Despite the suspicious post from this 2-day-old account (at the time of writing), this post was confirmed to me as an official announcement after I flagged for moderation and received a response from the moderators.
As such, I’ll be sharing my dissatisfaction as a Foundation member who has built up a lot of frustration throughout the entire and unfortunate situation. I hope to express my disappointment in a constructive manner, with the intent that we all learn from this and properly address the conflicts.
I’m not happy with the lack of communication and transparency from the Board to the wider community, as well as the poor execution for creating an account and posting something completely vague and uninformative. The majority of us are still completely unaware of the internal affairs and conflicts between the Board and Sonny Piers. We don’t even know why he was removed, let alone what happened.
For starters, I have my doubts that the one Code of Conduct complaint he received was the deciding factor in his removal, especially when there are many cases of GNOME maintainers being consistently rude to users and contributors – which I believe to have received many complaints – yet nothing has changed with their behavior, nor have they been removed from the community…?
Additionally, Code of Conduct complaints are usually not made public at all (for good reason), so I find it even more suspicious that the Code of Conduct complaint against Sonny Piers was made public. In my opinion, mentioning the Code of Conduct complaint was only used to justify removing him, so that the community would support the decision; not to use it as a learning process and enforce the Code of Conduct, i.e. it was done in bad faith.
Secondly, creating this account and posting this vague post about removing Sonny Piers only gives me a bad impression, because it was unexpected, gave no worthwhile information, and is severely vague. Even if I pretend that Sonny Piers was at fault, the Board is also far from innocent here due to the lack of transparency and clarity, and ‘suddenly’ deciding to create a new account to post this.
All things considered, I sincerely hope that the Board will be more transparent with everyone in future conflicts, and be more careful with communication, because I don’t think I will be able handle this kind of treatment much longer.