Node.js Board Statement on TSC Action

[mrhinkle]

Earlier this week, the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) announced the results of a vote to remove a member from the TSC based on a pattern of behavior, summarized in nodejs/TSC#310. The vote asked two specific questions: Should the member be removed from the TSC and should the member be asked to voluntarily resign from the TSC? For both questions, the results were the same: six responded 'No', four responded 'Yes', two members of the TSC abstained, and one member was recused. As a result of this vote, four TSC members stepped down from their positions: Anna Henningsen, Bryan Hughes, Myles Borins, and Jeremiah Senkpiel.

We, as well as the community, were deeply concerned by these events, and as a result convened a private, meeting of the Node.js board on Tuesday August 22nd. It was deemed necessary to clearly articulate our position and values as the Node.js Foundation Board as follows:

When the Node Foundation was formed in 2015, it was critical to all stakeholders that the authority over day to day governance of the project be granted exclusively to the TSC and this is reflected in the committee’s charter. This was specifically to provide independence to the TSC and empower it to self govern. However, recent incidents have indicated that the governance rules of the TSC are not adequate to address situations such as this. Specifically, individual Code of Conduct issues often transcend the current rules available to address them, affecting the ability of the larger Open Source community to engage and participate in the Node.js project. If conduct issues cannot be resolved acceptably by the TSC under its existing rules, we, as the Foundation Board, have to evaluate whether the structures created at the beginning of our Foundation's journey need to be adjusted in order to address these issues appropriately. The Board will look at options for long term solutions to these issues.

The health of the Node.js community is of paramount importance to the Board, and the behavior of Node.js leadership is critical to this health. The Board does not support antagonistic, aggressive or derogatory behavior in the community and leadership and expects that the TSC will enforce its Code of Conduct equally amongst community members, collaborators, and leadership. Accordingly, we urge the TSC to revisit this issue and suspend the individual involved from active TSC participation until this matter is resolved, hopefully with consensus, including support from those who recently resigned, if they would be willing to help.

We believe that this issue is extremely important and that timeliness and thoroughness of response is critical. As a result, the Board will be devoting the entirety of its August 28th meeting to a private discussion of the current situation. In this session, we’ll be focused both on responding to this incident, as well as reviewing long term governance changes to the TSC, CTC, and Community Committee Charter and rules while respecting the need for these groups to preserve their independence of operation. Due to time constraints, the public board meeting will be canceled for this month, however, we will continue to communicate updates to the community, as they become available. If any member of the community has questions they should direct them to:

• Mark Hinkle, Executive Director, Node.js Foundation (mark@nodejs.org)

The Node.js Board of Directors