determine Gratipay's response to questions about the Gittip crisis #319
Comments
That's definitely the direction we want to go. We want to engage in conversation about specific questions. A "stance" sounds like a blog post published as the Gratipay brand, and I don't see us making any official posts or pronouncements about the Gittip Crisis, because that would simply be inflammatory at this point.
Probably about the same, to be honest. :-) Therefore, our intention is to avoid getting anywhere close to a repeat of the Gittip Crisis, or the parallel mess we went through with 8chan and weev. How? By curating our userbase more closely, in order to weed out off-brand receivers before they get established. What does this look like? With our relaunch as Gratipay 2.0, we now review all Teams when they first apply, and again as needed. So far we've approved 70 new Teams and rejected 8, so we're running at about 90% acceptance so far.
We've learned to try to ignore controversy. :-) |
Okay, so ... so far I think our response to questions about the Gittip Crisis is:
That sound right? |
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Anything left to be said here? |
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I wrote a blog post that I'm thinking of as addressing this: "Our Community." Thoughts, @mattbk @seanstrom @kzisme, et al.? As we step back out in the open-source world (see #316), is this something we can point people to who ask about the Gittip Crisis? |
Anyone with a chip on his or her shoulder is going to read this as an insult to his or her values. I don't know how to get around it.
So is Gratipay a common carrier? If not, people can go along with the rules, or be kicked out. |
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Is the post here saying that the feminist groups/individuals that were on Gittip, were the ones who were acting out and crowding out other people? I feel it's really easy to read it as that, but I may be out of context. |
No. Gratipay is a community. I've added that sentence to make it clearer. |
lol
@mattbk Alright, so it seems like a bad idea to publish this on the blog, because no matter how lightly we tread, it's going to be inflammatory. I propose that we inline the "Our Community" post into this thread, and then if anyone brings it up we can point them here, and otherwise let's call it a day and move on with life. How about that? |
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Well I would imagine the reason why treading lightly isn't working is because this response isn't a direct response to what happened. We most likely need something like this as a general response, but I wouldn't say this would be sufficient in answering the questions of whether Gratipay would alienate a group of people. Responding "lol" further just characterizes that we don't take this seriously and would rather push on then dealing with it for whatever reason. At least that's how it comes off to me. |
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Reading more of the comments above I see that you've already answered my questions. We would handle the incident the same and now we want to avoid any controversy. Which seems like the answer that has been proposed is to make sure that Gratipay will not allow teams that will potentially cause controversy between Gratipay and themselves. Which prevents Gratipay from ever addressing the issues publicly again, which seems to be what Gratipay wants, and exclude any potential dissenters. |
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@seanstrom I laughed because you responded exactly as @mattbk had predicted (and I've added an <hr> to my comment to make that clearer).
:-) |
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The question I asked may have been predicted but it still was a genuine question. The question allows for Gratipay to even clarify their intent more here. If I misunderstood the intent of the "lol", then I'll recognize that I jumped the gun. But even then it feels that in general Gratipay is just going to maneuver around groups that were once apart of Gittip. Doesn't seem like an actual solution for those that are still concerned about the Gittip Crisis in general. At least that's how I'm perceiving it and how I would feel about it. |
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@whit537 Just checked the "Our Community" post and I like it! I've been following this discussion and I side with you. My thinking is that there will be a few different groups of people.
Also, these new users will have questions (direct them at our community post or somewhere else) about what we do and if we are a fit for them.
Those are just my thoughts 😸 EDIT: Ping me in the upcoming radar when the draft is published :) |
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@kzisme I think your markdown formatting got a little garbled, so I'm reformatting:
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@seanstrom It sounds like you're asking for us to retroactively apply our Gratipay 2.0 Team review process to certain Gratipay 1.0 receivers. Our general policy is that we only answer "Will you accept ______?" questions within the context of our actual Team review process. I don't think it makes sense to make an exception in this case, for several reasons:
If our review process and the Teams we've already reviewed don't give you sufficient information about whether Gratipay is something you want to align yourself with, then you'll just have to wait until we are asked to review a Team that would serve as a good litmus test for you. |
All I've been saying is that the "you have to align with our values" qualification is vague and subjective, and it looks vague and subjective from the outside. People are going to have a problem with that, but probably only 1) people whose teams are rejected and 2) people who quit gittip because they didn't like what you did. |
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@mattbk So should we publish the "Our Community" post or not? What do you think needs to be done to close this ticket? |
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I think our actual Team reviews make the brand/values qualification less "vague and subjective from the outside." Process:
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It's a great discussion point, and gets into the philosophy behind trying to have a society. While we can hide behind laws in some cases, we only do that because laws are how we keep people from being dicks to each other and they are backed up by the government, police, etc. What Gratipay is doing in this case is setting up its own laws for its own society--backed up by "if you don't get along, you don't get to play." I think it's very interesting to be a business that is promoting openness and trust, yet at the same time keeping people out. Most people would expect a hippy-dippy organization to allow everyone in, but Gratipay is countering that expectation. Because it's such an intricate point, it's going to generate a reaction from people who disagree that an open company would be against openness or the free-for-all negative interactions that various groups of people embrace as part of their identities. That being said, it's worth publishing as long as people feel like they can engage in a constructive way. |
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I'm just pointing out that we've come up with several new policies that basically make it impossible to arrive to another controversial situation between Gratipay and whoever. And then we won't actually speak much about the previous controversial moment and even tell ourselves that not many want to hear about it anymore. It seems like we are doing a whole lot to basically never actually address previous issue, but to just use new policies to defend ourselves. Those are my thoughts. |
This is false. See gratipay/project-review#17 for an example of when rejecting a Team under our new policies resulted in a controversial situation. |
Doesn't avoiding controversy make good sense most of the time?
That's what I see going on here as well, and I'm not a fan of it either. I think there are ways to document what happened (and it's been well-documented, just not in one place) without shoving it in the faces of new users.
I think @whit537 is trying to move forward, and can't fault him for that. Part of learning comes from the decision to not make the same mistakes. |
Yes! I think it's even more interesting, precisely because our criteria for acceptance and rejection are not ready-made (and might therefore be called "vague and subjective"). We're not following easy party lines ("gamergate" vs. "anti-gamergate" or whatever). We're trying to be careful and deliberate in our decisions, without resorting to facile litmus tests or caving in to mob justice. We have an open and transparent review process in which anyone and everyone is invited to participate. Anyone (me so far) that wants to deny a Team on the basis of "values" has to make a case, which others can challenge. I think this sets us crucially apart from, e.g., Patreon, where yes/no decisions are made behind closed doors.
Okay, look, let's be honest: Shanley, weev, and 8chan are the three Gratipay 1.0 receivers that I see as "acting out." Am I being forthright enough? :-) |
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Here's another draft of "Our Community," and here's the first for comparison. I'm still not comfortable with it, because it can be said that 8chan actively removes unwanted users, and that we passively crowd out unwanted users. |
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Fine with me. |
Note: https://blog.readthedocs.com/state-of-the-docs-2015/
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http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Gittip_crisis doesn't count? |
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Or combine, Learning from Gittip: Safety and Consent. I think you'll get more readership. |
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@JeffSpies I'm more comfortable titling this "Safety and Consent" because that's what we want to focus on. "Learning from Gittip" feels to me like we're making it about "us" instead. It also feels to me like it hints towards sensationalism. The "Gittip crisis" hot-button isn't what matters here. Safety and consent are what matter here—and how we're going to work out their relationship to transparency and openness. |
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While I agree with the sentiment, I'd just consider past criticisms. A reader (not knowing what changes have occurred here), might think you have very little to say about safety and consent (or what you'll say will come from a place of ignorance) and not read at all. But that reader (again not knowing what changes have occurred) might at least see that you might have something of value to say about learning from gittip, give you a chance, and read. Plus safety and consent is just one thing of many being addressed. It may encompass other things or be your primary focus, but there's a lot baked into the action steps of this piece for which problems they address you don't need to be and aren't specific. The accurate title is slightly broader. From a readership point of view--getting the word out there (which I think is a goal)--I'm much more likely to click on the gittip link than a link about safety and consent. It appeals to a wider audience and has a different vibe than previous posts, which some readers may be tired of. With that said, you need to be comfortable with the choice--my only involvement is in looking forward to seeing community perceptions align with what I know are this community's values and intentions. |
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Alright, let's go with "Learning from Gittip: Safety and Consent". Medium recently added a scheduling feature ... I've scheduled this to publish at US/Eastern 3:45 this afternoon.
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Will you be tweeting? |
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One of us will drop it on the @gratipay Twitter. |
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@mattbk Maybe let's plan what we say? |
Can we examine this? I think we're publishing this so that we can direct specific people to it who would like to use Gratipay, but have lingering questions about the Gittip crisis, which they're explicitly asking us. This post is for the moderates in the open-source community. I don't think we're trying to maximize our readership for this, because a large portion of the audience that would engage with this post are not people we're trying to persuade here. We're not trying to win back Shanley or her followers, any more than we'd want to win back 8chan or weev and their audiences. Hot-headed activism and/or trolling don't belong on Gratipay. Insofar as this piece does register on Twitter, it seems likely to generate more heat than light (Twitter is optimized for outrage). I say we let that happen as it may, and don't work too hard to fan the flames. I mean, @mattbk are you prepared to engage over this post on Twitter? I'm still not. I'm much more interested in engaging here on GitHub in discussions such as @brainwane has raised: #499. |
I suppose that's your call to make, since you've got Twitter access. I guess I'll say that, for my part, I plan to ignore Twitter, and to pay attention to GitHub. :-) |
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At any rate, the post is live, and I've customized the title/subtitle that displays in listings across Medium. With that, I think we are ready to close this ticket! Last call ...
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That's fine, I can not tweet it. I wasn't here for the problems described. |
Up to you and @kzisme. I probably shouldn't have said anything about it. |
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!m @seanstrom |
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!m @whit537 |
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:-) For those who might be unfamiliar, "!m" is our goofy way of saying "You're doing good work!" It comes from an IRC bot that I encountered at YouGov, which had picked it up via acquisition from Polimetrix. Ideally a bot would spring up and announce "You're doing good work, so-and-so!" but we haven't taught @gratipay-gremlin how to do so yet. :-) For me it was the weirdest part of YouGov onboarding, but it made for a great culture of appreciation there. See http://motivate.im/ for backstory, and gratipay/bot#2 for teaching @gratipay-gremlin how to motivate people. :-) |
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I changed the "on GitHub" link on the Medium post to link back here. We should give people some chance of finding this ticket from that post. |
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I apologized for the Gittip crisis on Twitter last night:
I was motivated to do so after finishing Nadia Eghbal's report on funding digital infrastructure (cf. 00512, #704 (comment)). I think Nadia's report signals a new chapter in the work that Gratipay intends to support, and I want me and us to be able to fully contribute to this new chapter. For better or for worse, that means returning to Twitter (cf. #236). We've already pretty much done that as a company, and I've started to return personally, but I've felt like I need to directly apologize in public on Twitter, since I messed up in public on Twitter. So now Gratipay has articulated a response to the Gittip crisis, and so has whit537. As Mike Bayer said in reply, "You tried. You get to try again." Let's try again! 💃 |
Reticketed from #312.
As we start stepping out again in the open-source community, we're going to get people asking us questions about the Gittip crisis. What's our plan for responding to them?
Current status (#319 (comment)):
Published: "Learning from Gittip: Safety and Consent"
Final Draft: "
Safety and Consent"Draft 6: "
Learning from Gittip"Draft 5: "
Learning from Gittip"Draft 4: "
Learning from the Gittip Crisis"Draft 3: "
Our Culture, Our Community"Draft 2: "
Our Community"Draft 1: "
Our Community"Draft 0: "
Our Community"Punchlist
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