"Code of Conduct"s perfect storm - bringing madness to the surface

Zenaan Harkness zen at freedbms.net
Sun Mar 26 23:34:16 PDT 2017


Well well well. Surprise surprise. Who woulda thought that some folk
would not only bring in "Politically Correct" codes of athoritarianism,
and then a short year or two later, those same folk would pomptly and
swiftly throw aside said code of conduct, run a star chamber, and evict
an honourable community contributor from "the community", without any
recourse, without any right of response, with exactly NO public
discourse, and without even the reasons, conclusions nor anything else
of substance being made public other than "You must leave, naughty man!"

??

Seriously, who could have predicted this?

And who could have predicted that proclamations from The Ministry would
cause even greater abuses of power, arising from self perceived almighty
authority over what behaviour is allowed behind closed doors, between
consenting adults, acting lawfully ?

Who indeed...




https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/26/sex-and-gor-and-open-source/?ncid=rss

Sex and Gor and open source
Posted 17 hours ago by Jon Evans (@rezendi), Columnist

Next Story

A few weeks ago, Dries Buytaert, founder of the popular open-source CMS
Drupal, asked Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor and
long-time member of the Drupal community, “to leave the Drupal project.”
Why did he do this? He refuses to say. A huge furor has erupted in
response — not least because the reason clearly has much to do with
Garfield’s unconventional sex life.

More specifically, Garfield is into BDSM. Even more specifically, he’s a
member of the Gor community, an outré subculture of an outré subculture,
one built around a series of thirty-odd books by John Norman which are,
basically, “John Carter of Mars” meets “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Essentially–as I understand it–a community who are interested in, and/or
participate in, elaborate (consensual!) sexual subjugation fantasies, in
which men are inherently superior to women. I know all this because of
Garfield’s lengthy public response to his ouster, self-deprecatingly
titled “TMI about me“:

    Yes, I am one of those people … Despite the total lack of evidence
that alternative lifestyle cultures offer any harm to anyone, there is
still a great deal of prejudice and bigotry regarding it … someone, I do
not know who, stumbled across my profile on a private,
registration-required website for alternative-lifestyle people … that
information made it to the Community Working Group (CWG), who concluded
“there was no code of conduct violation present for [them] to take any
action on” … in my first contact with Dries, he asked me “to step down
from Drupal” … Drupal has been the cornerstone of my career for the past
nearly 12 years … Dries wouldn’t budge on me leaving, including making
it clear that it wasn’t an option, but an instruction … informing me
that I’d been summarily dismissed from my position as track chair and as
a speaker at DrupalCon, “per [my] conversation with Dries” … here I am,
being bullied, harassed, and excluded because of my personal activities,
which I don’t even publicize much less advocate for in tech circles.

Buytaert (who is also co-founder and CTO of Acquia, a Drupal platform
which has raised ~$175 million over the years and has been struggling to
IPO for a few years now) retorts:

    when a highly-visible community member’s private views become
public, controversial, and disruptive for the project, I must consider
the impact … all people are created equally. [sic] I cannot in good
faith support someone who actively promotes a philosophy that is
contrary to this … any association with Larry’s belief system is
inconsistent with our project’s goals … I recused myself from the Drupal
Association’s decision [to dismiss Garfield from his conference role] …
Many have rightfully stated that I haven’t made a clear case for the
decision … I did not make the decision based on the information or
beliefs conveyed in Larry’s blog post.

Sigh. This sad mess is something of a perfect storm of Code of Conduct
conflicts. It is one which raises a number of interesting questions. It
also raises several quite boring ones, so let’s get them out of the way:

    Does this matter? (Isn’t this just prurient clickbait?)
    Is it OK for an open-source community to ban/ostracize a member for
being involved in BDSM, or other forms of unconventional but consensual
adult sexual behavior?
    More generally, is it OK for an open-source community to
ban/ostracize a member purely because their “belief system” — perhaps
better described as a complicated fantasy milieu in which they happen to
spend their personal time — was doxxed?

These questions are boring not because they are unimportant, but because
the answers are so obvious: yes (no), hell no, and hell no.

I’ll unpack the first: open-source communities/projects are crucially
important to many people’s careers and professional lives — cf “the
cornerstone of my career” — so who they allow and deny membership to,
and how their codes of conduct are constructed and followed, is highly
consequential.

I really, really hope I don’t have to unpack the two hell nos. But in
case I do, let me quote this excellent blog post from Nadia Eghbal:

    In the past, Dries might’ve kicked Larry out because “BDSM is a
threat to family values”. Today, leaders like Dries kick Larry out
because “BDSM is a threat to gender equality”. Unfortunately, the end
result is the same … Beliefs are not actions. We cannot persecute people
for what they believe, no matter how much it disgusts us, and
simultaneously maintain a free and open democracy … If diversity is our
dogma, call me “spiritual, not religious”. I still pray for the same
things as you, but I won’t be at the witch trials.

Which is brilliantly put and I hope settles the previous questions.
However. The Garfield Situation also raises two questions which are far
more complex and interesting:

    Under what circumstances, and via what kind of due process, is it OK
for communities to publicly condemn people for secret reasons?
    Is it OK to ban/ostracize community members for (legal) behavior
which occurs entirely outside the community?

Obviously sometimes organizational decisions have to be made based on
information that must remain confidential, for legal or ethical reasons.
But if you’re making such a decision, you really have to do so in the
right way. What is the right way?

…Probably something close to the opposite of what Buytaert and the
Drupal Association did. Even if their decision was correct, which
currently seems at best suspect, their complete lack of process
transparency, and Buytaert’s vaguely worded
hinting-without-really-saying-anything statement, makes it very hard to
have any faith in it.

Their accusations are so vague — nonexistent non-accusations, really —
that Dries & co. could surely have told the community substantially more
(indeed, anything) about Garfield’s problematic behavior, if any,
without revealing sensitive information. For instance, they could have
said they’d received reports of threats, harassment, or coercion by
Garfield, if any such reports existed. They have said nothing of the
sort.

(For what it’s worth, a well-informed source of mine reports: “It’s
worth noting that a handful of women who worked with Larry did not
report harassment or abuse from him in the workplace. We can’t know for
sure if he committed offenses, but if there were allegations or even
rumors of his mistreatment of women we would be having a very different
conversation right now.”)

They could also have cited which elements of the Drupal Code of Conduct
he violated, if any. They have not done so … but they’ve expelled him
anyhow. Isn’t that Code of Conduct, and its associated Conflict
Resolution Policy, supposed to be what dictates the rules of behavior
and interaction in the community? Doesn’t overruling that written code
with arbitrary decisions made for secret reasons reveal that in practice
it is an irrelevance with no actual weight or importance?

I reached out to Buytaert in the hope of clarification; he did not
respond.

It’s hard not to get the impression, from the little that we do know,
and the manner in which it has been miscommunicated, that what’s
actually deemed unacceptable here is that Garfield’s kink has spilled
outside of his personal life — i.e. that his real sin is that he was
doxxed. Which, as noted, is firmly in hell no territory.

It is of course entirely possible that this impression is incorrect, and
that Buytaert and the Drupal Association have done the right thing. But
they have offered no evidence, no arguments, and no reasons for their
decision. It seems obvious to me that they have a moral obligation to
their community to do so. You can’t ban people without at least
sketching the outline of what it is they did wrong. Just trust us is not
enough —

–especially since it also seems possible that the CTO and co-founder of
a heavily funded pre-IPO company has participated in expelling a man
from what his been his professional community for the last twelve years,
ignoring that community’s own Code of Conduct and Conflict Resolution
Policy, because it was decided he was guilty of, essentially,
thoughtcrime; that no real accusations have been made, and no
allegations of problematic behavior have been cited, because none such
exist.

A third plausible scenario, based on the tea leaves of Buytaert’s phrase
“actively promotes,” is that Garfield has been banned for expressing
views outside the Drupal community which are deemed unacceptable inside.
This is not a new issue in the open-source world: I wrote about it last
year, in the context of Curtis Yarvin and “Opalgate”:

    Should communities accept people who hold repugnant views, as long
as they don’t express them within that community? Or should they be
expelled, because it’s assumed that their views influence their
community work in a negative way, or because their presence makes other
people feel unsafe?

    Personally, both answers make me feel deeply uneasy. Humans are
messy, complex, and contradictory; human interactions are that squared;
the results are so complex and context-sensitive that they often need to
be judged on a case-by-case basis, rather than by any hard-and-fast
rule.

…although in those cases, the views in question were clearly expressed
publicly, not privately, and were not intended as part of any BDSM
fantasy world. Does that apply here? Who knows? Certainly not the Drupal
community.

It’s impossible to judge the Garfield situation, because all we are
permitted to know is that it has been prejudged for us, by people who
refuse to tell us anything about either their evidence or their decision
process. It is, however, very easy to judge whether the people who have
made and communicated this decision are, by the way they have done so,
actually serving their community. And that answer is, once again, I’m
sorry to say: hell no.


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