[diversity-talk] abusive leadership

[alyssa wright]

(Note: Written from an angry, hurt, and upset space.)

Last week, a long time member of the OSM community removed me as an
organizer from the NYC OSM group because of his interpretation of a
suggestion I made on the osm-nyc mailing list. He claimed that he "owns"
the NYC OSM meetup and sees it in his discretion to remove people at will.

Regarding the individual -- it is clear that this is not an isolated event
but a patterned behavior that we tolerate as an OSM community.  Such
disrespect -- complete with the emails of righteousness and condescension
-- is a exactly why I started OpenThreads. Our acceptance of abusive
leadership is a major contributor to opensource's lack ethnic and gender
diversity.

I reached out to other OSM leaders (some who might be on this list) for
perspective and advice. While all were responsive, it became clear that
there is no process for identifying or addressing abusive behavior.  While
there seems to be structures (precedence?) in place for dealing with
abusive editors, there is no system of accountability for abusive community
dialogue and leadership.

This needs to change. All of our outreach and nicer websites will not
matter if we tolerate clear disrespect and abuse of power.

So, I would like to ask here -- what to do? Because right now , I feel
completely disempowered.  And while we might be able to resolve this
specific incident, I feel completely disempowered to ensure it doesn't
happen again, to me and to others.

Thanks,
Alyssa.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/diversity-talk/attachments/20130627/026ce090/attachment.html>