It's not often that people behave in a mature fashion, so I fully understand you did not recognise it for what it is.
And it's not a claim that everything they would say would be a lie, it's just a warning. Given the severity of their actions, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and accept that the warning is probably warranted or at least it feels warranted to them.
That's not what they did, obviously.
The statement is much more than that.
Forcing people to air all their dirty laundry in public, as the Puritans did, is not just, and tends to severely limit already-marginalized people's access to justice.
More importantly this is a problem in a private organization and not a public entity or court proceeding.
This is not about whatever the original "accusation" was; it's about process and structure. AIUI, the whole purpose of having a moderation team is so "dirty laundry" of that kind won't have to be aired in public and ruled on by an uninformed lynch mob. They're talking about not being able -- allowed -- to do their job, not the (irrelevant) details of one specific task of the job.
> This is a fundamental principle of justice, dating back centuries.
And this is a forum moderation team, not a court of law.
> And this is a forum moderation team, not a court of law.
Principles of justice apply everywhere. Suggesting they can't be criticized for being unjust, solely because they aren't a court of law... is quite bizarre.
B) So no case has ever been decided in closed court in your world, or if any have, they're all unsubstantiated? You need to get your mind out of its over-literal legalistic rut, because in the reality the rest of us live in that happens quite frequently, and much of the time we even trust that allegations made in such courts are substantiated even though they aren't made public.
C) This is still not a "system of law" we're discussing. Try to understand the difference.
My position, by contrast, is straightforward: Principles of justice apply everywhere. Full stop.
The fact that this isn't a court of law is utterly immaterial. Allegations "substantiated" in secret are not substantiated at all.
The public accusation is vague and is not substantiated. What is the reason for it to exist in the first place if not to put blame without giving a chance to refute it?
You're confused about what the public accusation is. It's not about whatever shitty thing someone on the core team originally did; it's about process and structure. Their complaint was that the moderation team can't moderate the core team, because the latter claims not to be under the purview of the former. Does that really need further "substantiation"? And what's "vague" about it?
And no, the details of the original shitty thing don't matter; the same (lack of?) process and structure would apply to any such incident involving one or more members of the core team.
(How can any of this be so hard to understand???)
Of course it's a good thing. It's part of the strategy behind this move.
If (when) the accusation turns out to be a relative nothingburger, the Moderation Team would lose the moral authority and hence the power they think they command by going "well fine, we'll take our ball and go home".
Better to let it be vague, so that the public can imagine serious violations that cast the Core Team's legitimacy into doubt.
The reason for this is that, when you hire people to validate a process, most of the failure states come from processes that you are unable to verify as good or bad. This doesn't always mean that something is wrong - it just means that the validation team (or the code of conduct team in this case) does not feel, in their opinion, that they can confidently render an opinion. This is important because, at the end of the day, all these teams can do is produce opinions.
The obvious reaction is to suggest changes to the process that would allow you confidence in validation (these are called 'controls' in the auditing world). However, if the group you are trying to validate won't make your changes, then you are left in a situation where you can't be confident about doing your job. You aren't sure that anything is wrong exactly, but you are sure that the current setup won't allow you to be sure. You're faced with sitting in a situation where people expect you to validate a process, but you feel you can't - and so the only path is to resign.
However, as you can tell, there's a chance that the problem is the process verification team. Maybe they are dumb, or jerks, or whatever. If they are jerks, then you both wouldn't be able to rely on their specific accusations and it is possible that they missed things because of rudeness or incompetence, etc. So either way the sensible thing to do is not make specific accusations aside from "we don't think we can verify this process and we would recommend you take what others say about why with a grain of salt."
This appears to be a big win for the rust community.
Absolutely everything about this team’s behavior is mature and reasoned.
> This appears to be a big win for the rust community.
This appears to show that you have absolutely no idea what this is about.
I have no way of forming an idea whether it's utter bs or if there is something actually going wrong.
And I'm sure that the authors of the message are aware of that but made the decision to write what they have written anyway.
The mod team isn't asking for public debate, they're informing the org about their resignation and briefly listing out why. They don't need to convince you of anything, they're just telling you what their decision already is. This isn't a persuasive essay, this is a notification.
I swear, this kind of "if anything is public, you're now suddenly accountable to me, and I should have full access to everything" attitude is exactly why so few organizations are open about any of their internal processes or decisions. It shows up in a lot of places: Open Source and game development in particular. Sometimes people have public conversations in forums/groups that are still intended for specific recipients. Sometimes people share a small part of a process or decision, and not all of it. Sometimes people muse about decisions openly, and their musings aren't intended to be a formal essay to be picked apart or debated. It's fine.
That's not the only thing that they did. As the Russian saying goes, 'if you said A, say B'. I'd have no problem with the message 'We are resigning because we had a conflict with a certain team and it didn't get resolved in our way', but they have said more, just enough to make a public accusation without any chance for the accused party to refute it.
Giving someone the option of privacy is not the same as denying them justice. Quite the opposite, it's a mature way of allowing the org (and whichever people are involved in the incident in particular) to choose how public they want to be, and to choose how they want to respond.
But that's the extent of what they would owe, the mod team doesn't owe arbitrary people in the public an explanation that's detailed enough for them to form a hot-take immediately within the space of a few hours.
I'm not sure this really changes anything, it is a community announcement. I think this is something a community would want to know even independent of any other drama, even if they were resigning on good terms.
I guess I should clarify that I don't see letting the community know about something as necessarily equivalent to volunteering to debate or even to fully explain. I don't think this stuff is a binary category between never intending a message be read by the public (even if it's technically public) and doing something like a national TV news interview. Rust has a community issue tracker/repo that it uses for organization; posting notifications there (and in other community hubs like Reddit) feels very appropriate to me.
An author of a paper on string theory published on arxive is aware that everyone can read it and almost no one will understand that except for a few from the intended audience. He or she is fine with that and so does everyone else.
The authors of the resignation letter are similarly aware of the publicity, but decided to go ahead with their vague and unsubstantiated accusations and their appeal not to believe if the accused party says anything. They are aware of the effect and are fine with that. Some people are not.
Arxiv papers might not be written for me now, but if I got interested in a paper (and had time to spare, of course) I would probably have most of the content I need to at least grasp the general content of the paper.
Thanks for the example, it fits perfectly.
The time investment to even grasp the general idea of very specialized papers would be significantly longer than the investment you need to make to become a respected member of the rust community and apply for the next mod-team. Then you could also ask the members of the previous mod-team about the specifics of their complaints.
Maybe you are right, maybe the example fits perfectly.
My point is that arxiv papers (like most papers) come with an abstract to set the stage and have references to other papers cited therein.
Now regarding the structural issues, I actually could find very scarce information about the governance of Rust. I certainly could not find any information on how the core-team gets selected and what the processes are around being added or removed from the team. I also did not find much about their duties. So in that sense there seems to be verifiable information about lack of transparency (if not accountability).
The decision is "mature" if and only if what the moderation team claims to have occurred actually occurred, and we don't know the full details behind this.
No offense, but what do you expect to be able to contribute to this situation as an outsider? Would your contribution to the community be improved by additional information?
Who are the "insiders" here? A couple dozen people?
Rust is supposed to cater to their user base, not the dramas of a few people who need attention and something to do with their life.
Sometimes, throwing a spanner in the works is the good way forward. That's core to stop-the-line manufacturing, for instance. Without more information, it's hard to assess whether that team exhausted other escalation means, so I would wait for more details before judging their decision.
That's a pointless question.
I might want to understand what's going on to understand if it's even worth it to be contributing to the community at all.
I'm saying that public awareness is not a priority while the issue isn't resolved, and that it may actually be detrimental.
> I might want to understand what's going on to understand if it's even worth it to be contributing to the community at all.
Usually, when moderation happens, information is best delayed until the problem is solved. That avoids uninvolved parties fanning flames on an ongoing conflict, and when information comes, it's structured rather than a stream of instant reactions.
Note that this is true whether the conflict finds a satisfactory resolution or not. If the team that leaves sees that no good resolution is found, they can disclose information later, once resolution attempts have been exhausted.
Note that this is from my past mod experience, I'm not involved in moderating the rust community.
> This is a highly mature drama where the arguments are dry, generic and adhere to a strict code of values. No fingers were pointed, and the offended party is taking the high road by resigning.
As an outsider, I see Twitter-esque levels of grandstanding in the linked "post"—hardly mature. Based on observing the Rust community from afar over the last few years, this unfortunately is not something that is surprising.
(FWIW, I agree with all the comments pointing out that zero-context outsiders should not expect to be brought up to speed from a pull request message alone—anyone arguing the opposite is guilty of the same sort of mindset that I'm chiding here. If this announcement(!) weren't deliberately crafted to give the effect it does, supporters of the resigners might actually have a point. The fact that something that should be as boring as a pull request—no matter how controversial the subject—is being discussed in terms of "high roads" taken by any side, however, really throws that argument into the mud.)
Go hole up in a cabin in the woods and decompress by hacking on personal stuff or something and stay away from social media. For some, it has poisoned everything to the point that it has given rise to a new breed of vague status updates that pervade even project infrastructure.