[diversity-talk] The recent unpleasantness

[Paul Norman]

On 12/2/2014 3:22 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Your justification for this seems to be behaviour outside of this list
> and/or, and this is the bit I take particular offense with,
>
> "The private responses to me have generally expressed that is part of a
> pattern of behavior, and not an isolated incident."
>
> Which, in essence, means nothing less than people having emailed you in
> private and influenced your decision by telling you bad things about Serge.
>
> I've been on the unpleasant end of moderation myself and I can tell you
> that there's few things more hurtful than having a "secret court"
> against you in which some people get the chance to whisper something in
> the moderator's ear, and the moderator ends up partly justifying their
> decision by what he's been told.
Given that this decision involves an outcome far exceeding previous 
precedents[1] based on allegations he was not given a chance to respond 
to and involved activities outside the scope of the OSMF, I would 
strongly encourage Serge to raise the moderator action to the 
appropriate body as unreasonable. The appropriate body is probably the CWG.

It should also be noted that moderator action cannot be justified as 
enforcing a code of conduct when that code of conduct has not been 
adopted with the consensus of the list, list-wide consensus, a directive 
from a WG responsible, or a board decision. A moderator could use such a 
code of conduct as a guide to coming to a decision, but the decision 
must be justified in of itself.