Calling for a Vote of No Confidence in the Python Steering Council

They're really banning almost everyone that dares speak up.

I don't have any affiliation with the Python forums, but I'd like to just use this soapbox to at least air some of my worries as someone who is neurodivergent.

I have to include the clause that this is not the universal neurodivergent experience. We're not a monolith. This is my own experience, but I don't feel like I am the only one.

https://discuss.python.org/t/inclusive-communications-expect...

I've gone down the rabbit hole and what I dug up was honestly just scary. I very much resonated with Karl in that thread, the constant walking on eggshells in the dark, not knowing when someone you say in good faith might construed as "problematic behavior". Karl made a new thread saying he's leaving:

https://discuss.python.org/t/im-leaving-too/58408

And promptly got banned. This prompted Tim to open a thread about this:

https://discuss.python.org/t/how-can-we-better-support-neuro...

I feel Tim tries to do his best for the community at every step. But he got booted with one of the reasons being:

"- Dismissing unacceptable behavior of others as a “neurodivergent” trait, which is problematic because it creates a stereotype that neurodivergent people are hard to interact with and need special treatment."

The matter of the fact is: Some of us do need special treatment. We're not kids, but you can't expect us to act like a perfect neurotypical person would. We are sometimes hard to interact with. Stop pretending neurotypical people and neurodivergent people are the same! We're not the same: We're not better, we're not worse, we're different.

I'm sick and tired of people speaking on our behalf in the name of diversity. The hand that is reached out in the name of "neurodivergence accessibility" is often quickly pulled back when we don't fall in line with the guidelines centered on neurotypical sensibilities. We're free to be neurodivergent as long as we act neurotypical enough.

Now, I don't really care much about the Python community by itself, but I feel this is a barometer for the wider state of the open source community.

To me, it just makes me feel neurodivergent people are not welcome in these spaces.

"If the code runs, who cares that it was written by a werewolf" may get you better code, but it may also get you more werewolves. If the only thing anyone is doing is writing code, that probably doesn't matter, but here in the real world developers have to work together and it turns out that for some people working with werewolves is disagreeable. Which means that if you invite all the werewolves in, you'll lose the people who don't want to work with werewolves, so maybe you don't get better code after all.

Which is a better tradeoff? That depends on how many werewolves you have, and whether they're Fenrir Greyback or Remus Lupin, and how many anti-werewolves you have, and whether they're actually in danger from the werewolves or just prejudiced against them, and all sorts of other complicated things.

In the present instance, my own prejudices say that it sure doesn't look to me like Tim Peters is a werewolf, but unfortunately the following three situations look exactly alike from the outside: (1) Tim Peters is guilty of nothing other than talking in a way that's perfectly harmless but that some officious busybodies don't like; (2) Tim Peters has been privately accused of some genuinely awful things that are hard to prove or disprove, and the powers-that-be have gone after him for technical offences in order to avoid a messy argument about those awful things, and either (2a) he's innocent of those awful things or (2b) he actually did them.

In a transparent system, the governing body would have released the name.

A vote of no confidence over not releasing the name is appropriate.

>If Peters had not wanted to publicize his suspension, that should have been his choice.

You seem to miss the point. Although I suppose Mr. Furman does too.

Aside from Tim Peters saying it was him, everyone who was paying attention to the threads that led to the suspension should have known it was him (I can't guess who Antoine Pitrou suspected instead in https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a-co... - but maybe that was his subtle way of implying that someone else deserved it instead?) and after the Register article (and perhaps Lunduke's coverage, and that of blog posts such as Chris McDonough's and my own, and I also saw others talking about it on social media), everyone else who cared knew too.

But the Steering Council nevertheless insisted that they were suppressing the name out of some kind of privacy concern, even though the suspension was accompanied by a suspension from the forum that explicitly cites the Steering Council decision. This is public information on Mr. Peters' profile (https://discuss.python.org/u/tim.one/summary) - there's no way around that with the Discourse software. Furthermore, there's simply no way to hide the fact that a normally active discussion participant has suddenly gone radio silent.

In my view, Mr. Peters absolutely does want to publicize his suspension - which is why Lunduke was able to interview him, for example. I rather doubt that the Register did that kind of investigative work, either (even if it should have been easy). Meanwhile, this supposed concern for privacy was completely ignored when the forum moderators decided to slam the door behind myself and Dr. Mertz on our way out, while repeating the Code of Conduct Work Group's ridiculous claims about us.

Mr. Furman is absolutely correct, in any case, about "chilling effect". It's abundantly clear from that post, as well as the one announcing the suspension, and the discussion in the PSF section (https://discuss.python.org/t/pr-disaster-surrounding-recent-...), that nobody dares whisper the name "Tim Peters" - despite the fact that everyone reasonably ought to know who it is anyway. Presumably they fear being sanctioned themselves.

> The problem is that the reasons I have seen given for the suspension are flimsy.

Yes, this is also covered, of course.

Anyway, the people I see disagreeing with Mr. Furman are very much part of the set of people I'd expect to see there. The ideological clique is so well defined that even likely-neurodivergent people like myself can easily sketch it out. The group I have in mind also includes other Steering Council and CoC WG members (although perhaps they'll decide discretion is the better part of valour, or see their views as redundant at this point) - and, among core devs: Nathaniel J. Smith, Victor Stinner and Ned Batchelder (although he became a core dev quite recently and rarely posts much of anything at all). There are others I could think of but I doubt they'd feel strongly enough about it to post.