Effective immediately I am stepping down from the Nodejs TSC
medium.com
medium.com
I see a number of comments that trot out a lot of tired "anti-SJW" talking points, and these do not add to the dialogue and only create unnecessary animosity. I didn't see any negativity on the "pro-SJW" side yet - the responses to the former seem calm but are being downvoted - though I would advise the same.
If your immediate reaction went to taking some sort of partisan stance on the issue, either for or against this decision by the author Myles Borins, or by the TSC's vote, or by Rod Vagg, then I urge you: please step back, psychologically, from this. Reflect on your thoughts before you resort to believing that any of these folks are part of your in group or not and basing your judgment on that quality, as opposed to the facts, which it appears few of us have.
Without knowing the facts, the fact that we even know this happened and that it briefly ended up on the front page of HN is concerning.
Any group of people leading an organization can fracture because of a fight; it's nothing new, and the fact that it happened on twitter is immaterial.
> Without knowing the facts, the fact that we even know this happened and that it briefly ended up on the front page of HN is concerning.
Agreed. Given the list of problems was removed from the GH issue, I have no idea what this is about, and no way of forming an opinion on any of it. I at least will flag it.
There is plenty of information in the comments to this post to get an idea of what it is about. I respectfully suggest that you get some insight before suppressing the post through flagging.
As far as I can tell there is no merit to the complaints. If 4 members stepped down, that suggests Node TSC has a serious problem with people who are wildly extreme.
Here's what appears to have happened based on the original complaint:
1. This guy tweets an article that discusses campus speech codes, university politics and so on. It doesn't attack anyone and is a fairly long-winded but reasonable contribution to the discussion about free speech. His tweet implies he does see CoCs as having downsides and that he finds this article to be persuasive.
2. In response, someone tweets that "I hope I meet you at a place without a CoC so I can take a dump on your laptop". Rod points out that this isn't a very nice response and is not a mature contribution to the conversation, "Hey here's an interesting discussion to be had vs ... <tweet screenshot>".
Now let's look at the complaints. They assert:
1. Rod tweeted an "inflammatory article"
2. When he highlighted the immature response, this "suggests pleasure at having upset members of the JavaScript community and others".
3. Some woman complained and said she wouldn't contribute anymore. That woman asserted that "some people said he was bad but what can you do". This was "a reason for some to avoid project participation"
4. And "it is evidence to others that Node.js may not be serious about its commitment to community and inclusivity", citing a tweet that says the Quillette essay is "hot garbage" written by a "known MRA" (what the heck does MRA stand for?).
I find this rationale extreme, absurd and scary. These people ARE in fact "warriors" by any definition of the term. I strongly disagree with the complaint because:
* The article is not inflammatory.
* After being subject to outright abuse and highlighting it, something that women do every day on Twitter, somehow this was turned into Rod being a bad person. This is pure doublethink. Rod was clearly annoyed and trying to point out that such responses are not acceptable.
* A woman proceeded to do some serious shit-stirring and trolling, claiming that lots of anonymous people disliked Rod behind his back, but of course, was unwilling to say who. This is not acceptable behaviour.
* Another woman dismissed the article with a straight ad-hominem on the author.
The bad and abusive behaviour here is very clear and it's all by people who were objecting to Rod's tweet. Yet somehow this turned into some sort of trial.
Fortunately, Node TSC rejected this transparent attempt to get rid of someone for having the temerity to tweet about politics. If there are other members who couldn't handle this and quit as a result, that can only be healthy for the project.
Two abstained, one member was the person in question, and then we have 6 against removing, and 4 in favor.
And after this vote failed to remove the person, four members resigned.
This is the future we chose. Sorry. :(
The article was definitely what brought it to a head because it prompted some people to say publicly they had bad interactions with Rod Vagg.
There were also a number of thoughtful responses to Rod's tweet where people spelled out why they thought his attitude towards CoCs was unhelpful. As far as I know he didn't engage any of these authors, which makes me suspect he was not actually looking for "interesting discussion".
Overall it was inflammatory in the same way another article complaining about missing generics in golang would be inflammatory here. The article doesn't seem to respect existing work and doesn't bring a new or evidence based perspective.
I agree it would be nice if all the complaints, responses, etc were laid out plainly. But I can also understand why this is not the case, given tweets like https://twitter.com/ag_dubs/status/887785046320480256 and the understanding that there's little benefit for the women involved to gain by re-litigate these interactions in public.
The tweets by ag_dubs seem like a good example. She starts by saying up front her problem with Rod is that he "criticises social policies in node" and she can't handle that so she lessened her participation. Presumably she means policies like the CoC.
Then she goes on to assert that he "engaged in targeted harassment against me personally". Because of his "unrestrained antagonism", she often has to have "other people speak on my behalf to sidestep his derailing responses".
Having read that set of tweets, put simply, I don't believe her. I do not believe she has been harassed. I think she can't separate someone disagreeing with her on social policy issues with "harassment". The logic leap from "he harassed me" to, "that's why I ... avoid his derailing responses" clearly isn't rooted in any conventional definition of harassment. And what does it even mean, getting others to speak for her?
Um, yes it is. A harassing response which does not address the substance of your points is clearly a derailing response. That you can't "clearly" see this says more about you than it does about her.
> And what does it even mean, getting others to speak for her?
Literally, it means asking a colleague to say the exact thing that she wishes to say, because she knows that if she says it he will try to ad hominem it. This is standard English.
I would also point out that some of her vocabulary, "Beyond ____, also ____", is also standard English and it forbids your egregiously malformed interpretation of her comments. That is, you seem to think that the "targeted harassment" is "his constant, unproductive criticism" when in fact the criticism is clearly, in context, the "what he has done to the health of the project" which she has just been talking about -- and she has saying that "beyond" that, he "also" has targeted her with harassing statements. That construction explicitly forbids your sophomoric armchair psychoanalysis which can't separate someone who happens to disagree with you on social policy issues as "she can't separate someone disagreeing with her on social policy issues with harassment." (I don't actually believe that you are this way -- I don't know you -- I just think that your comment reeks of it and I would observe in passing that paradoxically we all accuse ourselves of our own sins. I mean, I'm terribly guilty of the latter, at least.)
If 6 of them vote against removing the "accused" party, and 2 of them abstain, there's certainly little merit to these complaints.
Without details on how rvagg conducted himself, this could be anywhere from 'Social justice warriors biggest fuck up yet' to 'nepotism protects blatant asshole/racist/nazi/mysogonist'.
This is all due to the following reasoning:
[Note: the specific list of issues has been removed at the request of several core collaborators who felt that listing the issues was not fair to Rod. This post was made with an effort at full transparency and with no ill intent towards anyone. No additional harm was intended by listing the issues - jasnell]
Unless this was requested by Rod himself, this seems like needless censorship.
Now if the original post goes public, it makes sense that the details be blanked as "not fair to Rod", since the rest of the world's eyes are going to look on just these things and might not have full context.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821212745/https://github.co...
"...Rod’s first action was to apologize to a contributor who had been repeatedly moderated. Rod did not discuss the issue with other members of the CTC/TSC first. The result undermined the moderation process as it was occurring"
"Rod did not moderate himself when asked by another foundation director and told them he would take it to the board"
"Rod tweeted in support of an inflammatory anti-Code-of-Conduct article"
Is this really all that there is to it?
It's about the problem of campus censorship and lack of free speech in universities. It starts by suggesting that Isaac Newton would have been pushed out of modern universities, if zapped forward in time, due to his mental issues and eccentric beliefs about non-gravity related topics.
Then it goes on to argue that there's a thing called "neuro-diversity" and universities are only catering to the "neuro-typical". The "neuro-divergent" should stand up for their rights against oppression. This seems like a rather forced way to try and cast what campus politics is doing as discrimination in the hope that the people enforcing speech codes will think again.
It's kind of an odd thesis - I can see where the author is going with that, not sure I agree but I don't clearly disagree either. I just doubt it's a good argument.
Regardless, the only people who could describe this as inflammatory are people on the war path, who want to expel anyone who isn't 110% committed to their ideology of punishing speech that isn't sufficiently "progressive". Seems like another day, another Damore to me.
Out of his 13 peers (other Node TSC members), 4 felt strongly enough about this that they have resigned.
The purpose of the vote was to determine if any action should be taken, the vote occurred and its outcome was respected. If individuals want to resign because they disagree with the outcome of the vote, they are clearly entitled to do so and it does not violate the spirit of democracy that those unsatisfied with the status-quo take a stand by moving on from the organization. They didn't trash the place or delete all the source code and ban all dissenters from the project, they simply resigned from their roles within the organization which allows it to continue unencumbered by the dissenters strongly held viewpoints.
If they had voted to boot the guy and his supporters resigned to show solidarity and protest the decision, would you have been similarly critical?
I hope it does! :)
> 4 felt strongly enough about this that they have resigned.
Those people felt so strongly about somebody mulling the downsides of CoCs that they preferred to leave the project they worked on than to try and cooperate with the person that may have slightly different opinion. Unless CoC is pretty much the only thing in the universe that can never have downsides or unintended consequences, this is pretty depressing.
It is one thing to have technical disagreements when working with a team of other humans. These debates can reveal some very strong opinions, but if the discussion stays about the tech, it generally isn't a problem for the team to move on, and certainly would not violate any Code of Conduct that I've ever read.
It is an entirely different situation when several people seem to have been made to feel uncomfortable, excluded, marginalized, belittled, mocked, or shamed. Yes, some people have very thin skins and are easily offended, but is it likely that 4 people in this group were over-reacting, and that ultimately drove them to the point of resignation? Or is it more likely that there was a pattern of behavior from @rvagg that violated (or perhaps just consistently pushed the boundaries of) the agreed-upon norms of the group, as laid out in the Code of Conduct?
I think his openly dismissive attitude about the Code of Conduct probably stemmed from him being unwilling or unable to follow it, and regularly being at odds with the rules. If it didn't bother him, why would he question it? More importantly, if the group doesn't want to honor the Code of Conduct they've established, why didn't they just change it to allow @rvagg to operate without feeling like he was at odds with the rules?
""" His tweeting of screen captures of immature responses suggests pleasure at having upset members of the JavaScript community and others. As a perceived leader, such behavior reflects poorly on the project. https://twitter.com/rvagg/status/887790865766268928 """
That seems much less problematic that undermining moderation as it occurs.
Wow, trying to censor someones social account now.
....concerns were raised by several TSC
and CTC members regarding issues they had with
@rvagg's interactions in the Github tracker and
Twitter.
The specific issues that were reported include:
[Note: the specific list of issues has been removed
at the request of several core collaborators...]
Maybe the offenses of @rvagg were really heinous, but from later in the link[0] they mention that the charter states they can only remove members by vote, through voluntary resignation or through participation rules (I assume that means they stop participating for some length of time) and that they took said vote to remove @rvagg after failing to reach consensus and the vote failed.
They are working on improving their existing code of conduct. Presumably to make it easier to remove people for whatever it is that @rvagg did.
Unless they just want to turn it into a pet project dictatorship (nothing wrong with that many successful open source projects are run that way - see the linux kernel for instance) then they need to follow the rules they set down and it sounds like they are doing that as well as trying to improve the rules to prevent whatever ruckus it is that happened internally.
I'm sure the OP has lots of inside knowledge that we never will but on the outside it looks like he would be better served by sticking around to work on the revisions to the code of conduct
I'm an outsider to this, but it seems to me that the tl;dr was that he was basically undermining the moderation actions of the TSC and CTC.
> Do Meeting Notes or a recording of the TSC vote exist? Is it known who voted what and who abstained?
My interpretation is that it's asking, "Who's against us? Let's call them out..."
Likewise, members on the TSC likely represent constituent interests (or I would hope they do).
Election of a new member, or eviction of an existing one, is done by existing membership and there's no public voting to elect any of the members.
I see nothing wrong with having a private vote for something as sensitive as kicking someone out. It's no different than keeping jury deliberations private.
I mean, from the perspective of say, folks that feel they were harassed (hypothetically), they would want to know who they should feel comfortable expressing their concerns to in the future, and who is or is not sympathetic to those concerns. Private votes that don't align with public behavior would also be concerning, and private votes encourage deceptive acts.
For what it's worth, when Congress votes to censure, impeach, or remove, these are public votes. I don't think the jury analogy is quite apt, as the people voting were not selected in that manner. Is that fair?
I think that this is an extremely important point, given that the CoC says that the reporting path is an email alias that goes to the entire TSC.
If the CoC's reporting path were some other group, I think it'd be a very different situation. (There are of course downsides to having a separate antiharassment group that has different power in the project from the core team, and may end up disagreeing with the core team, but it would avoid this particular problem.)
If you want closed-door meetings and secret decisions, there are tons of proprietary projects and standards committees doing important and exciting work.
One can not even question the codes of conduct, they are written on stone and are beyond criticism and questioning...
If you really think disagreeing with someone and expressing it constitutes as limiting Free Speech, then aren't you limiting Free Speech right now?
Does not make it right when it occurs
>Stepping down from a position because you disagree with someone != "Free Speech"
Attempting to, or actually forcing someone out of a project on the basis they liked a article on the web you believe they should not have liked, then responded with "incorrect words" is in fact a Free Speech issue
>If you really think disagreeing with someone and expressing it constitutes as limiting Free Speech, then aren't you limiting Free Speech right now?
where did I say that?
But since you seem to be confused allow me to clearly state my position
1. Myles is free to say what ever he wants.
2. I am free to say what ever I want
3. I believe Codes of Conduct are an assault on freedom of speech
4. I will speak out critically against anyone supporting their use or their enforcement
@rvagg's response was to openly mock the idea of a Code of Conduct. So then not only was he potentially getting away with violating the CoC, he was publicly mocking the whole system with impunity.
"Free Speech" grants us (American Citizens) the right to say (mostly) whatever we want without fear of breaking the law. No one is accusing him of breaking the law. No one is trampling anyone's freedom of speech.
I'm hoping this eventually leads to a fork but it probably won't. I imagine there needs to be enough concentrated power to fork and I doubt there is enough developers interested to do it.
So you mean he actually contributed to the code instead of inventing new ways to police what can be said on Twitter? What an horrible person.
Because they got what they wanted?
It's sort of like going to work for customs while being a strong believer in open and unrestricted borders, apologizing to people about the existence of customs and waving them through, and then complaining about "the alt-right brigade" when people ask if you're actually the right person for the job.
... but sharing such an article would not be wrong ...
Is the disconnect really this large between ideologies?
That said, I still think there are scenarios where sharing such an article would be, although not wrong in a moral sense, certainly something that would displease your coworkers and harm your group's effectiveness: imagine that a large number of your coworkers thought that marijuana was a serious problem in their society and had made it one of your team's priorities to eliminate marijuana from the community. If your coworkers don't believe that you'll have their back, or if they worry that you'll undermine them if they leave a prisoner with you or something, it's entirely reasonable for them to be unhappy at you, whether or not they're "right". And it's entirely predictable that a more fruitful way to achieve your goal would be to leave the department and argue your case through political means, instead of remaining.
You can disagree with rules and still enforce them. In cases where judgement calls need to be made, you then use your own judgement. This is only unreasonable when the rules are perfect, or judgement calls are made when the rules are clear.
It's not inconceivable that an member of such a group could be thinking that "the best way of driving the project and community forward" is not having a CoC at all, or having one different than the current one (like the Linux one, for example).
https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
I think it's totally fine for a member of the group to disagree privately with the decided goals of the group, whether this is "CoCs are good" or "this promises spec is good" or whatever, and recuse themselves from that goal and contribute productively to other goals. But that's different from actively undermining the group's decision, which is (I think) what is happening here.
A good example of catch-22. They shouldn't have approved it in the first place.
That's... how laws and rules work...
I agree with this argument - if the TSC does not intend to uphold the CoC, they should either not have approved it or should have made someone else the contact point (and given them meaningful enforcement power).
> Anyone who has doubts about the CoC, must be expelled from the TSC, because it's written on the CoC. This ensures that the CoC can't be touched ever.
I don't agree with this, and I don't understand how you conclude this. An easy way to change it is for the TSC to vote "We no longer want to have a CoC." Done. Nothing in the CoC says that it's a CoC violation to want to get rid of the CoC. (Of course, you have to express your desire to get rid of it without trolling, harassment, doxing, etc., but that doesn't really seem hard: you say "I think we should stop having a CoC.")
Wait, they just tried to expel a guy because he was subtly criticizing the CoC on twitter.
2. Even if it were, that would still only be a claim about this particular guy's approach to criticizing the CoC.
3. Even if it were a claim about all criticisms of the CoC, the vote failed. As far as I can tell, the scenario in reality is exactly the scenario you wish: someone on the TSC criticized the CoC, the TSC votes that this is totally fine.
(If you are now additionally arguing that TSC members should be barred from resigning from the TSC and then critiquing the decision on their private blog once no longer affiliated from the TSC, well, that does not seem like the pro-free-speech position.)
That's certainly something that a member of the community is generally free to do, but it's, in pretty much any organization regardless of domain or left-right position on the ideological spectrum, something that is viewed as inconsistent with membership in leadership committees except where that membership is an entitlement through, e.g., equity ownership.
EDIT: but it's also worth noting that the sanction votes in both proposed sanctions were 60/40 against sanctions, and the final outcome was to work to clarify expectations. (And clarifying expectations seems sensible since it is clear that there were sharp divisions within the community in the expectations here.)
It's like saying that once you're elected to congress, you must vote along party lines no matter your personal convictions because "reasons".
We see how well that's working out for America, don't we?
You may still feel just as safe, and that's great for you. But it's not very hard to understand why people aren't happy. Even if you vehemently despise CoCs, you should still be able to see how a mass exodus, for whatever reason, could be bad for a project's future.
I strongly disagree with this language. I support CoCs because I feel explicitly spelling out consequences for harassment allows for the unambiguous rejection of toxic behavior which creates a welcoming environment for new or otherwise anxious contributors... but nothing about CoC affects an individual's personal safety and using that type of hyperbolic language damages the cause more than it helps.
Your wording is definitely better than mine, but I hope that doesn't detract from my point
I've been doing open source work for 15+ years and I don't recall any of the projects I worked on having a CoC. Nor did it ever come up as an issue. I did see aggressive list moderation be abused to distort the technical path of a project though.
You talk about a "mass exodus". I find myself skeptical of this claim. If the NodeJS contributors are so dependent on a CoC then it seems like they went badly wrong somewhere. Somehow other projects thrive without one.
Could you cite evidence of aggressive list moderation being abused to distort the technical path of a project? Is the project in question the Node.js project, or another?
The project is fairly well known to have serious issues with censorship of community forums and moderation. I don't wish to name it here because this is my anonymous account.
(And yes, now they have a CoC, which is not what the perennially-offended camp would like it to be: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-linux-camp-conflict-...).
Right, no CoC, just random moderators who abused their power. I don't see how that's a good thing. I think having a CoC can limit the explicit powers given to moderators so that moderators can only moderate very bad behavior like X, Y, and Z, but not A, B, and C. Of course, this depends on moderators being held to the CoC (i.e. if a moderator doesn't follow the CoC, you make it clear that's not OK so they aren't "abusive" again), and it depends on X, Y, and Z being very carefully deliberated.
> You talk about a "mass exodus". I find myself skeptical of this claim
Visit Twitter and look at Node's "thought leaders". I'll update this post with some links to tweets in a couple minutes.
> If the NodeJS contributors are so dependent on a CoC then it seems like they went badly wrong somewhere. Somehow other projects thrive without one.
Right, many projects of Node's size thrive without any CoC, they just have moderators following whatever rules the mods deem fit, or they just allow toxicity. If you want to remove toxicity while holding mods accountable, some sort of CoC is the way to go.
Also as far as I can tell CoCs are invariably so vague that they just trigger more fighting. Now there's a formal excuse to do it, you see.
One could argue that all you need is a single maintainer, like North Korea has, and I get it, that does sound simpler. But I prefer it when there are more rules to prevent dictators - I think those rules can limit the powers of the overrulers and simultaneously put a wrench in harassment.
Moderators abusing their power is absolutely possible. However it seems to me, anecdotally, that putting in place a CoC is a good sign that such abuse is about to get far more common.
The problem is that a CoC cannot really be any more precise than my vague 'use common sense' strategy is. A CoC will basically say "be nice to people, don't be a dick" in more flowery language, but ultimately - as incidents like this one show - there will still be moderators who decide whether any given incident is in violation. So a CoC doesn't really help with moderator abuse: if they want to be abusive, they're going to do it.
Of course, you can get really in depth and create judgement panels, voting mechanisms, appeals processes etc for a CoC violation. But we already have that, it's law.
It does have an effect on the social culture that's touched by that CoC, and you might like or dislike that effect. You might also have been totally distanced from this so as someone who is an outsider who has met a bunch of these people, let me say that in my personal interactions with these folks, Node.js has been more friendly to LGBT folks, issues of accessibility for the hearing and sight impaired, people with mental health issues like depression, people of color, women, and nonbinary folks, than just about any other community I have ever met. Meanwhile they have never come across as any of those alt-right buzzwords -- as "social justice warriors" or "man-hating" or "white-shaming" or anything; I have never felt unwelcome personally as a white American man.
Someone on the TSC has been anti-(what-the-community-is-about), and is actively apologizing for CoC enforcement and saying mean things which is discouraging others from participating in Node.js, and the technical community had a vote to censor him. They voted not to, and now someone for whom those community values are important has quit the TSC because they didn't support this decision.
I feel like everybody's rushing to see everyone else's choices as invalid but these are all valid private decisions. That community is allowed to decide that it likes this culture that its CoCs create, Rod is allowed to decide that he does not like it, the TSC is allowed to vote that Rod's dislike is not enough to kick him off the committee, and Myles is allowed to decide that this TSC support of this guy who doesn't like this culture is enough for him to no longer want to be part of the TSC.
you can thank GitHub for this. GitHub is a big Advocate for aggressive anti-free speech codes of Conduct
More and more Projects are being pushed to Adopt them, and many are.
Ok.
The solution in my mind is not to eliminate CoCs but to start a discussion about how to improve them to mitigate this impact. This appears to be what the original tweet was doing "If you've never considered the potential downsides of codes of conduct, here's a good place to start"
Apparently this is not a conversation it is ok to have if you are on a committee that is responsible for managing and enforcing the CoC? It seems to me like these are exactly the people who should be having this conversation.