame, and more than 3 hundred new topics per month across all sections of this forum.
The wiki is not a suitable way to communicate information of this importance.
It is not reasonable to expect people to understand Python governance when it is communicated this poorly.
Again: openness is indeed severely lacking.
I hope I don’t need to explicitly state my suggestions for improvement here. They follow directly from my grievance.
Tim Peters (@tim.one), in post 39:
My apologies! There are too many bureaucracies for an old man to remember :wink:.
This in itself is part of the problem.