On Sat, 1 Apr 2017 at 09:27 M.-A. Lemburg <mal@egenix.com> wrote:
On 01.04.2017 05:44, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>
>> On Mar 31, 2017, at 2:40 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
>>
>> In the (long) discussion of https://github.com/python/core-workflow/issues/6, Wes Turner began to do his usual posting of lists. People pointed out he was stepping out of line by being somewhat off-topic and seemingly lecturing folks. He posted some of his lists again and then I warned him that if he did it again I would block him for a CoC violation since he did not want to respect anyone's time by taking the time to edit what amount to dumping his personal notes on GitHub. (This is a long-standing issue, BTW, with Wes where he has been warned in other settings like distutils-sig about his posting behaviour.)
>
> ...
> So, if Wes is to be blocked for a while, it should be on the basis of "adding too much noise to an important communication channel" rather than CoC which should be sparingly used for only egregious issues.  Also, if a real CoC issue does arise, I think any actions taken need to have multiple assents from a group of decision makers rather than having one person become a de-facto CoC czar with the power to banish people.

It's definitely a requirement of any CoC management to have at
least two people decide on this, since CoCs in general are
always open to interpretation and need to take multiple views
into account. 

OK, but who is the second person supposed to be? Since this was the core-workflow issue tracker for the core-workflow mailing list I figured it fell on to my shoulders to deal with (I actually had to check the mailing list this morning to see if I even had co-owners on it since I actually didn't remember explicitly having any). Am I to ask just any core dev for a gut check to make sure this is a reasonable action to take?

I guess my point is that we don't have any form of policy or practices in place for this sort of thing. An action of this level has (fortunately) only occurred with Anatoly and we took so long to deal with it that no one questioned my actions when I first used the CoC on python-ideas.
 
Wes's comments are nowhere near a CoC violation,
IMO.

There's also extensive history spanning multiple mailing lists for Wes' behaviour. This isn't isolated to just what I linked to, it just happens to be what finally pushed me to take action. If I could block him at my personal account level and have his posts not show up for me I would, or if I could just block him for the core-workflow issue tracker I would, but we just  don't have that level of blocking on GitHub and the finest grain available is organization level.
 

I agree with Raymond that CoCs are not meant as a tool to
silence people with different ideas or communication styles
out of convenience.

Now we're getting into a philosophical discussion as to whether the CoC covers people who choose to continually communicate in an unproductive  way even after it has been pointed out to them that they are not contributing constructively to the conversation (as Paul more eloquently stated). To me the CoC covers that as part of requiring people to be respectful of others. Time is one of those things that I can't get back and which we all have a limited supply of to spend on this project, so having someone suck it away in small doses regularly even after they have been told by multiple people that they are not contributing seems like a CoC violation to me.
 

It's the ultimate tool, not the first to consider.

It wasn't my first anything. As I have said, this isn't some isolated incident in the Python community with Wes. And I didn't do this on a whim. I literally felt like crap for about an hour after hitting the red "Block" button because I realize the ramifications of what I did, so please don't think I just had a bad day and decided to take it out on someone or did this just because I didn't like someone's four messages on GitHub.
 
If Wes were
continuously offensive that would be a reason to start discussing
CoC related actions.

As I said, this spans at least distutils-sig and python-ideas for years (to the point that I have had his emails being marked as read for a few months and I know multiple other people who have done the same).

From what people have said in opposition to what I did, I think we need to have a discussion about two things:

1. Is it a CoC violation if someone chooses to ignore repeated warnings that their communication style is unproductive and thus a waste of people's time? And if people don't view it as an explicit CoC violation, do we still view it as enough reason to block someone but under a different name? (I obviously view it as a CoC violation.)

2. What is the exact procedure someone has to follow to instigate a ban (and this policy should probably cover GitHub, mailing lists, and anywhere else someone can be banned)? Is it having two core devs agree to the ban and it being publicly stated here (as MAL suggested)? Whatever approach we choose we should write it down in the devguide somewhere.

As for Wes himself, I'm fine with the ban lasting only a couple months (say the end of May?). Based on the positive feedback I received on the ban I don't want to just drop it without at least some time passing to get the point across that something needs to change, but I also don't expect the ban to be permanent since there wasn't any malicious intent.