To be honest, this doesn’t really quell any concerns. When I looked at Jon’s posts I couldn’t find anything that looked remotely like misconduct, certainly not something that would warrant a 6 week suspension. Jon’s civility, if anything, makes the need for moderator action like this seem even less likely.
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Answering your question is tricky to say the least. You are right that Jon appears quite level-headed and polite! He doesn’t call people names, he doesn’t outright troll people, and overall he seems very reasonable (and I’m still of the opinion that he is).
That said, our community as a whole is at the peak of years-long crisis. Historically, Nix community has been very welcoming of anyone tech-savvy and not outright hostile. We haven’t even had any moderation at all for a very long time, and we used to do things based on lengthy discussions and implicit authority that is based around people’s contributions. This might sound like a good thing, but it had backfired horribly on so many occasions. Flakes are in a half-baked limbo for eternity because people used their authority to push the feature without properly addressing community’s concerns. We are permanently short on people, because people with authority block any attempts to expand the teams. We are struggling with getting a lot of basic things done, because people with authority block any progress on that.
This is no exaggeration that this is a years-long crisis. There are people with authority in our community that are destroying the project and the community, and this authority is all implicit. A reasonable thing to do would be to ban those people from the project, as they are doing a lot of harm. But we can’t. We don’t have any formal structures in place to do that. Our moderation team is very limited in scope (as a result of people with authority limiting it!), and we don’t have anyone with actual explicit authority to ban people from the project.
As you can see, the situation is extremely dire. We desperately need to take decisive actions. The open letter was one of those actions. Jon’s input is, unfortunately, counterproductive in this case: the concerns he raises are valid, but he also misses the very important context of the situation being extremely bad. As such, he derails the sensitive conversation and wastes everyone’s time, when the clock is ticking like it never did.
To be clear: I’m not part of the moderation team, and I don’t speak for its behalf. This is my vision of a situation as someone who involved themselves with Nix Project for 3 years, without assuming some formal position. While I don’t want to see Jon gone from the community, I support the 6-week suspension: we really are in a terrible situation, and his input right now doesn’t help.
Regarding the Foundation: it is not a governing body. It just takes cares of administrative tasks, such as setting up events, NGOs, interacting with the sponsors, and so on. Moderation team isn’t a government body either: RFC 98 tried to establish it as such, and failed miserably. There are reasons to think that this failure (as long as all other failures at establishing a coherent governance model) are intentional sabotage from people who enjoy the implicit authority under the status quo.
The open letter calls this situation out, and wants to fix it. The open letter also depends on knowing a lot of internal context, so I’ve put out a text that aims to explain the situation concisely (shameless self-plug!).
I’ll add the section about RFC 98, Moderation team, and how it plays into this conflict, since it seems very apparent that people are confused about it, and are questioning moderation decisions in this case.
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There are people with authority in our community that are destroying the project and the community, […]
I’m having a hard time figuring out whom you’re referring to. Could you help me?
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Transparency about jonringer’s suspension
On Thursday, the moderation team, in consultation with members of the Foundation board, made the decision to issue a six-week suspension to Jon Ringer, effective in all NixOS project spaces. Jon has been a prominent member of the community for many years, and so we felt it important to share some details of our decision-making on this issue to which we ordinarily would not call attention.
As many of you are aware, since last year the community has been heatedly debating decisions made by NixOS event organizers and the Foundation with respect to a particular event sponsor. Jon has been a frequent participant in these conversations throughout, arguing in support of the decisions made and the sponsor in question. The overall quality of most of these conversations has been, frankly, dreadful, for reasons that involve many participants—we don’t consider Jon to be an outlier in this respect.
We recognize that it is important for the community to be able to freely discuss topics like this, and we are unwilling to arbitrarily exclude viewpoints with which we personally disagree on that basis alone. We also believe that, if such conversations aren’t carried out carefully, they can create an environment which becomes intrinsically unwelcoming to members of the community we don’t want to exclude. We have struggled with finding, in real time, the appropriate balance between these two values, and we don’t expect other leaders in the community to be any more successful at this than we are ourselves.
What has been disappointing to us about Jon’s behavior is that he has taken a position that, to all appearances, is wholly insensitive to the nuances of this conversation and the way it is affecting the community, and to his role in the conversation and what his actions signify. We, along with other community members, have attempted to point these issues out to him, but we have not seen a change in this behavior.
We present some examples below, but please understand that the issue here is very much about context. Jon has generally used language that, out of context, is civil and otherwise unobjectionable. We don’t expect community members who have little awareness of the entire conversation to understand, from these examples, why a six-week suspension is a proportionate response. In addition to its own judgment, the moderation team is using feedback from the board and other senior community leaders to calibrate its perceptions of this, and we are explicitly not inviting debate on this topic from people whose involvement in the NixOS community has heretofore been minimal.
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Jon’s PR applying to become an observer on the Foundation board (the issue here is not that he dared to apply; it’s the complete absence of sensitivity—in the best case, assuming that this was not Jon’s intent—to what his application, at that time, after the way he’s been engaging with Foundation decisions, would do to the community—continued and exacerbated in more recent comments after his application was formally declined): Add jonringer as a board observer by jonringer · Pull Request #133 · NixOS/foundation · GitHub
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This thread, concerning the (not ultimately implemented) suggestion that particular attention be paid to gender minority representation in the event sponsor selection process (the issue here is not the disagreement, but the pattern of engagement involving repeatedly resetting the conversation back to zero—asking if there are any specific suggestions, as if the entire thread isn’t his response to a specific suggestion; saying he’s not interested in debating, while debating; making value statements and responding to other people’s value statements with, ‘Stating […] something doesn’t make it true’, etc.): Objection to minority representation by a single class in NixOS sponsorship policy
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Jon responding with ‘everything is political’ in a way that both denies that his engagement has itself been deeply political as of late and shows an insensitivity to the issues previously raised: Major Nixpkgs contributor leaving - #11 by Pamplemousse
This is an incomplete list of interactions that have made up the general pattern, extending back to at least the beginning of this calendar year. In each case, the community has been reinflamed due to Jon’s lack of sensitivity. We feel that, after enough such interactions, failing to recognize the impact of one’s behavior and not changing it constitutes reckless conduct for a community leader. The word ‘reckless’ is chosen with care; we are not accusing Jon of having malicious intent against the NixOS community. But based on the impact of his behavior, we believe a temporary suspension is justified and necessary.
It is our hope that Jon will choose to take some time during his absence to reflect on the impact his actions have had on the community and resolve to behave differently if he chooses to rejoin us. The moderation team will take swifter and more permanent action against Jon in the future if this pattern of behavior resumes.
In the context of the broader conversation around the NixOS community’s culture, and the decisions made by the moderation team and the Foundation board, we want to highlight some things that are not the case:
Jon is not being suspended because of his employer.
We don’t exclude people from this community based on who they work for or what they do for a living, in any circumstance. Members of this community are expected to understand that the sometimes-pseudonymous usernames they interact with on this project could be anyone who do anything. You are entitled to your opinions about what other people do with their lives, but you are not entitled, here, to use those opinions as grounds to make anyone feel unwelcome.
He is not being suspended because of his political beliefs.
As with the above point, members of this community are expected to understand that they may be interacting with people they consider to be political adversaries. It is normal for a multicultural community to contain people who possess different beliefs. The moderation team draws a distinction between beliefs and actions, and we will not tolerate actions in this community that interfere with fostering a welcoming environment for as many people as possible. If you are concerned that, because your politics align with Jon’s, you too may end up suspended, we want you to understand that it is only Jon’s actions that have put him in this situation.
He is not being suspended for disagreeing with us or the Foundation board.
We welcome disagreement that is respectful of our time and communicated in appropriate channels. We have heard, privately, from several people who have expressed support for various sides of moderation-related issues, and we appreciate all of their input and their continued participation in this community.
He is not being suspended because a mob has demanded it.
We have received multiple reports from community members about Jon over the past several months in particular. We appreciate these reports and consider them an essential part of the moderation process. In the end, it is our judgment that we use to decide how to respond to situations, and you should hold us and us alone accountable with respect to our goal of fostering a welcoming environment.
Given that our goal for this community is a welcoming environment for many people as possible, we do not lightly make decisions about suspending long-standing community members, even temporarily. Every suspension or ban of a contributing member of our community is an event that we hope to avoid, understanding that in some cases this is unavoidable.
Creating a safe and welcoming community is our mission, but it’s not only our responsibility. We share that responsibility with you, and the choices you make when you interact with others in our space have a big impact on how successful we all are at that mission. We rely on you to work with us in difficult situations and to remember not only to use polite language, but also to exercise common sense and empathy to anticipate the effects your words will likely have on others, and to listen and give consideration to others when they tell you about problems you may be causing. All of this applies extra when you have a position of leadership in the community, but in a community as anarchic as this one it can’t be just something for leaders to keep in mind.
Finally, please refrain from starting new public threads on the subject of Jon. Direct feedback on our decision can be sent as private messages to moderators here on Discourse. We may not get back to you right away; we are volunteers with outside lives, and the last few days have been very busy for us.
The NixOS Moderation Team
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It was a unanimous decision, or can we have each member vote on the six-week suspension?
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This post really cleared up the situation for me.
At first glance, it looks like a standard case of the individual coming from a technical environment and not realizing that meritocracy doesn’t actually work to produce well represented leadership structures.
Whether that’s in good faith or not doesn’t matter if it keeps leading to disruption of discussion.
The links to relevant discussions made it pretty clear. I was kind of leaning towards “pics or it didn’t happen” until I found this post.
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What is the point of that question? The decision was made as a team, and its consensus finding process (usually unanimity btw) is an implementation detail.
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I personally support you doing what you can as a team in a well reasoned way, given the circumstances. I don’t have a beef with people, but it’s time to stop divisiveness and fighting in spaces where people are communicating.
Tit-for-tat exchanges to struggle for control will destroy the community, and you can’t let it go on.
Ultimately this community needs help with social negotiation around collaboration from an impartial party with real experience stewarding that, in my opinion. And it needs appropriate affordances to give agency to people who participate. That will take time.
In the mean time, if we are all as people to participate together, we need to individually stop playing the tit for tat control game, or we need someone to try to impartially (as much as possible) stop us when we go too far.
Let’s try to genuinely learn to put our energy into slowing down, understanding each other, figuring out what it takes to be in a community together with whoever is left willing to be in it. Let’s treat each other like the human beings that we are. For better or worse, we are the people. Let’s understand one another, and try to make this work.
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(implied: and not tossed into this topic)
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The flagged posts in here are clear indication of silencing opposing opinions and building an echo chamber. It is frankly revolting to see this with civil discourse.
EDIT: I ask that the moderation team lock the thread if discourse on this topic is no longer accepted.
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I’ve flagged the posts that don’t follow a direct instruction on how to give feedback about this decision. I don’t know how to be more clear. If that revolts you, I regret that I have no substantial response to that.
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To address the voices desiring more specific reasoning about the ban of Jonringer:
First of all, please ask yourself whether you actually require more information or whether you are merely moving the goal posts. If you disagree with the decision, would more information would convince you, or would you still be dissatisfied and ask for even more justification?
Secondly, when it comes to something which involves many situations spanning multiple months, there is no one event or one thing responsible for it, which we could write down.
Thirdly, a meeting to discuss the matter was scheduled days before the incident yesterday. The only thing that changed because of external pressure is that the meeting got moved to an earlier point in time.
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