[OSGeo-Discuss] [Board] How to retire membership status?

[Cameron Shorter]

Could each of us please be a bit more measured and forgiving when 
responding. It seems a few words have been selected which caused more 
offense than intended.

I remember Jeff McKenna once saying that he sometimes takes a step back 
from the keyboard for a day or so before responding, and being much 
kinder and wiser as a consequence (my memory of Jeff's words).  I can 
think of a few emails Jeff sent where I think he did just that - his 
excellent email describing his reasons for wanting to join the current 
OSGeo board comes to mind.

Confrontational tit-for-tat conversation is uncomfortable and if we take 
it too far, we will find that productive members of our community will 
start silently dropping off.

In response to Sara:

On 22/6/18 7:50 am, Sara wrote:
> Cameron said:
> > We should do our best to ensure opinions are stated respectfully, and 
> encourage forgiveness when we slip up and get a bit passionate.
>
> I'm not sure who you are referring to with this, but please do let me 
> know if you mean me.

Sara, I'll discus one statement:
On 15/6/18 4:23 am, Sara wrote:
> Sure, happy to explain further: my request is for information that 
> LocationTech already stated publicly was "open", "has always been", 
> and would be posted to OSGeo's wiki -- to actually be made open and 
> posted to the wiki. If LocationTech either misspoke, lied, or changed 
> their mind on that then as a community member/volunteer/sponsor I 
> would like to know why. I'm not alone in this, either: I'm just 
> today's squeaky wheel. :)
You have a valid concern, and a question which should be asked. But in 
asking it, consider how could Marc could answer  and save face in the 
process. Consider that there might be internal conversations within 
LocationTech where someone, maybe Marc, is trying to defend a decision 
to back OSGeo. I think this is a leading question into any response by 
Marc leading to an implication of guilt. An extreme example of this type 
of question is when a man might be asked: "Have you stopped beating your 
wife?" Both responses of "Yes" and "No" imply he has beaten his wife.
I'd hope that if you decided to reword your question, you'd avoid 
selecting the word "lied", which implies deliberate wrong doing.

Re Marc's comment:
On 15/6/18 10:00 am, Marc Vloemans wrote:
> The demands made by Sara Safavi to give insight into the books are not appropriate. Comparable to a customer asking her employer (Planet Labs) to open their books to a customer.
I think this statement also went too far. I suspect Marc might have felt 
threatened by having his employer attacked and replied using a similar 
line of argument. Hopefully if he responded again he'd select different 
words.

But my bottom line is please lets empathise with the sometimes difficult 
situations that our co-volunteers are placed in, and see if we can help 
them work through them. Assume best intent, forgive, support, encourage.

Maria, re the Code-of-Conduct, I agree with Christian. Rewriting it to 
create rules which consider all future opportunities for human conflict 
is utopian, impractical and ultimately unachievable. There have been a 
huge number of person-hours which have been put into the numerous 
Code-Of-Conducts which our OSGeo Code-Of-Conduct was based upon. I think 
we keep our Code-of-Conduct as simple as possible, and rely on our 
underlying morals, ethics, and collective intelligence to address 
concerns as they arise.


On 22/6/18 10:24 pm, Christian Willmes wrote:
> I do not think this is about the CoC. It is about if and how a valid 
> request by a community member is handled/answered (or not).
>
> This is a matter of transparency and openness on the one side, and 
> assumed things like respect, manners, decency, or just civil good 
> behavior of holding to a given word/promise.
>
> Marc can for sure just say, I/we do not want to publish the record. If 
> there are no valid understandable reasons given for not publishing 
> them, even if promised otherwise, OSGeo can say, ok thanks for letting 
> us know, and draw their due consequence from this.
>
> Improving the CoC is good, but for this case it does not really 
> matter, I think. Everybody can see, that there were unnecessary 
> offense given and taken... how could the best CoC in the world help 
> prevent this situation?
>
>
> Am 22.06.2018 um 12:51 schrieb Andrea Aime:
>> On Fri, Jun 22, 2018 at 11:51 AM, María Arias de Reyna 
>> <delawen at gmail.com <mailto:delawen at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>         I think this email, cited by Sara Safavi, from Marc Vloemans
>>         [1] is just unbelievable and thus unacceptable to this community.
>>
>>     Personally I agree with you that it was an uncomfortable
>>     situation easy to misinterpret. I wasn't comfortable either
>>     reading it. (me, the person, not the board)
>>
>>
>> Agreed, I was neither.
>>
>>     The thing is, we still have this "assume good intent" clause on
>>     the CoC that makes it kind of useless on the gray area.
>>
>>
>> I would suggest revising the CoC then, otherwise all the talk about 
>> supporting diversity is kind of done in vain imho
>>
>> Cheers
>> Andrea
>
>
>
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-- 
Cameron Shorter
Technology Demystifier
Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant

M +61 (0) 419 142 254

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