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Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

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11–20 of 77 posts

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#11

Am I missing something here? The minutes give no real details about anything It's all rather vague

Power wants to avoid accountability, and therefore it avoids transparency wherever possible. No surprise there, and no different from what happens in corporate boards where consensus is established by board members glancing meaningfully at each other, so the agreement doesn't enter the record.

I've long observed the governing bodies of GNOME, Mozilla, and Wikimedia (whose composition doesn't reflect the composition of the community, to put it mildly) to act like mediocre corporate boards, and I'm sure the same power structures and patterns of behavior can be found in other large open source projects.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#12

Am I missing something here? The minutes give no real details about anything It's all rather vague

I'm not sure, but code of conduct was breached, so could be the usual whenever code of conduct is brought up.

The code of conduct consists of individual provisions, articles, and paragraphs. It should be easy (in fact, it should be a prerequisite for such actions being taken) to cite the specific provisions of the CoC that were supposedly violated, and to enter that information into the record. That this didn't happen speaks volumes.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#14
post #2

[flagged]

> https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20240527 This is simultaneous hilarious and frightening. Wtf is going on at GNOME?

Nothing else than taking some peasants and giving them a bodyguard uniform and now they feel more entitled than the building landord himself.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#15
post #2

[flagged]

> https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20240527 This is simultaneous hilarious and frightening. Wtf is going on at GNOME?

Now I don't know what the parent said, but if you mean frightening as in taking up people's time, worry not, as commonly in small orgs such meetings don't take place in reality even though the minutes might indicate so. These minutes may be signed by the attendees via email (or mail) without ever meeting up in reality.

This is very common for small orgs where communication is already daily or the matter is trivial in the first place. The reason minutes are signed at all in such cases is to have a paper trail of the decisions and a date for the meeting held, as that might be a legal requirement.

As an example in our company when approving accounts, all of us have already seen the accounts multiple times. We have been there when the accounts were being made. The minutes of the meeting are more like a formal paper stating that we know what the accounts contain and approve their content, but it's not like we usually schedule an actual meeting just to waste each other's time.

Of course if there's say disagreement with the matter amongst attendees, it is essential to hold a proper meeting.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#17
The minutes for this meeting is not public yet, but in general gnome foundation minutes are extremly vague on all subjects (e.g. "a change was proposed and the board approved it").

Code of conduct issues seem to bring out certain people out of the woodwork. hence to avoid conspiracy theories and witch hunts taking over I think the foundation should explain the situation as soon as possible.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#18
CoC violations — particularly ones egregious enough to warrant removal from a project — often involve topics of a highly sensitive nature regarding events which could potentially reveal the identity of the victim party, which is entirely not appropriate. While I completely understand the frustration around the current lack of communication regarding this incident, it's fully appropriate given the situation at hand and those party to the proceedings are the only ones at liberty to discuss what happened.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#19

Gnome is kind of junk nowdays, right? Haven't used since slack 7.

On the contrary. I hadn’t used gnome since 2017, and back then it was absolute junk. Upon installing NixOS two weeks ago, I went with the default desktop environment for while, and this was gnome. I thought at first that NixOS had tweaked gnome into being nice, but my colleague assured me that this is how gbome is today.

More mimalistic, drawing inspiration from macOS.

I still have to remove stuff rather than add stuff to get to where I want. But it wasn’t the first thing I removed on a new install.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#20
post #18

CoC violations — particularly ones egregious enough to warrant removal from a project — often involve topics of a highly sensitive nature regarding events which could potentially reveal the identity of the victim party, which is entirely not appropriate. While I completely understand the frustration around the current lack of communication regarding this incident, it's fully appropriate given the situation at hand an…

They absolutely do not, certainly not "often". In many cases mediocre corporate developers who have taken over a project demand more deference in purely technical matters (which they do not understand) and remove opposition.

They then close down all communication channels so the real victim (i.e., the person that was removed) cannot tell the truth.

Then they engage in vague accusations that there was some other issue that cannot be mentioned in order to "protect a fictional aggrieved party".

Which is criminal libel.

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