Darrell, without going into the specifics of this case, there's one bit in your message that had a bad taste for me.
What you have essentially done is elevate Serge's message to almost "extreme violation" status because you've decided to sanction immediately, rather than just going through the usual procedure. Your justification for this seems to be behaviour outside of this list and/or, and this is the bit I take particular offense with, "The private responses to me have generally expressed that is part of a pattern of behavior, and not an isolated incident." Which, in essence, means nothing less than people having emailed you in private and influenced your decision by telling you bad things about Serge. I've been on the unpleasant end of moderation myself and I can tell you that there's few things more hurtful than having a "secret court" against you in which some people get the chance to whisper something in the moderator's ear, and the moderator ends up partly justifying their decision by what he's been told. "Lurkers support me in email" is a common theme on mailing lists, and it is incredibly easy to succumb to this but a moderator especially should not. If accusations cannot be in plain view (anonymised by the moderator if absolutely necessary) then they should also not be used to build a case against someone. Just like in a proper legal process, the accused has to have a chance to see what accusations are leveled against them, rather than just: "Emails have been sent by an undisclosed number of unnamed people which paint the picture of the accused being a repeat offender." (Had I known that you were soliciting email comments about Serge's character, who knows, I might have sent one in his favour?) The absolute least you should have done is say something like how many "private responses" you have had from how many people and what they said, roughly. Else you're not only blocking someone from participating for 60 days, but you're also giving them the nagging feeling that there's an undefined mob (2 people? 5? 10? 50?) out there who are happy to secretly email everyone about an alleged "pattern of behaviour". And what recourse is there against rumours? Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ diversity-talk mailing list diversity-talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/diversity-talk
