[python-committers] I have blocked Wes Turner from the Python org on GitHub

[Nick Coghlan]

On 1 April 2017 at 19:16, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1 April 2017 at 09:17, Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org> wrote:
>> I have sometimes been mildly annoyed by his posting style on MLs, and I
>> can imagine how it can become very annoying on a GitHub PR.
>
> Agreed. I don't feel that Wes' contributions are productive, and I
> generally ignore them. I support banning him if he refuses to (or is
> incapable of) improving his style - he's certainly been told often
> enough in various lists. But it did surprise me that it was addressed
> as a CoC issue. I'd hope we have alternative means of dealing with
> non-productive behaviours that don't have the implications of a CoC
> violation.

The CoC is the only mechanism that's written down, since it defines
the terms of the deal for ongoing participation: we're each expected
to be open, considerate, and respectful of others, and that "open by
default" status can be withdrawn given persistent and repeated
failures to be considerate and respectful even in the face of personal
coaching.

Outside that, mailing list moderation decisions are entirely in the
hands of the moderators of any given list, while bugs.python.org is
collectively managed by the current core developers, and the Python
GitHub org is managed by the folks with the "owner" role for that
group (covering both python-dev and the PSF, since that org is used
for more than just CPython)

> As has been noted, Wes' style may be more about how he thinks and
> behaves, and may well be something he can't "fix". It's very dangerous
> to judge people based on limited interactions, and it's entirely
> possible that the code of conduct has more to say about how we treat
> Wes than the other way around.

> But even if that *is* the case, there
> comes a point where treating all participants equally does mean we're
> OK to say "sorry, you're being unproductive and that won't change, so
> we can't work with you" regardless of who they are or their
> circumstances. I'd prefer to view what's happened here as a case where
> we have to say "we've done our best to be welcoming and work with you,
> but it's not going to work out".
>
> If we don't have a good way to do that, let's get one.

Short of cases that are escalated to the PSF Board (for blanket bans
from PSF provided infrastructure, which has still only been deemed
necessary once), the steps typically taken by mailing list moderators
and issue tracker administrators are:

1. giving folks guidance on specific behaviors that are causing
problems for other people (in this case, random info dumps on
distutils-sig, python-ideas, and most recently, core-workflow GitHub
issues)
2. if nothing changes, or the problematic behaviours return, this may
escalate to an enforced suspension (for the issue trackers), or
mandatory moderation (for mailing lists)
3. only if step 2 proves inadequate are other options (like permabans
with no chance for future review) considered, and that currently means
escalating matters to the PSF (since they're the ones with ultimate
responsibility for the management of all of our communication
channels)

In this particular case, we're only at step 2 - self-moderation based
on previously provided guidance has proven inadequate, so an enforced
break specifically from the Python org on GitHub makes sense (mainly
because the tools for dealing with non-productive noise on GitHub
issues aren't anywhere near as well developed as those for email). If
there was finer granularity available on GitHub, the suspension would
presumably have only been from the core-workflow repo specifically,
but that's not currently an available option.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia