Lets remove gossip from Julia stewardship

Community
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It has recently come to my attention that the behaviors of the Julia stewards are flawed.

I’m sure the Julia stewards are overall excellent people, even if the execution of their stewardship is flawed.

Personally, I have a zero tolerance policy for gossip, especially formalized systematic gossip.

What I experienced from the Julia stewards can only be described as the equivalent of gossip.

They did not make it clear whom I violated, what harm I caused, or what the actual problem is.

Instead, the Julia stewards made a formal declaration of some sort of gossip regarding my interaction on the website, without being specific.

This nebulous and unspecific declaration of gossip is then used as a basis for declaring a warning.

Overall, it literally amounts to nothing but a declaration of gossip. Basically, I am told that people in combination with the Julia stewards are engaged in some type of gossip about me, and that this is reason to give me a warning, without being specific.

From my perspective (having an active zero tolerance policy for any form of gossip), it appears that these Julia stewards are themselves the ones who are engaging in toxic community behavior (gossip).

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people .

Of course, I’m aware that I am not necessarily the most pleasant person to interact with in every scenario, and that at times my attitude may not be ideal.

However, the approach that was taken by the Julia stewards on me was based on nothing but gossip.

I’m certainly willing to examine myself scientifically by taking evidence and specific situations into account.

However, I will (and have) respond very harshly and negatively to any form of gossip.

Gossip and formalized anonymous complaints should be completely ignored and considered unscientific.

The Julia stewards should seriously reconsider how they go about their conflict resolution, and the gossip should be entirely removed from their procedure.

Engaging in gossip is toxic community behavior, and the Julia stewards made a literal declaration of gossip in my situation. Gossip should not be part of conflict resolution for the Julia stewards, as it is a form of conflict and toxic behavior in itself.

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I may have missed something, but all I am seeing is you opening topics accusing the Julia stewards of all kinds of things.

I am not sure what you consider gossip, but if your behavior is discussed in the context of resolving a complaint, the rules clearly state that the procedure is confidential.

In any case, I would recommend that you just wait to hear from the stewards, and present your side of the case to them when the opportunity arises. It may not make sense to involve the community at this stage; we lack the context.

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It’s not possible to present my side of the case, because I dont even know what the other side is.

I have a zero tolerance policy for gossip, and I believe the Julia stewards should be held publicly accountable for engaging in systematic gossip.

People who engage in gossip are not reasonable and avoid accountability, therefore it is necessary to expose.

If gossip is a more general problem in the julia community, then the julia users in general should also think about whether they are engaging in gossip, which is not good community behavior.

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I take it this means you are not leaving the julia discourse?

I don’t really see how opening all these topics is helping anyone, let alone you.

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Your initial post about leaving discourse was quite good, you didn’t like how you were treated, perceived it as unjust, and announced that you would not participate anymore for some time. This made sense irrelevant of whether you were right or wrong, people who knew nothing of the case could have seen this with sympathy.

Now after very little time, you come back to discourse, open a bunch of posts, whine about all sorts of things, try to get people to rally your cause which clearly is not meeting success. This has the complete opposite effect. I’d be surprised many people feel sympathy now.

You’ve released a bunch of rather high quality packages, with recognition from the community, this is great, no one will take it away from you, all your recent efforts are dragging this in the dirt… maybe stop?

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My goal is certainly not a popularity contest, I do not seek popularity or to rally people for some cause.

I merely wish to talk about an issue, regardless of whether it makes me popular or not.

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I will quote myself here :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: s/censorship/gossip/

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I am a moderator here — but not a steward. I take a post-by-post sort of view, and my toolbox is rather limited. The stewards have a far bigger mandate; they cover all interactions within the Julia community — and they handle any conflicts, complaints, and concerns, from mild to severe.

The very first step in the stewards’ toolbox is informal feedback:

  1. Informal feedback, privately and/or (for public violations) in the forum where a violation appeared, with the goal of encouraging good-faith contributions and mutual understanding while making offenders aware of the problem and preventing future incidents. Where possible, good intentions of the participants should be assumed.

The explicit goal of this step is not to castigate or punish, but rather to provide a bit of feedback to help everyone get along better.

The key part isn’t the whom, it’s the what. If you’re unclear as to what actions you took caused someone to contact the stewards, you can (and should) ask them directly for some clarification! They won’t be able to tell you who, but again, that’s not the point — especially if this is at the informal feedback stage.

It’s not at all about gossip; it’s about helping us all get along. The stewards are “just” an established set of mediators that try to help ensure mutual understanding and resolve conflicts.

So to put on my moderator’s hat, I’m tentatively okay (for now) leaving this open for discussion, but I fear it’ll be difficult to talk productively and objectively about changing the stewards’ process when you’re so closely involved with a current matter. We can talk about how the stewards process works at a high level, but if this becomes personal it’ll make sense to close it.

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It’s entirely unclear to me what happened and what you are reacting to. I have no idea what a

could possibly be. Have you been advised, warned, rebuked, have some of your posts been flagged or hidden? Was it a strongly worded warning?

You say you don’t know what you did, but you’re not even telling us what you are upset about, except that it’s something to do with with ‘gossip’.

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This sure sounds like “festivus”. EDIT: My comment only references the complaints above. I have no knowledge whatsoever about the substance of those allegations, but I do think it is distinctly unhelpful to post an inflammatory accusation like this without any supporting evidence. The following statements should be interpreted in that light.

No doubt, the community should stand behind someone whose rights have been trampled! But we as the community to whom this complaint has been addressed have no information to go on.

Perhaps the procedure for the stewards could delineate clearly what recourse there is for someone who has complaints about the procedure? Such as when the procedure was not in reality followed to the letter.

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I can understand that it’s frustrating to be told that some person or persons have complained about your behavior without being given the details of the complaint. Communications to Julia Stewards are, however, strictly confidential for very good reasons—people must feel safe to report harassment and threatening behavior. This is simply not a legal proceeding: you do not have a right to face your accuser and the stakes are low—the most severe punishment Julia Stewards can impose is a ban from Julia forums which can be appealed after at most six months.

While I cannot talk about any specific complaints, I can present some general rules that everyone should abide by when communicating with other members of the Julia community:

  • Be civil and polite when messaging people publicly or privately
  • Do not send threatening, harassing or intimidating messages
  • Do not send people messages with profanities directed at them
  • If someone has asked you to stop messaging them, stop
  • Do not keep sending messages to people who have not replied to earlier messages—consider this an implicit request to stop
  • Do not send unsolicited messages to express your disapproval of a person or their employer

These rules always apply to communications through Julia forums like Discourse, GitHub, Slack or Zulip. However, they also apply to messages sent by other means to people that you know primarily through the Julia community. If, for example, someone emails another community member in a manner that violates these rules and it is reported to the Julia Stewards, it may lead to official action even though we cannot prevent anyone from sending emails.

If you follow these rules—which I would hope I didn’t have to spell out, but here we are—then you should be fine.

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I realized that my comment above could have been misconstrued. I wish to clarify that I have no knowledge of an improper process in this case, and I edited my post accordingly.

I do feel though that the procedure outlined in the forum documents does not offer any recourse to those who think the process was not followed.

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For someone who considers the julia community an important aspect of my life, it seems very severe to ban someone based on unsubstantiated gossip.

Granted, I was told that no actions would be taken in my situation, so it’s not necessarily severe for me.

However, the declaration of gossip itself, which would potentially be used to ban someone is irresponsible.

It is in fact highly irresponsible and an unfair potential threat to ban people based on the equivalent of gossip.

The problem with this is that there is no accountability, and the unverifiable gossip happening behind the scenes is by definition harassment itself.

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As a general comment, in any situation where we might consider banning someone, if there were dispute about any underlying facts the Stewards would certainly seek corroborating evidence, such as testimony from multiple affected people, direct access to the DMs on discourse, and access to deleted posts on discourse.

I do feel though that the procedure outlined in the forum documents does not offer any recourse to those who think the process was not followed.

I’m not what more would be possible (within the community … people can always complain in other forums) besides having a panel of 7 people monitoring such cases. It’s not really practical to have a hierarchy of multiple appeals panels in such a small community.

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Is this tantrum not gossip itself?

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All this is coming across as a bit jarring — you seem to be investing so much time into something that has no serious professional or personal repercussions for you. Since you are posting on a public forum, others feel the need to engage into something that they’d rather not. It all seems like a deadweight loss at this point.

I know of cases in universities where anonymous complaints were enough to be removed from campus, disbarred from labs or put on academic leave. None of this is your situation and no one is coming after you because you are not perceived as a legal liability to anyone.

I sympathize with your need to be heard and your feeling slighted at how you were treated but you’re taking this too far and alienating people rather quickly.

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If you are drawn into this conversation, that’s entirely on you, nobody asked you to spend time on it, so dont complain about your own choice to participate.

As someone who already has already experienced being banned from university due to corrupt administrators and faculty, I considered the Julia community a refuge from such criminals.

The policies here in the Julia community actually sound worse than the corrupt university policies, even if the consequences are less impacting on life.

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I am not drawn into this conversation. I was merely pointing out what’s looking to most people as a never-ending monologue initiated by you.

If the community doesn’t meet your standards, then perhaps the problem could be with your idealized expectations of the same.

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It’s a discussion about how the Julia stewardship implements its policies for conflict resolution.

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I am very curious about how you were banned from university.