Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

CoC violations — particularly ones egregious enough to warrant removal from a project — often involve topics of a highly sensitive nature regarding events which could potentially reveal the identity of the victim party, which is entirely not appropriate. While I completely understand the frustration around the current lack of communication regarding this incident, it's fully appropriate given the situation at hand and those party to the proceedings are the only ones at liberty to discuss what happened.

Does free software have academic title IX courts? Even while there may be legit complaints against someone, I'm very suspicious of FOSS governance being abused as a network of star chambers of people with a tremendous amount of influence on the security and privacy of user machines.

A metadata tag and registry of whether FOSS dependencies are governed by a non-profit and the organizations we have exposure to seems like an emerging need.

Am I missing something here? The minutes give no real details about anything

It's all rather vague

The problem is that, looking back at GNOME history, we get curious about what really happened.

But Sonny is not protesting or something, so we cannot say anything about it.

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Gnome is kind of junk nowdays, right? Haven't used since slack 7.

While I agree that the GNOME Foundation is a private organization that, in practice, has the right to decide who is allowed to participate without talking about that process publicly, that doesn't mean that should be exempted from negative consequences to their collective reputation for exercising that right in a way that makes it appear that they are not a transparent organization and operate as a kind of star chamber internally.

Not only does it go against long-established principles and ideals of our society in a lot of ways, to the point that I think even many proprietary software developers would be somewhat uncomfortable with decisions about justice and punishment taking place behind closed doors (even if they're fine with source code being closed), but it goes against the spirit of open source, which is rooted as a concept in the notion that transparency is good and opacity is harmful.

I am concerned that the idea that victims should have their identities kept private to protect them from harassment is increasingly used as an excuse to punish people suspected of wrongdoing in private proceedings and not disclose much if anything about the evidence or the nature of the proceedings, and instead demanding that the public trust authority figures behind closed doors. That is, transparency and openness seem to be vanishing from society in general, in favor of an emphasis on security and a victim's right to privacy, which means we're back to a system where most proceedings take place behind closed doors. Sure, official legal proceedings might still be open, but almost everything of importance these days happens within the domain of very large private organizations and their regulations, meaning that their internal processes affect us almost as much as laws do in some cases.

I worry not only for the future of GNOME, but also for the future of open source and open societies based on the principles of transparency in general. It's possible that the Internet making everything so connected and causing information to flow so rapidly has made it so that it is too dangerous to be open, and thus freedom and transparency are ultimately being killed by the combination of technology and private ownership favoring authoritarian approaches and unilateral, backroom decision making.

The minutes for this meeting is not public yet, but in general gnome foundation minutes are extremly vague on all subjects (e.g. "a change was proposed and the board approved it").

Code of conduct issues seem to bring out certain people out of the woodwork. hence to avoid conspiracy theories and witch hunts taking over I think the foundation should explain the situation as soon as possible.

Ah, the good old gnome drama. They consider users , stupid and make their system as stupid as possible and never let the user to do advance customization as they please. Their gate keeping nature back fired I guess.

are they going to remove his contributions to gnome?