This post is a response to what Tobias posted yesterday on his blog. I would really prefer not be writing it. There are many other things that I would prefer to be doing, and I do not enjoy engaging in public disagreements. I honestly find all of this very stressful and unpleasant, but here we are.
For context, I joined the board in July last year, having previously been on the board from 2015 to 2021. This means that I wasn’t on the board during some of the events and decisions described in Tobias’s post. I am assuming that I am not one of the unnamed individuals he is calling on to resign, though I would be significantly impacted if that were to happen.
The post here is a personal view, based on my close involvement with the issues described in Tobias’s post. As such, it is not an official board position, and other directors may disagree with me on some points. It’s possible that the board may produce its own official statement in the future, but boards are inherently slow-moving beasts, and I wanted to get something posted sooner rather than later.
I want to start by saying that it is difficult to respond to Tobias’s post. The Foundation has a policy that we don’t comment on specific code of conduct cases, in order to protect the privacy of those involved. And, when you get down to it, this is mostly about the particulars of one specific case. Without being able to discuss those particulars, it is hard to say very much at all. That, in my opinion, is the elephant in the room.
The other reason that it is difficult to respond is there are just so many broad brush accusations in the blog post. It presents power conflicts and financial mismanagement and reckless behaviour and so on and so forth. It’s impossible to address every point. Instead, what I will do is provide a fairly high-level view of each of the two main themes in the post, while calling out what I consider to be the main inaccuracies. The first of those themes is the code of conduct decision, and the second relates to the performance of the Foundation.
The big elephant
In the blog post, Tobias throws around a lot of accusations and suggestions about the code of conduct decision to suspend Sonny Piers from the GNOME project. His description of the chain of events is both misleading and a misrepresentation of what happened. Then there’s an accusation of recklessness, as well as an accusation that the code of conduct decision was somehow politically motivated. All of this is clearly intended to question and undermine the code of conduct decision, and to present a picture of mismanagement at the foundation.
My view is that, despite the various twists and turns involved in the decision making process for this case, and all the questions and complexities involved, it basically boils down to one simple question: was the decision to suspend Sonny the correct one? My view, as someone who has spent a significant amount of time looking at the evidence, talking to the people involved, and considering it from different perspectives, is that it was. And this is not just my personal view. The board has looked at this issue over and over, and we have had other parties come in to look at it, and we have always come to the conclusion that some kind of suspension was appropriate. Our code of conduct committee came to this conclusion. Multiple boards came to this conclusion. At least one third party who looked at the case came to this conclusion.
I understand why people have concerns and questions about the decision. I’m sympathetic to the experiences of those individuals, and I understand why they have doubts. I understand that some of them have been badly affected. However, ultimately, the board needs to stand up for the code of conduct. The code of conduct is what provides safety for our community. We do not get to set it aside when it becomes inconvenient.
The argument that the code of conduct decision was somehow politically motivated is false. We even had an external reviewer come in and look at the case, who confirmed this. Their report was provided to Tobias already. He continues to make this accusation despite it standing in opposition to the information that we have provided him with.
Tobias seems to think that Sonny’s importance to the GNOME project should have been taken into account in our decision for the code of conduct case. To me, this would imply that project leaders would operate according to a different, less stringent, set of conduct rules from other contributors. I believe that this would be wrong. The code of conduct has to apply to everyone equally. We need to protect our community from leaders just as much as we need to protect them from anyone else.
No one is suggesting that the management of the code of conduct decision was good. Communication and management should have been better. Community members were significantly impacted. We have sincerely apologised to those involved, and are more than willing to admit our failings. We’ve also been working to ensure that these problems don’t happen again, and that’s something that I personally continue to spend time and energy on.
However, to understand those failings, you also have to look back at the situation we faced last year: we had just lost an ED, board members were burned out, and our processes were being tested in a way that they never had been before. We still had all the usual board and foundation work that needed taking care of. In the middle of it all, elections happened and the board membership changed. It was a complex, shifting, and demanding situation, which looks rather different in retrospect to how it was experienced at the time. We learned a lot of lessons, that’s for sure.
The other elephant
The other part of Tobias’s post addresses the performance of the Foundation.
He points out various problems and challenges, some of which are real. Unfortunately, while being convenient, the theory that all of these challenges are the result of the incompetence of a few individuals is, like most convenient answers, incorrect. The reality is more complex.
One of the major factors for the Foundation’s current situation is our recent history with Executive Directors. Neil left as ED in November 2022. It took us about a year to hire Holly, who was ED for seven months, during which time she had to take a non-trivial amount of time off. And the Foundation is a small organisation – there aren’t lots of people around to pick up the slack when someone leaves. Given these circumstances, it’s unsurprising that the Foundation’s plans have changed, or that they didn’t happen in the way we’d hoped.
This is why the current board has been focusing on and expending considerable effort in recruiting a new executive director, who will be joining us very soon. Hurrah!
Tobias’s proposition that anyone who tries to change the Foundation gets burned out or banned is not true. I am living proof of this. I have changed the Foundation in the past, and continue to change it as part of my role as director. The Foundation today is radically different from the one I first joined in 2015, and continues to evolve and change. A lot of this is due to the interventions of previous and current directors over time.
Amid all this, it’s also important not to forget all the things that the Foundation has been successfully doing in recent years! I went into some of this in my recent blog post, which provides more details than I can here. It is worth stressing that the ongoing successes of the Foundation are mostly thanks to the dedication of its staff. We’ve run successful conferences. We’ve supported Flathub during which time it has experienced extraordinary growth. We’ve supported development programs. And the organisation has kept running, sailing through our taxes and registrations and all those other bureaucratic requirements.
On resignations
From the outside the GNOME Foundation can seem a little opaque. Part of the reason for that is that, as a board, we have to deal with sensitive and confidential matters, so much of the work we do happens behind closed doors. However, when you are on the board you quickly learn that it is really much like any other community-based open source team: there’s usually more work to do than we have capacity for, and the majority of the work gets done by a small minority of contributors.
Speaking as part of that minority, I don’t think that it would be beneficial for members of the board to resign. It would just mean fewer people being available to do the work, and we are already stretched for resources. I’m also of the view that no one should be asked to resign in response to upholding the code of conduct. Conduct work is difficult and important. It requires tough decisions. As a community we need to support the people doing it.
And if people think we should have different directors, well, that’s what the elections are for.
Closing
Readers might wonder why the Foundation has not spoken publicly about this topic before. The main reasons were confidentiality and legal concerns. We have also tried very hard to respect the wishes of those who have been involved and affected. Now with Tobias’s post it is harder to avoid saying things in public. I’m personally skeptical of how useful this is: with opaque and complex issues like these, public discussions tend to generate more questions than they do answers. Contributor relationships are unfortunately likely going to get damaged. But again, here we are.
It should be said that while the foundation hasn’t spoken publicly about these issues, we have expended significant effort engaging with community members behind the scenes. We’ve had meetings where we’ve explained as much of what has happened as we can. We even went so far as to commission an external report which we made available to those individuals. We continue to work on improving our processes in response to the, ahem, feedback we’ve received. I personally remain committed to this. I know that progress in some areas has been slow, but the work continues and is meaningful.
Finally: I am sure that there are contributors who will disagree with what I’ve written here. If you are one of those people, I’m sorry that you feel that way. I still appreciate you, and I understand how difficult it is. It is difficult for all of us.
Thank you for writing this. Someone had to respond to Tobias’ blog post since he decided to relitigate all this in public again, and this seems like a considered reply.
Thanks for posting this. I was very concerned with what I felt was retaliation against the code of conduct committee for doing their job. Unfortunately, when there is no comms people make up theories. It was very unhelpful for Tobias to write misleading things that implies something else.
Apparently someone got suspended form the GNOME project. And Tobias Bernard wrote a post about. (I stopped reading after “Fuck Nazis, GNOME is Antifa”.)
What was the complaint? What was the evidence? Where can I read the “code of conduct committee […] conclusion”. Where can I read the conclusion of “Multiple boards”. Where can I read the conclusion of “at least one third party”? Did other third parties perhaps disagree? Etc.
This is all rather troubling.
As a simple user who was amazed by everything that had been accomplished during this year of STF funding (which could have been even better without Sonny’s ban in the middle, if I understood correctly), I can only see the enormous waste.
You seem to be saying that Sonny’s ban was justified… while indicating that you had to spend an enormous amount of time analyzing the evidence, then commissioning an external audit. If there really was a problem, it really shouldn’t be blatant.
Was it really worth losing a recurring partnership with the STF? Are you going to replace Sonny to submit a new funding request and manage all of this? And what is the status of the crowdfunding project that the foundation was supposed to set up several years ago for real developments? We will never know who complained and why. On the other hand, it is sad to say, but the community at large, the end users, will have lost infinitely more in this affair.
Sonny, if you’re reading this, I want to say a huge thank you for everything you’ve accomplished.
I handled Code of Conduct processes for a political organization and reading Tobias’ post followed by this one demonstrates that the same arguments get made over and over. There is only one correct answer, the one espoused in this post. Tobias’ post is how an organization ends up full of broken stairs, and ultimately becomes ineffective. The idea that because someone contributes their behavior should be overlooked is how you undermine an organization.
When I run organizations in the political space I require the board to read this article to understand how important it is to protect everyone (it’s not really about misogyny or informants, those are simply the examples used): https://truthout.org/articles/why-misogynists-make-great-informants/
In our organizations we had a problem with certain leaders, members of our organizations both on the board and not, and a lack of willingness to do anything about it because good help is hard to find. When we made the conscious decision to remove these problematic people it was painful at first, but over time we experienced a major uptick in volunteering, and soon we were winning elections at a rate we had not seen in our lifetimes across our county and, recently, across the state.
It turns out that bad actors cripple organizations, and regardless of how popular, charismatic, or effective they are, organizations will always improve once they are removed and the space is made safer for the larger community.
Keep up the good fight, it sounds like this was the correct decision, and GNOME is and will be better for it.