[Meme] Reserving Scorn for Those Who Expose the Misconduct
THE previous short article mentioned Daniel Pocock and explained why articles of Daniel Pocock are still relevant, applicable to the present, and very important. Many of these articles speak about abuses and are not (in their own right) an abuse. Owing to the era of CoC (Code of Censorship), they like to frame truth-tellers as 'harassers' of those who deserve condemnation and need to be called out. To better understand the CoC phenomenon (or phenomena) see this short summary (reproduced below with mild typographical corrections). █
Codes of Conduct phenomena
In 2020, Pocock argued that the Outreachy program, where he has several years of experience as a mentor, was effectively paying women not to be too outspoken in the open source world. (Techrights).
In 2021, David Arroyo Menéndez, a researcher from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and author of the Damegender software posted statistics about diversity on the debian-women mailing list. Steve McIntyre, a former Debian Project Leader, sent a public reply threatening to censor Arroyo Menéndez if he published any more statistics. In defiance, Pocock published a blog suggesting that the statistics could be analyzed using a Regression discontinuity design to see if the rate at which women joined Debian was increasing or decreasing after the Code of Conduct was introduced. Pocock’s initial summary of the data showed that fewer women were actually joining Debian after the Code of Conduct and Outreachy mentoring programs were introduced.
In comments reported by The Register, Pocock explained that the Code of Conduct phenomena in open source organizations was a form of kangaroo court being used to deter and deflect questions about accountability.
On 21 March 2022 Pocock published an open letter asking the Association for Computing Machinery and other professional bodies to consider whether the Codes of Conduct in the open source software workplace are effectively impersonating the Code of Ethics of a professional body (the open letter).
Harassment and abuse victims contacted Mr Pocock for support with poor behavior
Shortly after the FSFE Fellowship elected Mr Pocock as their representative in 2017, female volunteers contacted Mr Pocock and asked for support with harassment. Mr Pocock made several visits to Albania and Kosovo. He was a witness to various situations involving poor behavior, harassment and possible abuse involving 16 year old volunteers.
In October 2017, Mr Pocock filed an internal report with Mozilla (email evidence)
Larissa Shapiro from Mozilla replied that kids were at risk (email evidence)
Emma Irwin from Mozilla admits it is a serious matter and recommends Mr Pocock give evidence to Marta, Mozilla’s HR investigator (email evidence)
Mozilla produced an internal report but it has never been published (email evidence)
One of the women, Anisa Kuci, wrote an email thanking Mr Pocock for his support (email evidence on blog).
During these interactions with the victims, Mr Pocock wanted to show empathy with the victims and commented to the women that his cousin had been in the highly publicized choir of Cardinal George Pell. The prosecution of the Cardinal was proceeding concurrently with these discoveries of harassment and abuse in the open source supply chain. This very brief revelation to the victims in Albania started an avalanche of gossip and innuendo about harassment in open source communities.