Matt Miller has recently made very public and strong accusations[1] of spreading innuendo, without providing any equivalent right of reply. To respect his concerns, I think it is important to clarify the difference between innuendo and public interest. When the CEO of McDonald's had a relationship with a subordinate, his employment was terminated[2] and there was also widespread publicity. Tiger Woods had to publicly apologize for relationships with cocktail waitresses. A former French president had a relationship with an actress: culturally, many French people consider the relationship to be a private matter but there are concerns, from security and use of public resources, when the head of state is being whisked[3] out of his office on the back of a scooter for a secret romance. Privacy vs public interest. When the Debian Project Leader had a relationship with an admin of Debian's outreach/GSoC programs and Debian supported her quest to become OSI board president, the discussion is shut down and blogs are silently censored in Fedora and Ubuntu planet sites. That action made it a Fedora issue too. As a former member of Debian's Outreach/GSoC admin group, there are situations where I needed to know about that conflict of interest between Molly de Blanc and Chris Lamb. I wasn't informed at those occasions where it was essential to know it, nor did either of them make any attempt to recuse themselves. This is not innuendo: I was there, in that team. They could have kept their privacy if Lamb recused himself without giving any reason. Yet multiple people became concerned later when they realized bad things were happening, for example, the secret punishments. Having been in that situation, I feel it is entirely responsible for me to give my own observations as a witness who was at a disadvantage in that team and organization. Nonetheless, Fedora's leader, who was not there, has classified this information from a first-hand participant/witness as mere innuendo. Why? In de Blanc's talk[4] at FOSDEM 2019, she explicitly talks about using Whispering Networks. This appears to be an explicit call for innuendo: to put it bluntly, in her talk about enforcing codes of conduct, de Blanc both violates the FOSDEM Code of Conduct[5] by humiliating some volunteers (the cat behind bars) and the behavior she encourages in her talk appears to contravene many codes of conduct: in other words, she is encouraging people to violate codes of conduct when they feel justified in doing so. If de Blanc herself can actively encourage this behavior, why can't people ask sensible questions about her own actions? Regards, Daniel 1. https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/on-being-part-of-the-fedora-community/ 2. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7645457/McDonalds-CEO-steps-relationship-employee.html 3. https://www.bbc.com/news/25680221 4. https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/community_guidelines/ 5. https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/practical/conduct/ _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
