Hello, Am Montag, 3. August 2020, 06:49:30 CEST schrieb Simon Lees:
many of you have witnessed discussions and allegations of different kinds on this mailing list, some very offensive and disrespectful towards the community and the values that bond it together.
In order to not add further discussions, to not nurture the chaos already present, and aiming to have a fair and unbiased vote on the "motion of no confidence", as a board we agreed to not comment on individual emails during the period of the poll.
Now we feel that we need to disclose some background and provide clarification over how this all started.
OK, let me translate this: Now that the board has survived the non-confidence vote with a black eye [1], it can continue the repeated attacks and badmouthing on Sarah. I admit that this translation contains a bit of sarcasm ;-) but it's much closer to the truth than several statements in this board mail. And I seriously wonder how the board's behaviour is compatible with our code of conduct. My plan (after the non-confidence vote ended, independent of the result) was to let the painful events of the last months become history so that the wounds can start to heal, but the board mail contains statements that I _have to_ comment :-(
Sarah Julia Kriesch, former member of this board, has repeatedly moved heavy accusations against some members of this community during her first term on the board 2017-2019. In each case these accusations were unfounded after in-depth considerations. The measure taken after the first incident was a formal warning in alignment with the openSUSE Community Guiding Principles. [1] The second time lead to a vote on her removal from the board, where she maintained her seat after a narrow vote.
This is your point of view, and you manged to leave out everything that would speak for Sarah. Both the formal warning and the vote on her removal were the result of (or revenge for?) something she did that was maybe not very friendly, but clearly allowed by the board rules - which makes the actions taken at least questionable. Back then, the only reason why I didn't heavily object against the formal warning was that it was "just a warning". In the meantime, I realized I was an idiot for not objecting. And to pick another example - those accusations (as you call it) were _not_ unfounded. But of course you don't know that because in the handover meeting, Sarah wasn't even given a chance to explain what she had written :-( Oh, and that "poor" community member you see as the victim turned out to be what he called me in one of his last board meetings.
Unfortunately Sarah's behavior has continued and the board received complaints, despite repeated efforts by several members of the community to carefully explain and council Sarah on her behavior and its implications on others.
The only somewhat recent complaint I've seen was the shouting down (or "loud speech", even if I still think it was shouting) in the handover meeting by a single person. And that was a wild mix of accusations with a "something will stick" goal, including things that were plain wrong, and others that maybe were "not the best idea", but clearly not a code of conduct violation - and therefore also weren't valid reasons to remove Sarah from the board. [Another paragraph removed to avoid adding more fuel to the fire.]
To handle the situation with minimal impact on the parties involved a moderate solution was sought: Sarah was offered the opportunity to step down instead of being removed and the complete background being disclosed.
Even though "mutual confidentiality" was agreed between all parties, Sarah decided to violate this agreement that same evening and also started making false accusations about her stepping down.
I remember some vague pointers in the german telegram group after she was asked about the reasons, and she stopped after a reminder. Yes, technically you can call it a violation of the agreement, but given the emotional situation, her behaviour was more than understandable. Of course, after the board had the "great" idea to disclose more details (therefore violating the agreement in an even worse way) after my resignation[2] and some questions from the community, some more details from Sarah's and my point of view became public. Maybe some things were opinionated or a bit biased, but I don't remember anything from Sarah or me that would qualify as false accusations.
We would like to assure you that with every action the board has undertaken, the well-being of all involved parties has been a main priority.
Oh well. That's the best joke I've read today - but I can't laugh about it :-(
As a community, and on the board, we spent a huge amount of time on this topic in the last half year and we have learned some lessons. Two of these are to
1) defer handling a complaint against a community member to the following board meeting (not on the same day), and
Wow, there's indeed one paragraph in this mail I can agree with. However, I also miss a point saying "finally stop the attacks on Sarah, and adjust the tone towards her to a sane level". Looks like you still have some lessons to learn... :-( Regards, Christian Boltz [1] Just to give you an idea how black that eye is - compare the result of the name vote we had about a year ago with the result of the non-confidence vote. (Spoiler: The current board is clearly less popular than our name "openSUSE".) [2] I'm still sure that resigning in protest was the right thing to do, and the board (and also some individual board members) have _repeatedly_ confirmed this :-( --
Does this suggest to remove this feature completely? If you want a browser that doesn't malfunction and crash, yes. Better: the whole networking code should be removed, so we wont get any cookies over the network [>> Markus Fischer, > Boris Zbarsky and Zs. G. in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430006]
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