The Governing Board of the Perl Foundation has reviewed the activities and processes associated with the work of the Community Affairs Team (CAT) and has decided to suspend the work of this group until all related processes are formalized and the authority of this group is formalized. The council also canceled two previously published incident reports that resulted in action being taken due to inappropriate behavior of some community members in discussions on the Slack platform.
The Community Affairs Team was created to monitor compliance with the community's communication requirements and to deal with complaints of violations of the Code of Conduct. As a result, it turned out that the Community Affairs Team began to go too far and against some participants who made careless and harsh statements, false claims and inadequate measures were put forward, including for actions committed before the start of the movement towards inclusiveness and noble manners.
The Council found it incorrect to use subjective criteria of "misbehavior" when bringing order to a long-established community, and determined that the Community Affairs Team should only act in accordance with clearly stated rules and within clearly defined enforcement measures. These rules were proposed in the draft charter, but were never properly formalized.
For example, Christian Walde and Matt S. Trout, active members of the community and well-known Perl developers, were under attack, and were permanently removed from the discussion platform (later a permanent ban was replaced by a ban for 1 year). Interestingly, Matt Trout, who suffered from the actions of the Community Affairs Team, welcomed the fact that despite the freezing of the team, the punishment was upheld, as he admits that he acted incorrectly towards Sawyer X and later apologized to him. Matt also pointed out that the Community Affairs Team was confused and forced to improvise due to the Governing Council's inability to approve and publish a code of conduct before the incidents began.
In response to the actions of the Governing Council, Samantha McVey, founder of the Community Affairs Team, expressed her disagreement with the actions and announced her resignation as team leader. Samantha finds it wrong to withdraw the group's reports unilaterally and is unhappy with the delay in the adoption of the bylaws and code of conduct in the community, which should have been adopted many months ago. Samantha also does not believe that the official reason for withdrawing incident reports is to take action before the adoption of the bylaws and before delegating official authority to the Community Affairs Team, since the reports were previously approved by the governing board itself. For Samantha, keeping the community safe and enforcing a code of conduct is more important than formalities.
Source: opennet.ru