Re: [FOSDEM] Academic Freedom vs CoC at FOSDEM
On 10/01/2022 13:31, Jens@trendhosting.net wrote:
I'll bite, but only once.
I read the Anderson case ruling, and it's quite interesting. The court agreed with the professor, but on the merits of the case as presented, not on anything relating to codes of conduct or academic liberty in general.
What's important to understand is that Dr. Anderson got fired after posting anti-semitic content. The contract the university had with Dr. Anderson granted him academic liberty, but also referred to a code of conduct as the standards to which employees should adhere.
The court case revolved entirely around the technicalities of how the firing was conducted. The problem was just contractual. The contract was not explicit in giving appropriate weight to the code of conduct in comparison to the guarantees of academic freedom given elsewhere.
This question of how much weight to give the code of conduct is just as critical in free software organizations. As you point out, most people are not employees but the CoC may be balanced against other rights. Notice that the NTEU (union of university staff) made a statement about their decision to fund the law suit. The funding was not automatic. The NTEU also has members who are Jewish.
In other words, your example of Dr. Anderson is misleading. It does not relate in any meaningful way, nor does it have anything to say about the value of academic freedom versus a code of conduct.
Whether intentional or not, I won't judge, but you are far from "presenting both sides of the story".
You're also undermining the efforts of a team of volunteers to run as inclusive an event as possible. They're very likely so busy that they won't be able to goole for and read the ruling as I have done. Refering to it preys on their good intentions, which effectively turns this claim that the case is relevant into a social engineering denial of service attack.
My intention was the opposite. I didn't expect anybody to drop what they are doing and join a CoC discussion. I feel that having a guarantee of academic liberty would be liberating. Under the previous White House CoC, many employees were fired for telling the truth, for example Lt. Col. Vindman. People felt like they were walking on eggshells. It is interesting to look at the first TV interview with Dr Fauci after the change of president / change of CoC, he simply looks happier that he can say what is technically correct even if it is inconvenient for his latest boss. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/anthony-fauci-trump-biden/index.... Regards, Daniel -- Debian Developer https://danielpocock.com
Hardly anyone responded to this. Yet the emails continue. Could this please stop? Belgium isn't the White House, nor Australia. At the moment it feels like some emails are being sent to attract attention. The relevance to FOSDEM is really thin.
On 10/01/2022 18:56, Olav Vitters wrote:
Hardly anyone responded to this. Yet the emails continue. Could this please stop? Belgium isn't the White House, nor Australia. At the moment it feels like some emails are being sent to attract attention. The relevance to FOSDEM is really thin.
The external examples are quite relevant because they don't involve the names of FOSDEM participants. I could very quickly point to targets from the Apache and Fedora software projects though. In 2021 these people disappeared like Lt Col Vindman: Marko Rodriguez https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/23/apache_tinkerpop_speech/ Ahmad Haghighi https://ahmadhaghighi.com/blog/2021/us-restricted-free-software/ It is harder to be objective discussing cases like that where we know people on one or both sides of the dispute. As a former community representative, some people also told me they are afraid to speak because they don't want to disappear like Marko or Ahmad. Debian and FSFE decided that their obsession with CoCs is more important than the death of my father. The only conclusion I can draw from their behavior towards my family is that the CoC has mutated like a virus. Yet they unilaterally decided to impose that on us at the beginning of the FOSDEM dev-room selection process. Regards, Daniel -- Debian Developer https://danielpocock.com
On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 07:47:41PM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
On 10/01/2022 18:56, Olav Vitters wrote:
Hardly anyone responded to this. Yet the emails continue. Could this please stop?
+1 Regards Geert Stappers Assumes the Olav Vitters posting was a private request, unhappy to seen an onlist reply of it ... -- Silence is hard to parse
Hi Daniel, You have made your point. The FOSDEM team disagrees with you. The code of conduct is not going to go away, and you are expected to abide by it. Now please stop. On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 07:47:41PM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
On 10/01/2022 18:56, Olav Vitters wrote:
Hardly anyone responded to this. Yet the emails continue. Could this please stop? Belgium isn't the White House, nor Australia. At the moment it feels like some emails are being sent to attract attention. The relevance to FOSDEM is really thin.
The external examples are quite relevant because they don't involve the names of FOSDEM participants. I could very quickly point to targets from the Apache and Fedora software projects though. In 2021 these people disappeared like Lt Col Vindman:
Marko Rodriguez https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/23/apache_tinkerpop_speech/
Ahmad Haghighi https://ahmadhaghighi.com/blog/2021/us-restricted-free-software/
It is harder to be objective discussing cases like that where we know people on one or both sides of the dispute.
As a former community representative, some people also told me they are afraid to speak because they don't want to disappear like Marko or Ahmad.
Debian and FSFE decided that their obsession with CoCs is more important than the death of my father. The only conclusion I can draw from their behavior towards my family is that the CoC has mutated like a virus. Yet they unilaterally decided to impose that on us at the beginning of the FOSDEM dev-room selection process.
Regards,
Daniel
-- Debian Developer https://danielpocock.com _______________________________________________ FOSDEM mailing list FOSDEM@lists.fosdem.org https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/fosdem
-- w@uter.{be,co.za} wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}
On 11/01/2022 09:21, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
You have made your point. The FOSDEM team disagrees with you. The code of conduct is not going to go away, and you are expected to abide by it.
Please don't change what was already written The original message: "Is it a good moment to contemplate the relationship between Academic Freedom and CoCs?" Nobody asked to remove the CoC. Can you please comment on why Olav's reply didn't appear immediately to other participants on the list and how that led another Debian Developer, Geert, to accuse me of forwarding a private message onto the list?
Geert Stappers Assumes the Olav Vitters posting was a private request, unhappy to seen an onlist reply of it ...
We saw this in a previous year when messages about Google were not appearing on the FOSDEM list: https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2021q1/003193.html Have other messages with comments about academic liberty been lost? Regards, Daniel -- Debian Developer https://danielpocock.com
On 11/01/2022 09:21, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
You have made your point. The FOSDEM team disagrees with you. The code of conduct is not going to go away, and you are expected to abide by it.
i was sufficiently alarmed by seeing this to step in and comment. over the years i have been regularly subjected to censorship by FOSS groups, enough to have a handle on why they do it. it comes down to a conflation between "asking difficult questions" there is an automatic tendency to assume "the PERSON is difficult". by making people feel "uncomfortable" because they're being challenged to face up to difficult realities, they automatically assume that they are PERSONALLY being attacked, and respond by attacking the speaker, personally. in more recent times with the [often toxic] Conductment Codes in place the conflation gets worse: raising a difficult topic is assumed to be a Conductment violation. it therefore comes down to respect for each other as PEOPLE on various lists over the past 4 years, i've witnessed that Daniel has no fear of personal consequences when asking difficult questions, whereas many people - far from not *wishing* to engage with those difficult questions are simply too afraid to do so publicly. thus we may *not* conclude that the "lack of response indicates nobody wishes to hear about it" so the reasons that i am alarmed at the direction of this conversation has nothing to do with the actual topic, it has to do with peoples' reactions *to* the questions that Daniel is asking. in the spirit of FOSDEM i would very much like to see everyone treated with respect and understanding, particularly when someone is brave enough to raise difficult and challenging topics that most of us are not comfortable facing or considering. l.
Dear, I both respect Daniel and Wouter, but I have no clue what this is all about. Maybe the gmail relay has f*cked up the beginning of the conversation like it did in the past. And as this isn't really a very constructive addition to the discussion, I just want to wish everybody a respectful fucking 2022! ;-) Cheers guys, and if there's anything I can do to help make this edition into another great success for Free and OpenSource software, let me know! Consider this an attempt to lighten things up and a reminder that one day we will all have a beer together! Jasper -- Jasper Nuyens Managing Director, Linux Belgium http://www.linuxbe.com Phone: +32 (0)2 747 47 01 Fax: +32 (0)2 747 47 10 GSM: +32 (0)478 978967 On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 3:14 PM Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net> wrote:
On 11/01/2022 09:21, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
You have made your point. The FOSDEM team disagrees with you. The code of conduct is not going to go away, and you are expected to abide by it.
i was sufficiently alarmed by seeing this to step in and comment.
over the years i have been regularly subjected to censorship by FOSS groups, enough to have a handle on why they do it. it comes down to a conflation between "asking difficult questions" there is an automatic tendency to assume "the PERSON is difficult".
by making people feel "uncomfortable" because they're being challenged to face up to difficult realities, they automatically assume that they are PERSONALLY being attacked, and respond by attacking the speaker, personally.
in more recent times with the [often toxic] Conductment Codes in place the conflation gets worse: raising a difficult topic is assumed to be a Conductment violation.
it therefore comes down to respect for each other as PEOPLE
on various lists over the past 4 years, i've witnessed that Daniel has no fear of personal consequences when asking difficult questions, whereas many people - far from not *wishing* to engage with those difficult questions are simply too afraid to do so publicly. thus we may *not* conclude that the "lack of response indicates nobody wishes to hear about it"
so the reasons that i am alarmed at the direction of this conversation has nothing to do with the actual topic, it has to do with peoples' reactions *to* the questions that Daniel is asking.
in the spirit of FOSDEM i would very much like to see everyone treated with respect and understanding, particularly when someone is brave enough to raise difficult and challenging topics that most of us are not comfortable facing or considering.
l. _______________________________________________ FOSDEM mailing list FOSDEM@lists.fosdem.org https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/fosdem
WIth love and respect to all, the first message on the topic confused me: https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2021q4/003272.html It sounds like a whole bunch of context is missing so I assumed my mail client threaded it incorrectly. Here are archive links... https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2022q1/date.html https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2021q4/date.html It seems like I'm not missing any messages according to the archives. With this in mind, I think the original discussion proposal was not phrased clearly so most people seem to be staying quiet too many questions on the same topic. My proposal for this thread: 1. Is the fundamental question being answered which should be archived for future people to be referred to? If so, what is that question? 2. If there is no fundamental question and it's an exploratory discussion, please try Libera chat #fosdem channel to explore the topic space and then move it to email when you need an archived resolution of the discussion. And with that, I am going to go back to lurking. I'm looking forward to FOSDEM 22! Keep up the amazing work everyone! Kind Regards, Ewan On Tue, 11 Jan 2022 at 15:53, Jasper Nuyens <jnuyens@linuxbe.com> wrote:
Dear,
I both respect Daniel and Wouter, but I have no clue what this is all about. Maybe the gmail relay has f*cked up the beginning of the conversation like it did in the past. And as this isn't really a very constructive addition to the discussion, I just want to wish everybody a respectful fucking 2022! ;-)
Cheers guys, and if there's anything I can do to help make this edition into another great success for Free and OpenSource software, let me know!
Consider this an attempt to lighten things up and a reminder that one day we will all have a beer together! Jasper -- Jasper Nuyens Managing Director, Linux Belgium http://www.linuxbe.com Phone: +32 (0)2 747 47 01 Fax: +32 (0)2 747 47 10 GSM: +32 (0)478 978967
On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 3:14 PM Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net> wrote:
On 11/01/2022 09:21, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
You have made your point. The FOSDEM team disagrees with you. The code of conduct is not going to go away, and you are expected to abide by
it.
i was sufficiently alarmed by seeing this to step in and comment.
over the years i have been regularly subjected to censorship by FOSS groups, enough to have a handle on why they do it. it comes down to a conflation between "asking difficult questions" there is an automatic tendency to assume "the PERSON is difficult".
by making people feel "uncomfortable" because they're being challenged to face up to difficult realities, they automatically assume that they are PERSONALLY being attacked, and respond by attacking the speaker, personally.
in more recent times with the [often toxic] Conductment Codes in place the conflation gets worse: raising a difficult topic is assumed to be a Conductment violation.
it therefore comes down to respect for each other as PEOPLE
on various lists over the past 4 years, i've witnessed that Daniel has no fear of personal consequences when asking difficult questions, whereas many people - far from not *wishing* to engage with those difficult questions are simply too afraid to do so publicly. thus we may *not* conclude that the "lack of response indicates nobody wishes to hear about it"
so the reasons that i am alarmed at the direction of this conversation has nothing to do with the actual topic, it has to do with peoples' reactions *to* the questions that Daniel is asking.
in the spirit of FOSDEM i would very much like to see everyone treated with respect and understanding, particularly when someone is brave enough to raise difficult and challenging topics that most of us are not comfortable facing or considering.
l. _______________________________________________ FOSDEM mailing list FOSDEM@lists.fosdem.org https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/fosdem
_______________________________________________ FOSDEM mailing list FOSDEM@lists.fosdem.org https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/fosdem
On 11/01/2022 16:49, Ewan Higgs wrote:
WIth love and respect to all, the first message on the topic confused me:
https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2021q4/003272.html
It sounds like a whole bunch of context is missing so I assumed my mail client threaded it incorrectly.
Here are archive links... https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2022q1/date.html https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2021q4/date.html
The original is in the second link, this message: https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2021q4/003272.html Notice that I was deliberately vague about the case involving Prof Anderson. Some of our German and Israeli friends would feel offended. It is an unlucky coincidence. I only wanted to focus on the high level question in the legal case: what happens when Academic Liberty clashes with a Code of Conduct? The details of the case are far more extreme than anything we are likely to encounter at FOSDEM. On the other hand, sometimes our dev-room has too many people. If you want a lot of people to leave quickly, the dev-room managers could display drawings from Prof Anderson.
It seems like I'm not missing any messages according to the archives. With this in mind, I think the original discussion proposal was not phrased clearly so most people seem to be staying quiet too many questions on the same topic.
My proposal for this thread: 1. Is the fundamental question being answered which should be archived for future people to be referred to? If so, what is that question?
The original message: "Is it a good moment to contemplate the relationship between Academic Freedom and CoCs?"
2. If there is no fundamental question and it's an exploratory discussion, please try Libera chat #fosdem channel to explore the topic space and then move it to email when you need an archived resolution of the discussion.
Some free software organizations are now using the CoC as an excuse to publicly humiliate individual volunteers and hurt families. Somebody buys a fake police badge on ebay. He declares himself to be the law, with the CoC in one hand and the fake police badge in the other hand. He announces that another volunteer has violated some CoC. This is not justice, this is vigilantism. If the CoC is having this impact then it is important to conduct scrutiny of the phenomena. Maybe we need a CoC for CoCs. In other words, the behavior around CoCs has become self-contradictory. Regards, Daniel -- Debian Developer https://danielpocock.com
On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 09:41:55AM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
On 11/01/2022 09:21, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
You have made your point. The FOSDEM team disagrees with you. The code of conduct is not going to go away, and you are expected to abide by it.
Please don't change what was already written
The original message: "Is it a good moment to contemplate the relationship between Academic Freedom and CoCs?"
Nobody asked to remove the CoC.
Can you please comment on why Olav's reply didn't appear immediately to other participants on the list and how that led another Debian Developer, Geert, to accuse me of forwarding a private message onto the list?
Geert Stappers Assumes the Olav Vitters posting was a private request, unhappy to seen an onlist reply of it ...
We saw this in a previous year when messages about Google were not appearing on the FOSDEM list:
https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2021q1/003193.html
Have other messages with comments about academic liberty been lost?
Regards,
Daniel
Headers from the Olav Vitters email: |Received: from mail.fosdem.org (mail.fosdem.org [31.22.22.142]) | by gpm.stappers.nl (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 64FF23041A6 | for <stappers@stappers.nl>; Tue, 11 Jan 2022 00:36:11 +0100 (CET) |Received: from mail.fosdem.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) | by mail.fosdem.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 402D2BB543; | Mon, 10 Jan 2022 23:35:58 +0000 (UTC) |Received: from mail-ua1-x934.google.com (mail-ua1-x934.google.com | [IPv6:2607:f8b0:4864:20::934]) | (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 (128/128 bits)) | (No client certificate requested) | by mail.fosdem.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 098D0BB72A | for <fosdem@lists.fosdem.org>; Mon, 10 Jan 2022 17:56:40 +0000 (UTC) |Received: by mail-ua1-x934.google.com with SMTP id l15so13473798uai.11 | for <fosdem@lists.fosdem.org>; Mon, 10 Jan 2022 09:56:40 -0800 (PST) I do read that as "email had to wait for approval". My previous email in this thread: | On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 07:47:41PM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote: | > On 10/01/2022 18:56, Olav Vitters wrote: | > > Hardly anyone responded to this. Yet the emails continue. | > > Could this please stop? | | +1 | | | Regards | Geert Stappers | Assumes the Olav Vitters posting was a private request, | unhappy to seen an onlist reply of it ... | -- | Silence is hard to parse The message is and was "Could this please stop?" Regards Geert Stappers Shouldn't have to try to put out fire with gasoline. -- Silence is hard to parse
On 11/01/2022 20:19, Geert Stappers wrote:
| Silence is hard to parse
The message is and was "Could this please stop?"
I hope so Since 2018, I have sent various emails to the aggressors. I asked them to stop ignoring the result of the Fellowship election. I asked them to stop blackmailing me. I asked them to stop hurting my family. So please write to those people and ask them to stop -- Debian Developer https://danielpocock.com
participants (7)
-
Daniel Pocock -
Ewan Higgs -
Geert Stappers -
Jasper Nuyens -
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton -
Olav Vitters -
Wouter Verhelst