#polyhack, the community, and moving forward.

[SomeoneWeird]

Over the weekend, two of our founding members have decided to leave over an unfortunate conflict of opinion (see #14). This has left many unanswered questions about what is happening with the community, and left people wary about things in general.

One of the largest aspects that can be taken from the above issue, is that we lack community consultation around certain non-trivial events. As it was the first time a member (not somebody who has joined and immediately spammed) has been banned, there were certain things overlooked, and things we can do better in the future.

As has been said, polyhack is a lot larger than it was a year ago, we now have 60+ members in the github org, and we're still probably missing a few that hang out in IRC (message me if you want to be added!). Things are obviously changing, and that begs the question of how to we maintain control over abuse.

polyhack was only frantically registered late last year in order to stop a number of spamming in the channel, before then we had no concept of administrators or 'people with power' (apart from the few people with owner status for the github org) see #10.

We need to tackle these problems upfront, and not let them culminate until another issue happens.

There have been a few things that have been suggested, such as a code of conduct (see #15 - thanks @davidmason!). This is a fantastic idea, and we should implement it - it just needs a little bit of work first.

One of the things we need to make a decision about in the immediate future, is @tonymorris's ban. I'm not going to immediately write it off, but theres enough people -1'ing in #14 which warrants initiating a vote, so I will create another issue that people can +1/-1 on the idea of an unban.

And last but not least, but very important:

part of what makes polyhack great is that despite "cultural" tensions everyone holds it together

- s1w