On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 11:17:33AM +0100, Steve Holden wrote:
> Full marks to the SC for transparency. That's a healthy sign that the
> community acknowledges its disciplinary processes must also be open to
> scrutiny, and rather better than dealing with matters in a Star Council.
The SC didn't say anything until Antoine posted an open letter from
Stefan to the list.
We didn't say anything because, as I mentioned, we wanted to discuss the matter with Stefan before we did so. Also, as I mentioned, we had a back-and-forth with Stefan, and were not aware he had already decided not to comply with our requests or the Code of Conduct. Had he let us know, we would've posted pretty much the same information a few days later.
There is tension between the requirements of openness and privacy, and I
don't have a good answer for where the balance should be. But it seems
to me that giving "full marks for transparency" for a decision made
behind closed doors that we only found about about because one of the
parties was able to announce their ban via a third party is a remarkably
soft grade.
The SC had already discussed how public to be about this, and we were always going to publish our decision as well as our initial correspondence to Stefan. Posting his replies is not up to us, and posting our replies to him without that context feels unfair and inappropriate. However, the Conduct WG was copied on all the correspondence. This was not backroom justice.
The SC does have to balance openness and privacy, and also fairness, the health of the code base, the health of the community, personal feelings of individual contributors, the perceptions our actions and decisions and silence create for the individuals involved, the other core developers, and the Python community at large. We're also still figuring out the process and standards we want to set for this kind of thing, because it is fairly new to the core developer community.