On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 5:25 PM, Boris Zbarsky <[email protected]> wrote: > On 4/7/14 4:40 AM, [email protected] wrote: >> >> Where were the personal stories about Brendan? > > For a lot of us, the issue was > http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/04/responsible-self-censorship.html
Yes. Also, the following is worth considering: Before Brendan resigned, the idea that Brendan would actually resign and not only as CEO was *unthinkable*. Instead, it looked like there was a need to let the reporting run out of fuel. When some news outlets (even ones that normally practice better journalism) seemed to want to publish at least one Brendan controversy story per day as long as there was *something* remotely reportable as controversy (potentially with embellished "facts" like calling the Rarebit devs "Firefox developers", which made it look like they were building Firefox itself, etc.), in that situation, saying something in public--if not *perfectly* said--could have accidentally been the fuel for the next day's Brendan story when there was a need to cut the fuel supply for such stories. As for not saying something immediately after Brendan resigned, it seemed like the damage was done and keeping the topic alive would have worked against the purpose Brendan had for resigning: protecting Mozilla from getting dragged down with prolonged controversy about him. I, for example, tweeted in grief almost immediately after learning that Brendan had resigned but then quickly deleted the tweet in the interest of not prolonging the controversy when Brendan had even resigned to make it go away. Now the situation is different, of course, because the controversy didn't go away but got replaced with another one. Also, it was probably a factor in how things happened that the Mozilla community had already had a painful episode regarding advocacy against same-sex marriage a couple of yours--that's what lead to the Code of Conduct getting formulated in the first place. That having had already happened probably 1) made some people feel they had already said what they had to say, 2) made people avoid the topic more than they would have had the controversy turned up for the first time now and 3) made people who actually were aware of and adhered to the Code of Conduct unsure of how to discuss the topic without coming too close to a Code of Conduct violation. After all, the handful of tweets from Mozillians calling for Brendan to step down were clearly Code of Conduct violations. > Some of us, myself included, wish we'd been able to do more, for sure. Yes. -- Henri Sivonen [email protected] https://hsivonen.fi/ _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
