Clytie Siddall & Debian Duty of Care
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Over the last few months, students in numerous countries have organized campus protests about the conflict in Gaza. Each university has responded differently.
At Trinity College Dublin, the messages from management frequently referred to the university having a Duty of Care.
In fact, a duty of care is not something new. This concept is well established in the law.
There is growing concern about the impact that management decisions have on health and safety. While duty of care is not a new concept, the potential compensation costs and risks of criminal prosecution for negligent managers has increased in recent decades. By way of example, the UK defined a new crime, Corporate Manslaughter, in 2008. Managers throughout both the UK and Ireland have been reminded about this in many ways. In Ireland, there was significant public attention on the unlawful killing verdict for the Stardust tragedy at almost the same time as the campus protests at Trinity.
The same concept, duty of care, is important in free software, voluntary groups and the companies that sponsor them.
In early 2015, we were informed that Clytie Siddall had died at Renmark, a remote community in Australia.
Siddall had been doing translation work with Debian and GNOME Project for a number of years. The Debian Contributors report notes her first contributions were in 2005.
There are many public references to Siddall's illness. She told people about it. She suffered from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Despite the fact she had been active in community groups dealing with this disease, were Debian collaborators aware of it? Yes, they were. The email below from Christian Perrier, a manager at French aerospace lab Onera, shows that not only did he know about the disease, he also observed the impact it had on Siddall's work and her life.
The coroner for South Australia has a web page explaining they do not publish a public report for every death. If local authorities and medical staff are in agreement about the cause of death then it may only be disclosed to the family. In the UK, far more untimely deaths are subject to a public inquiry by a coroner.
What we know for sure is that people suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are six times more likely to commit suicide. The cause of death for Clytie Siddall has never been stated and it would be inappropriate to speculate.
It is interesting to look through the conflict in the Debian environment throughout 2014, the year leading up to Siddall's death. This quote from Richard Hartmann stands out:
(on debian-private): words can hardly express how exhausted and chaffed I feel from the constant fighting and in-fighting. I feel confused and scared that what I always saw as the foundation of Debian, it’s social fabric, is not only tearing at the ends but that some rips are making it into the center, the very core.
Public Health England tells us that three suicides constitute a suicide cluster. While we can't speculate about Siddall's cause of death, it seems reasonable to ask, in a general sense, is Debian hiding a suicide cluster?. █
Subject: Clytie Siddall passed.... Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2015 08:46:05 +0100 From: Christian PERRIER <bubulle@debian.org> To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Keeping this private for now...I'll think and decide what to do later on. Hence, posting to debian-private even though Clytie was not DD nor DM....but definitely an eminent Debian contributor.
Many of you may have seen the name of Clytie Siddall here or there, most of the time in free software credits for translation into Vietnamese language.
Clytie worked for instance for years on the translation of D-I into Vietnamese, as well as several of our Debian-specific software (apt, dpkg, etc.) and documentation.
Her contribution was tremendous though shaky because she was sufferring from a severe illness, namely Chronique Fatigue Syndrom which may completely interrupt her work during crisis.
It has been years since I started working with Clytie even though we never met (she was living in Renmark, South Australia and I think she never met any of the free software community members who she worked with, including folks in Australia).
Her passing is a shock for me and probably the entire Vietnamese localization community, the GNOME localization folks and dozens of other projects.
I'll try to cook up some words to send to Clytie's husband, Peter. If you feel like this and want to contribute, please mail me privately. I'll relay to Peter whatever words, credits, thanks, etc. people want to send.