Outreachy Tindernships & Debian photo sites
[Article 2.5 years old]
Reprinted with permission from the Free Software Fellowship.
Non-developing Debian Developer Donald Norwood recently spammed a whole bunch of people with accusations about defamation and third party web sites.
Norwood has lied, he blames an Australian developer, Daniel Pocock, for the sites. We show the sites are operated by other people.
The first site is a Google Photos account operated by Jiin-Mei Lin. The photo is from DebConf18. The schedule does not include Mr Pocock, he was not there. He did not take this photo and he did not publish it.
We can see the Debian Developer Lior Kaplan has his arm around an Outreachy from another project. The woman is not a developer and never contributed packages to Debian. When regular developers asked if they could bring wives or girlfriends to eat with other participants, they received angry words from Margarita Manterola (Google, Inc, toxic woman):
The DebConf food and accommodation sponsorship is meant to help Debian contributors participate in the conference. It was granted to you, on the basis of your Debian contributions and it's not transferable, nor is it a sponsorship in cash that you can collect, it's meant to be used for your stay at DebConf and nothing else.
Lior Kaplan is the developer who attended the controversial FOSSCamp with the Albanians in 2017. Did he meet this woman from another community there and vouch for her to attend DebConf?
On the left of Lior, there are three women who participated in Google Summer of Code during 2018. That was their qualification for a ticket to DebConf. They are Enkelena (back row), Diellza and Elena. Enkelena is the woman who struck up a relationship with an Ubuntu employee in the GSoC mentoring team, Lukas Kanashiro.
The woman who Kaplan is holding in this photo was subsequently employed by GNOME Foundation. She joined at exactly the same time as Molly de Blanc, former girlfriend of the Debian leader Chris Lamb.
The photo was taken on the DebConf18 day trip. DebConf18 finished on 5 August 2018. Mr Pocock heard about these relationships at DebConf and on 27 August 2018 he publicly resigned as mentor and administrator in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. His resignation is written diplomatically to protect the privacy of the people with conflicts of interest. Jonathan Carter, Sam Hartman and Chris Lamb have created a series of false accusations that have forced widespread discussion of these photos.
Aigars Mahinovs has a Google photos site with pictures from DebConf19 in Brazil. Once again, Mr Pocock was not there. He is not in the schedule, he did not take the photos, he did not create the album or web site. This is the photo, it shows the same Albanian women:
It is exactly the same women, with one more this time: Anisa Kuci, Kristi Progri, Elena Gjevukaj, Diellza Shabani at the table of Chris Lamb. At the table below, Enkelena Haxhiu, dating the Ubuntu employee.
The woman closest to Lamb has already received funding to attend other events where Lamb was present and she was awarded an internship just weeks after this dinner. After Outreachy, she was employed by Wikimedia.
Three of the women had a valid reason to attend DebConf18 in Taiwan as they were participating in GSoC 2018. It has been proven that the vast majority of women stopped contributing after GSoC 2018. There was no justification for their travel expenses to attend a second DebConf, DebConf19, in Brazil. Other volunteers were harassed when they asked to bring their wife or girlfriend to dinner.
The DebConf budget shows a line for $10,000 of diversity expenses. Bringing exactly the same group of women from exactly the same ethnic background two years in a row does not look like diversity, it looks like dating.
There have been many similar cases:
- GSoC administrator Nicolas Dandrimont and his girlfriend Pauline Climent Pommeret
- the mystery around Jaminy Prabaharan failing GSoC and becoming a Debian GSoC administrator
- the Ubuntu employee Elio Qoshi who had an underage girlfriend
Please write to the Debian leader and ask him to stop the Debian policy of shaming people. █