Re: Resigning from chair

Hi all,

To Nathan, Jonas, Kingsley and all those who reached out in private: thank you for your kind and generous words. I hope we’ll cross paths again.

Generally speaking, I’ve decided to resign because I’ve reached my personal threshold for how much time I want to spend defending against a continuous stream of absurd accusations and accommodating the refusal to compromise in ever the smallest of ways, constantly hinting at narratives and motives that do not exist. In addition, I’d rather allocate my time and energies in a community with a more constructive and participatory spirit, where people are actually given the benefit of the doubt and issues are proactively addressed by proposing solutions (in practice, with PRs).

The straw that broke the camel back was the reaction to my attempt at rectifying a series of mistakes that, in good faith (it’s easy to see how it happened by looking at the commit history), happened to completely remove Henry’s name from the spec. As I’m sure you understand, this is a rather sensitive topic for me as I had taken the place, as chair and editor, of a much beloved and cherished person who recently passed away. Those would be big shoes to fill for anyone, and particularly so for a first-time chair. The reactions I’ve had are, in my opinion, completely unacceptable and downright toxic.

That said, I’m not looking for apologies nor do I want to convince others to change their ways. We each choose and shape our own communities, and this is not a community I want to continue being a part of. I do hope that I’ll get to work with some of you in other communities, however, where the culture and unwritten rules make it easier to elevate one another up rather than bring each other down.

Incidentally, I was both saddened and relieved to hear these very feelings echoed by many of those who reach out in private.

I’ve taken some time to merge all open PRs into my fork of the WebID repo, in addition to putting Henry’s (and Andrei’s, and Tim’s) name back in the spec as authors and adding a paragraph dedicated to Henry in the "acknowledgments" section, as suggested:

- source: https://github.com/jacoscaz/WebID/blob/main/spec/identity/index.bs
- rendered: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jacoscaz/WebID/blob/ci/main/spec/identity/index.html 

While it still needs some minor work, mainly on examples, I still believe that what I’ve done so far accurately reflects where the greatest consensus lies, a place which is extremely tricky to locate as doing so requires a lot of compromise. I hope that the next chair and/or other CGs / WGs will find value in it.

Best,
Jacopo.




> On 25 Mar 2024, at 14:14, Jacopo Scazzosi <jacopo@scazzosi.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I’ve decided to resign from chairing this group and editing the specs. It’s become too much for me to handle.
> 
> Is there anyone who would like to become the new chair and/or editor?
> 
> Best,
> Jacopo.
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 26 March 2024 08:02:59 UTC