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Add conflict of interest rules #3

Closed ariard closed 1 month ago

ariard commented 3 months ago

Following on my comments in #1:

I think it should have a moderation@bitcoincore.org. If you're in a situation of conflict of interests with someone with moderation privileges, and you believe it's altering its moderation decision-making process, at least you can mention the issue on a non-public communication channel and if justified asks that this moderator does not intervene in moderation decisions related to your persona. Conflict of interests hasn't started in the open-source world with bitcoin, they were doing that very well in the 90s with all the BSD forks, if my memory is correct.

Here what can be a proposal for future conflicts:

## Conflict of Interests

Contributors to Bitcoin Core software projects can reach out to moderation@bitcoincore.org if there is an estimation of a situation of conflict of interests.

Conflict of interests can be characterized directly in 2 situations:
- among the contributor and the moderator
- among the contributor and the contributor advocating moderation decisions to be taken on the contributor

A conflict of interest is a set of conditions of in which professional judgement concerning a primary interest tends to be unduly influenced by a second interest.

To be clear on my intent, proposing this rules is only intending to encompass future situation of conflict of interests in a scoped matter for what is related to online interactions on Bitcoin Core software projects. Scope of moderation rules applications has been raised independently by another contributor in this comment on #29507.

pinheadmz commented 1 month ago

@ariard I removed your comment on the pull request about mempool policy for being off topic. I will paste it here, and then reply on my own time. Normally posting off topic comments like this one would also result in a 24 hour ban from bitcoin/bitcoin too "cool down". I have adjusted my github notifications and I will not miss any more events from the meta repo.

@1440000bytes hello from your friendly neighborhood moderator. This is just a reminder to keep all discussions technical. > Pull request comments should be focused on the code in question. Discussions about personal opinions, moderator or maintainer actions (including responses to this comment) can be opened here

@pinheadmz you or another moderator still has not reply on the meta-comment I made on the moderation rules available https://github.com/bitcoin-core/meta/issues/3. I understand you can be in a situation of conflict of interest as the example I’m giving to you is related to your current employer to comment so and take a position.

As such from someone who is a code contributor and regular reviewer to this github repository, this is hard to think that moderation can be followed of good faith, when "discussions about personal opinions, moderator or maintainer actions” are not addressed after 2 months of having being mentioned.

pinheadmz commented 1 month ago

@ariard I can promise you that my employment will not have any effect on how I interpret the written moderation policy in this repo. My suggestion at the dawn of the moderator proposal was to add the names of the moderators to the policy itself, so that contributors could open pull requests to add or remove moderators similar to how we decide on code maintainers (and, really, everything).

ariard commented 1 month ago

Hey Matthew, calm down ! I think you're should talk with both of your employer here such @morcos and @sdaftuar to have a constructed and argued answer before to say non-sense like saying you're going to ban someone from the github repository (...which is not technically achievable given github technical architecture ?).

If this is an issue that needs to be settled in front of a US or European court of justice because bitcoin devs like you do not have the level of patience and civility to have a constructtive conservation on how moderation rules should work in a decentralized open-source project - I can always proceed in such direction.

More constructevely, promises are cheap when there are not objective rules to enforce them, either at the project-level or in your contract employement. On the former, if you remember the period of 10 years ago there was a lot of questions on the bitcoin foundation which was employing a lot of major bitcoin developers and at same time there were arguing on long-term technical proposals like the block size. Here a video of Gavin Andresen of 2015, at the time a bitcoin core maintainer, who was after the fact disapproved by numerous senior bitcoin core dev. On the latter, it is common notoriety that some blockstream people has in their contracts of employment, conflict of interests provisions in case of their company was asking them to commit unethical actions. The people behind blockstream were active in bitcoin far before chaincode and somehow they understood potential conflict between public open-source matters and private interest.

More concretely, that we shall have precise moderation rules prohibiting a moderator to take actions towards another contributor when there is an apparent situation of conflict of interests, this is just the type of rules very present in many corporate companies, public institutions, communities, etc.

I'll put again the formulation I'm proposing, which is just one among many plausible, for your consideration.

## Conflict of Interests

Contributors to Bitcoin Core software projects can reach out to moderation@bitcoincore.org if there is an estimation of a situation of conflict of interests.

Conflict of interests can be characterized directly in 2 situations:
- among the contributor and the moderator
- among the contributor and the contributor advocating moderation decisions to be taken on the contributor

A conflict of interest is a set of conditions of in which professional judgement concerning a primary interest tends to be unduly influenced by a second interest.

Thanks for your polite and courteous handling of this issue (though I reasonably believe here it's better to have other bitcoin core contributors non-affiliated directly with your employer to provide their opinions on the matter).

This conversation is cryptographically timestamped in the bitcoin blockchain for authenticity purpose.

pinheadmz commented 1 month ago

Pasting this off topic content here for discussion:

For my comments that was marked as off-topic by @pinheadmz, I invite a more wider group of regular bitcoin core contributors to express opinion on the issue, as pineheadmz as a matter t stake in marking as off-topic my comment so his moderation cannot be considered as objectively neutral. The issue is here: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/meta/issues/3 (edit: mistyped the github login of Matthew Zipkin at first).

pinheadmz commented 1 month ago

@ariard please (re)read the moderation policy in this repo. My interpretation of it is that comments on pull requests that do not contribute to the relevant technical discussion in the pull request itself is off topic. Moderators have been asked to delete such comments and temporarily ban the user that posted it. In practice the moderators have been using 24 hour bans.

pinheadmz commented 1 month ago

IMG_1884

For complete transparency I will add this screenshot. I can not do my job as moderator as it is described in the policy reviewed and approved by project maintainers and contributors.

I'm apologize to the maintainers. I need to escalate this particular case. @achow101

ariard commented 1 month ago

@pinheadmz

@ariard please (re)read the moderation policy in this repo. My interpretation of it is that comments on pull requests that do not contribute to the relevant technical discussion in the pull request itself is off topic. Moderators have been asked to delete such comments and temporarily ban the user that posted it. In practice the moderators have been using 24 hour bans.

Can someone else than yourself moderate my comments until there is resolution on the bitcoin-meta issue ? We have more like 40 people in the organization.

pinheadmz commented 1 month ago

@ariard sure. @willcl-ark is the other moderator and he and share the work depending mostly on time zone.

Just to be clear, you think that if I did not work for chaincode then I would not have removed your comment on the mempool policy pull request that did not in any way contribute to the technical discussion about mempool policy?

ariard commented 1 month ago

@pinheadmz

Just to be clear, you think that if I did not work for chaincode then I would not have removed your comment on the mempool policy pull request that did not in any way contribute to the technical discussion about mempool policy?

I’ll answer on 2 grounds (a) in matters of conflict of interest, it’s not only the substantial presence of a conflict of interest, but also the apparence that matters. While the substantiality might not be present, the apparence is gathered here (you have an example to nourish your reasoning on this canadian website, not saying it’s authoritative just an example that I’m not inventing cumbersome guidelines out of nowhere) . (b) I’ve been a chaincode employee myself in the past and in time there was no legal provision in my employment contract in the situation of conflict between open-source matters (e.g a janitorial role like moderation) and an organization private interest (e.g a technical stand on bitcoin consensus rules like some blockstream folks used to have in their work contract).

I prefer not that will intervene on the present matter (as I’ll say I’m also in a situation of conflict of interests with his present grant provider organization as I said so on a public bitcoin forum months ago even if I respect for will as an open-source contributor from his days on Lot49).

I think it’s reasonable to have the maintainers give more opinions on how conflict of interests shall be handled , or anyone else in the 40 group of people in the github organization as after all we all wish that to be a an open-source decentralized project.

achow101 commented 1 month ago

@ariard has been removed from the organizations to allow moderators to take any actions they deem necessary. He will be reinstated once the moderators inform me that any further moderation actions are unnecessary.

pinheadmz commented 1 month ago

@ariard 24 hour ban from bitcoin/bitcoin for repeated off topic comments. Please try to contribute to technical discussion in the bitcoin core repo. It is a work place where dedicated engineers are focused on improving the software. Last comment pasted below.

About the ongoing issue on moderation, I did a cryptographic timestamp of this github HTML page in the bitcoin blockchain, if this needs to be discussed on another public communication channel.

Maintainers or moderators can for sure mark as off-topic comments on the github repository, though they do no have the proof-of-work to reorganize the mainchain (edited).

emc99 commented 1 month ago

There is no such word as 'apparence'.

ariard commented 1 month ago

@achow101

Can you explain your thinking in matters of conflict of interests handling rather to engage in action that could be interpreted by the wider bitcoin community as retaliations on a recognized security researcher reporting security issues ?

24 hour ban from bitcoin/bitcoin for repeated off topic comments. Please try to contribute to technical discussion in the > bitcoin core repo. It is a work place where dedicated engineers are focused on improving the software. Last comment > pasted below.

@pinheadmz, I’ll take the 24 hour ban. In the meanwhile, I’ll let you meditate on the legitimacy of this action on the Github platform, a company with an address here.

GitHub, Inc.
c/o Corporation Service Company
2710 Gateway Oaks Drive, Suite 150N
Sacramento, CA 95833-3505

I’m still expecting substantial answer from maintainers and the other project contributors on my previous comment posted here.

ariard commented 1 month ago

@emc99

s/apparence/appearance/g.

English is the native language of not even 2B people in the world. The 6B others talk another language and I’m generous in how this linguistic estimation is made. Code and mathematics, which are underpinning the bitcoin blockchain, are the same whatever your language.

willcl-ark commented 1 month ago

@ariard thanks for raising your concerns about a theoretical conflict of interest scenario. I'd like to address a few points:

  1. We already have established the bitcoin-core/meta repository specifically for discussing moderation issues, as outlined in MODERATION-GUIDELINES.md. This dedicated space allows us to separate these conversations from technical discussions in the main repository, ensuring that both types of dialogue can proceed effectively.

    Clearly we both know this already, since we are here now. But it's not clear to me what the shortcoming of this approach is vs a dedicated "non-public communication channel" (the email address you propose) is, in the context of a potential conflict of interest; perhaps you could clarify the distinction in as you see it as I feel this may be our primary difference of opinion right now?

    From my perspective it would be preferable to have this procedure out in the open, as it stands currently. Introducing more closed-door/less-publicly-accountable procedures to moderation feels counter to what we are trying to achieve, but perhaps you have some scenarios in mind where this would be better-handled in private.

  2. While we don't have a formal conflict of interest policy, our guidelines already state that "Comments will be about ideas, not people." This principle is designed to focus discussions on technical merits rather than personal aspects, helping to mitigate potential biases. If it's felt that moderation itself is getting personal, then an issue can be opened here.

    It seems to me that by thte very nature of us having this conversation here, rather than as part of a PR, this is at least working somewhat as intended. You have also been free to air your grievences with @pinheadmz (and myself) moderating your comments here, which is, again, intended.

  3. A further question that arises from any theoretical policy is "what happens when the contributor feels they have no-one suitable to mediate" (or rejects all available candidates). This could be beasuse they have (legitmate) grievences with all available parties, or perhaps they exercise some "right" that they don't agree with anyone moderating them. What happens then?

    In the business world, which I'm not convinced we should strive to emulate in totality, it's paramount in these cases to disclose (publicly, whatever that means in that context) conflicts of interest up front. Following this a group decision could be made to try an minimise any individual conflicts, but ultimately there exist scenarios where there is nothing else to do but acknowledge that while documented processes exist, there are limitations and "perfect neutrality" whilst a goal, is simply not possible in every single case.

  4. Finally, re your earlier comment about potentially settling this issue in court. Such statements, even if made in jest or to provoke thought (and FWIW the latter is my personal interpretation of these particular comments) are in my opinion, totally counterproductive to our shared goal of improving Bitcoin Core. Veiled threats of legal action create an adversarial atmosphere that hinders open and constructive dialogue -- far fewer feel willing to say something knowing that it will later be held against them in court (I include myself in that number).

    Such threats can make people defensive rather than receptive to new ideas. Our community thrives on collaboration, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to technical excellence. We have concrete examples of contributors being dragged through the legal system to look at and learn from; so we should try to do this.

    Suggesting legal action instead of utilizing the already-available venues for discussion (e.g. this current venue) goes against the spirit of open-source collaboration that has made the Bitcoin Core project successful. I encourage you to reconsider this approach in the future if possible. Instead, let's both continue to engage in a thoughtful, respectful dialogue about any concerns in the appropriate channels. This way, we can work together to address any issues and potentially improve our processes in a manner that benefits the entire community.

harding commented 1 month ago

For my [ariard] comments that was marked as off-topic by @pinheadmz, I invite a more wider group of regular bitcoin core contributors to express opinion on the issue

@ariard your comments were clearly off-topic and the policy is clear about what should happen: "Comments about moderation decisions or moderation policy are off-topic in Bitcoin Core software projects and will be deleted." And "being off-topic [...] will result in a warning or temporary ban (in the order of days)".

ryanofsky commented 1 month ago

I think I sympathize with both sides in this case. I get that ariard was involved in some legal fracas before, which I don't know the details of, so he's going distrust people who might have been related, even indirectly to that, and push for a conflict of interest policy which would only let moderators with no absolutely relation to that moderate his posts.

I also think that in practice, moderators have been making very fair decisions and have been bending over backwards to be transparent and respectful even as they try to keep discussions on topic. I think deciding what is on topic and off topic is not straightforward, but when comments in PRs and technical issues are talking about people and the discussion itself rather than substantive technical disagreements, it is better to hide or delete those comments and ask them to be moved to a different forum, so first order issues stay in focus.

On conflict of interest proposal from https://github.com/bitcoin-core/meta/issues/3#issue-2307096275:

Conflict of Interests

Contributors to Bitcoin Core software projects can reach out to moderation@bitcoincore.org if there is an estimation of a situation of conflict of interests.

Conflict of interests can be characterized directly in 2 situations:

  • among the contributor and the moderator
  • among the contributor and the contributor advocating moderation decisions to be taken on the contributor

A conflict of interest is a set of conditions of in which professional judgement concerning a primary interest tends to be unduly influenced by a second interest.

I don't think it's a bad proposal, but I think it spends too much time trying to formalize what the definition of a conflict of interest is, and not enough time trying to say what should happen when the appearance of a conflict is present.

I do like the idea of having an email address that people can contact if they don't want to open a public issue. I think maybe instead of a conflict of interest action, we could add "Review" section underneath the Feedback section like:

pinheadmz commented 1 month ago

I like the copy written by @ryanofsky, and agree that having a private channel to report concerns about moderators seems appropriate.

achow101 commented 1 month ago

A conflict of interest is a set of conditions of in which professional judgement concerning a primary interest tends to be unduly influenced by a second interest.

I don't disagree with having explicit rules regarding conflict of interest, but this definition is so broad that I find it to be utterly useless. It is so broad that any prior interaction between a moderator and the moderated would count as a "second interest", and therefore no moderation actions could ever be taken because everyone has a conflict of interest. It would mean that all moderation actions have to be made by unknown third parties, and even then, they can only do so once. This is simply absurd and untenable.

The only conflict of interest that I think is relevant is when there is a dispute between the moderator and the moderated that directly involves the both of them. There is obviously a spectrum to this - a dispute involving a partner of either party would likely be constituted as a conflict of interest, while I don't think a dispute involving their employer should be unless there is evidence of the employer directing the moderator's actions.

Even so, as @ryanofsky said, what should be done when a conflict of interest is present? Are the moderators supposed to recuse themselves from ever taking moderation actions against someone who they might have a conflict of interest with? I think that's overly strict and makes it gameable for bad actors to try to create a conflict of interest with all moderators to prevent any moderation actions from being taken against them.

I agree with @ryanofsky suggestion of there being a way to review moderator actions - much like we are doing right now. I also agree with the points that @willcl-ark made above.

ariard commented 1 month ago

@willcl-ark Thanks for the well-layout answer, appreciated.

As a recall, I'll note the situation of conflict of interests due to past events. under which I am with your current grant organization spiral / cashapp / block inc and same than for pineheadmz, I can only have a reasonable doubt on your moderation actions.

All that said, answering to your comments.

About the bitcoin-core/meta, while I'm wholly receptive to have moderation rules to enhance and safe-guard civility and courtesy, I'll observe (a) that somehow the moderation rules have been rolled-out in a monolothic fashion (even if they have been discussed at private meetings, of which some I've been present) rather to be proposed on an open communication channel e.g the mailing list for the whole community of contributors (even occasional) to build more consensus about them and (b) my issue which was a remark I made first on one of the original github issue you opened and then which was left unanswered for like 2 months...

That delay in an answer can only give the impression that moderation rules are not wholly internalized by the moderator themselves, or rather than they’re applied in a partisan and arbitrary fashion. One can then only have low goodwill to follow them and respect the boundary between the both types of dialogue for them to proceed effectively.

Answering more substantially on your (1) about clarifying what can be situation of potential conflict of interests (substantial or apparent), I think I have few distinct situations in mind that are worth considering:

(a) Romantic relationship between regular contributors. I'm not going to make judgement here, people are free to live their personal lives as they wish. As an external and quite distant observer, I've seen in the past romantic situation between contributors. And one can only wonder if the regular technical comments and other technical positions made by one of the contributor were fully objective and not biased to advance issues / PR and the career of its romantically-linked co-contributor.

(b) Mike Hearn-style of threats "revoke git commit access". Here it's more at time of consensus validation changes and very deeply discussed technical proposals like the whole full-rbf saga. I think it's more another contributor, whatever its technical merits, engaging in open and repeated blackmail towards another contributor to leverage administrative endpoints (e.g mailing or repository permissions) to advance a technical and controverted viewpoint. I believe all the block size war have ups and downs, and even before with the original bitcoin foundation I gave more examples.

(c) Contributors with a janitorial role (e.g maintainers or janitors) being proxied by their employer organizations to take adversarial actions towards another contributors to either solve a past feud with another contributor (I know some veteran bitcoin people who have not always left one of their past employer in good terms, whatever the reasons) or to promote an organization commercial interest (e.g promoting a consensus validation changes or deep change in bitcoin core that is advancing one of their commercial product).

On the risk of introducing a more closed-door/less-publicly-accountable procedures to moderation, I share the apprehension on one side of less accountability for sure and how it can easily downgrade in a "spite on your neighboor contributor" spam mailbox. And the other-side, inter-personal issues is a fact of life. Being realistic, I don't think we can bet the type of conflict of interests I'm laying out will never happen again. I think having a private communication channel for future issues, at the very least to clear apparence of conflict of interests among all parties in private can only be wise. In the lack, one can be only be more appealed to report unsolved or latent conflict of interests to specialized or mainstream media.

About your (2), yes I think I had an open concern in the present situation that pinheadmz moderation was done with a potential bias, especially for having raised the potential bias w.r.t to its current employer and the present issue not having being addressed by anyone for 2 months. W.r.t the process works as intended, though note I think it's the first time such issue arises. Based on the lack of precedent, one couldn't expect a substantial answer by moderators / maintainers beforehand.

About your (3) and the question "what happens when the contributor feels they have no-one suitable to mediate (or rejects all available candidate)”. Presently, I think we have like 40 contributors in the bitcoin core github organisation (which is matching more or less the number of people regularly invited to invite-only meetings), which I think makes a sufficient pool of fallback candidates for moderation / mediation if that is needed.

Personally, while I said quite clearly I have potential conflict of interests with some organisations regularly contributing to this open-source project, I think I'm in good terms with the wide majority of regular contributors to this project and there are ample remaining people I wouldn't see conflict of interests to be moderated by them.

Pursuing to answer on your remark of "exercise some "right" that they don't agree with anyone moderating with them", I think they're 2 cases to consider. The first one is when you have an open PR aiming to fix or improve a code weakness or defect, like Peter Todd has done recently with his PR 28132, which was abruptly closed by a moderator without giving technical reasons (--saying there are too much borderlines comments on a controversial issue like full-rbf do not improve the long-term quality of the discussion imho). I think that type of situation is delicate as the PR author which has reported a bug in good forms is now under the dilemma to accelerate the full disclosure of the embargoed security issues as a non-argued dismiss of a PR / issue can be easily understood as denial of the weakness.

On that 1st case, I won't say more I've been both in the position of a security reporter and point-of-contact to coordinate mitigations among lightning projects, it's not an easy task to handle. In my thinking, I believe moderators shall have real technical culture of the project to have situational awareness when issues have been historically controversial and be more cautious. I don't think the current formulation about controversial topics of the moderation rules is great as I believe it shall be rather have a loosening than a limitation "Moderators may lock controversial conversations or limit it to prior contributors or members of the Bitcoin organization"). Though here, I'm drifting away from "conflict of interests" which is the object of this issue.

On the 2nd case to consider (about the "right"), I think we shall always consider that we might have occasional contributors, making good technical contributions, who might be english native or fluent in that language or coming from a less usual country that the current geographical distribution of the contributors and less versed with an "english-speaking international work culture", which is more or less implicitly underpinning the project development. I'm not speaking about myself here, as I'm okay-ish with english and used to deal with multiple culture, though I think yes moderation could be mindful about such "right" arising if contributors are coming from other social backgrounds.

I agree with you that we shouldn't strive to emulate the business world in totality. There are examples and rules to take inspirations from, though not clearly I think each time it should be pondered if they make sense in the open-source (bitcoin) world or not. Having a documented process at the very least is fruitful to minimize situations of individual conflicts, like said above about (1), as if done correctly (hopefully!) it avoids inflation of said conflicts. I think a notion like "procedural neutrality" is more adequate that something like "perfect neutrality". For the difference between the two notions, in my belief this is were ethics and principles plays out which is a more an individual practice that is hard to be formalized in written moderation rules.

About your (4) I'll recall the situation as I see it and you can read the link here.

Last year I received legal threats by the intermediary from Alex Morcos, a historical contributor to the bitcoin project and one of the co-founder of Chaincode and still active in the bitcoin space. From my impression this letter was just pure and cheap "veiled threats" as you said so (with no evidences). Subsequent to Chaincode lawyers's letter, I think one of my invitation to a private meeting where open-source consensus validation changes were discussed was illegitimately withdrawn. So far, I think none of my lawyers so far have received excuses from Alex Morcos or a Chaincode legal representative, or whatever more courteous letter to clarify the situation that it wasn't a "malentendu" arising from cultural reasons.

So on the rest of your point on feeding an environment of collaboration, mutual respect, and a shared technical excellence -- I shared the words truly, however it's better when the actions and conduct of everyone is following such principles to really create such environment. In the present reserve and in the lack of Alex Morcos clarifying some of its past actions, I cannot understand why you're reproaching me the mentions of the legal implications of this whole moderation process. Be certain, I'll have no hesitation to drag in front of a US or European court of justice @jackjack (the CEO of the company I think currently paying your grant) for any substantial matters related to standards in the bitcoin open-source world. My pre-bitcoin professional experience taught me there are far worst situation than getting into a legal feud with a single-digit billionaire -- and so far who has never contributed a line of c++ to the bitcoin core codebase…

On the concrete examples of contributors being dragged in front of court of justice (I think you're talking about the CSW thing). Be certain I fully disapprove that legal process both on its forms and contents. On my side I have always considered taking legal actions w.r.t CSW / Calvin Ayre, if it was to happen that I was one of the defender of the lawsuit. Be sure in the past I empathized towards some of the defendants, far before the bitcoin legal fund things was actually active.

I'll said again, I really believe that a culture of "colaboration, mutual respect, and a shared technical excellence" is something to aspire for as a whole group of regular contributor however I don't think we can have defamatory lawyer letters send in private among historical contributors to Bitcoin Core and then have call for "mutual respect" in public a while after. Ethic doesn't work like that, I really believe.

Overall, thanks you Will for your commitment on handling the moderation process, whatever disagreement we can have in such a discussion, which is normal and expected, I have respect for your past technical contributions in the bitcoin space.

ariard commented 1 month ago

@harding If you like reading old books, I can only suggest you to have a read of Paolo Virno, “The Grammar of the Multitude”, on the emergence constitution of the public space of expression vs private space in Occident on the last centuries.

I don’t know the quality of the english translation (it’s coming from an italian author), however I think it’s a good ressource to meditate that “off-topic” of a public subject and “clarity of policy” are far from being well-settled notions. The moderation rules are not even 2 months old and everyone has forget to put a version number / block height on it as it’s often a tradition in bitcoin (edited: to correct the typo on s/more/from/g).

ariard commented 1 month ago

I think ryanofsky formulation for the basis of a conflict of interest policy is very reasonable, I think the examples of substantial conflict of interest criterias he's giving are matching the ones in my reply to willcl-ark, apart of my reference pointing to past examples coming from the block size war.

I also think that like he’s saying it’s more important to have a general process to handle the appareance of conflict of interests when it’s related to moderation, than an exhaustive catalog, which is impractical. And I believe his observation that such process goal is not to bring the “world peace” is also very wise.

From reading the achow101 last comment, my initial proposal with a definition of a conflict of interest was just a starter to roll the conversation on this subject. While this present definition is indeed far too far, I don’t know if the best is to combine a formal definition with a list of loose examples, or just a list of examples.

I still think there should be a rule for moderator to recuse themselves, or nominally communicate in private to another moderator that they cannot take moderations related to a regular contributor, without necessarily saying more (e.g “I have a COI here”). Learning when to self-recuse is a high mark of ethics in my opinion. Apart of that, I think I’m mostly in alignement with achow101 remaining comment.

harding commented 1 month ago

@ariard

it’s a good resource to meditate that “off-topic” of a public subject and “clarity of policy” are far from being well-settled notions.

As of this comment, there are three comments of yours on PR 30943 that have been marked as off-topic. No amount of reading or meditation will convince me that comments like that are on-topic in any technical discussion. All three comments are wholly about moderation, which is explicitly described as off-topic by the moderation policy.

I recognize that the exact boundaries of what is off-topic and what is on-topic can be hard to define, but your comments are unambiguously off topic.

If you want conflict of interest rules added to the moderation policy, I think it would be useful for you to stop undermining the existing policy by flagrantly defying it.

pinheadmz commented 1 month ago

@ariard

As such from someone who is a code contributor and regular reviewer to this github repository, this is hard to think that moderation can be followed of good faith, when "discussions about personal opinions, moderator or maintainer actions” are not addressed after 2 months of having being mentioned.

(b) my issue which was a remark I made first on one of the original github issue you opened and then which was left unanswered for like 2 months...

, yes I think I had an open concern in the present situation that pinheadmz moderation was done with a potential bias, especially for having raised the potential bias w.r.t to its current employer and the present issue not having being addressed by anyone for 2 months.

Again I apologize for this, moderation is a new job and this is a new repository and I wasn't getting notifications. That has been fixed, so you can stop mentioning it. You could have just pinged me on this issue, it would've saved us all a lot of time and would not have distracted the developers focused on mempool policy.

Your comments from the mempool PR were reviewed by five separate people now and unanimously determined to be off topic. (They were also flagged by the GPT-bot I trained on the moderation policy! https://t.me/s/bitcoincoregithubmoderation). That's five bitcoin contributors spending time on your comments, instead of spending time on Bitcoin.

I am going to open a PR based on Russ' idea, adding a private channel for complaints about moderator actions, to close this issue.

jonatack commented 1 month ago

Regarding concerns about conflicts of interest, it may be a good idea to have an additional moderator unaffiliated with the largest or most influential organizations in the space. This moderator could handle cases where conflict of interest would otherwise be perceived.

jonatack commented 1 month ago

(FWIW the current friendly mods seem to be doing a great job. Sorry for the double post; having internet issues atm.)

ariard commented 1 month ago

@harding

As of this comment, there are three comments of yours on PR 30943 that have been marked as off-topic. No amount of reading or meditation will convince me that comments like that are on-topic in any technical discussion. All three comments are wholly about moderation, which is explicitly described as off-topic by the moderation policy.

I recognize that the exact boundaries of what is off-topic and what is on-topic can be hard to define, but your comments are unambiguously off topic.

If you want conflict of interest rules added to the moderation policy, I think it would be useful for you to stop undermining the existing policy by flagrantly defying it.

I think one of the recent example to get moderation rules, and personally why I've been a cautious supporter of its establishment has been the experience of mempoolfullrbf settings deployment few years ago, where they were a lot of spammy comments on complex PRs considering technical trade-offs, yet with divergence among industry players on the economical side-effects (e.g 0-conf acceptance business vs multi-party transactions like coinjoin).

On the present full-rbf PR, and giving it was re-opened after the original PR of Peter Todd which was closed for ambiguous reasons as he himself underscored on the mailing list: "this is quite an odd case of Core politics". One can only wonder if there is not a risk that the moderation policy could be sometimes instrumentalized by some regular contributor to promote commercial interests or even the "fame" of their open-source organizations. We have seen many such discussions on the historical mailing list during the block size war.

So yes, under those conditions, I think my position is fully legitimate to question the application of the moderation policy directly on a technical PR, and not on the "meta" repository. Finally, I can only invite you to read and meditate the book from Paolo Virno I was pointing to you above, it's a good one. If you prefer older classics Hannah Arendt "The Crisis of Culture" has some of its essays on the public "space of expression" vs the private domain which I think are worthy of meditation too.

ariard commented 1 month ago

@pineheadmz

Again I apologize for this, moderation is a new job and this is a new repository and I wasn't getting notifications. That has been fixed, so you can stop mentioning it. You could have just pinged me on this issue, it would have saved us all a lot of time and would not have distracted the developers focused on mempool policy.

Again my opening issue was linking to a situation of conflict of interests concerning Alex Morcos and Suhas Daftuar, which

Not addressing this issue under a short-timeline it has been a distraction of my own time that could have been focused on reviewing or contributing to the mempool policy, as I've regularly done over the past years.

Your comments from the mempool PR were reviewed by five separate people now and unanimously determined to be off topic. (They were also flagged by the GPT-bot I trained on the moderation policy! https://t.me/s/bitcoincoregithubmoderation). That's five bitcoin contributors spending time on your comments, instead of spending time on Bitcoin.

I think this is missing the point...In the lack of a conflict of interest policy, you can have 100 separate people reviewing my post and the ones hundred of them all saying the comments are off topic. Yet they might be all linked by a common commercial interest, or whatever, that question the credibility their "separate" appreciation. I think we have seen somehow such situations with blockstream or the original bitcoin fundation in the past during the block size discussion.

About having being flagged out by a GPT-bot this is neither a mark of objectivity, without you publishing the weight of your ML model. One can always reverse the gradient descent to get a result in average near it's own subjective judgement.

Sadly, my time is lost too that can have been contributed on reviewing consensus changes that improving the status on some Bitcoin defect e.g timewarp attacks.

Thanks for opening a PR following Russ idea and for putting in place a private communication channel (ideally an email endpoint) for future complaints about moderator actions.

ariard commented 1 month ago

General note - For anyone who disapproved the mention of legal actions in my post, a fact that was remarked by willcl-ark, this is more or less the communication tone set by TheBlueMatt when moderation was discussed in the rust-lightning project more than a year and half ago.

Here an excerpt: "Notably, a CoC is not a replacement for any kind of legal action - its only intended to focus on "are people able to freely contribute to LDK, there is no desire to take any action outside of LDK forums nor is any LDK CoC committee responsible for addressing any issues beyond that scope."

As a reminder TheBlueMatt, who is well-known for some of its contributions in bitcoin core e.g bip37, is currently employed by the same organization funding the work of willcl-ark or who historically has funded the open-source work of a good number of regular contributors to this open-source project. One can only be under the impression that all those "moralistic" lessons are hiding a bit of corporate hypocrisy, or they could be instrumentralized in the future to mask the advance of commercial interests.

Zooming out, I think there should be a self-reflection in this open-source project about ethics and principles, really.

It’s insulting at the utmost when a moderator funded by a commercial organization such as spiral / block inc is personally calling you to a culture of “collaboration, mutual respect, shared commiment", when such said organization had a complete lack of ethics in the past towards you, while you personally have spent months and years handling and fixing security issues on the open-source project powering some of their business lines today (and when you contributed on said open-source project before the existence of said organization by the way), all of the time in pure goodwill and in the interest of the end-users.

ariard commented 1 month ago

As pointed out by jonatack, I”ll be supportive of adding unaffiliated moderators.

I’m clearly not proposing myself for that janitorial role as I prefer to spend time on reviewing consensus changes, yet if anyone wishes advices on how to have properly written “conflict of interest” provisions in their work contract to guarantee the independence of their janitorial role, I'm here.

There is also the historical template by bitmex research available here that can be leveraged: https://github.com/jonathanbier/Bitcoin-Developer-Grant-Agreement

willcl-ark commented 1 month ago

On the present full-rbf PR, and giving it was re-opened after the original PR of Peter Todd which was closed for ambiguous reasons as he himself underscored on the mailing list: "this is quite an odd case of Core politics". One can only wonder if there is not a risk that the moderation policy could be sometimes instrumentalized by some regular contributor to promote commercial interests or even the "fame" of their open-source organizations. We have seen many such discussions on the historical mailing list during the block size war.

If you feel there is ambiguitiy in the rationale for closing that PR then that's my fault and I would like to fix that. I did leave a comment detailing specifically why that action was taken on that PR, but if I did not explain the rationale enough then let me know what's unclear and I will do my best to explain it further.

From my perspective the action appears pretty "successful", with the new PR receiving targeted technical review -- something that had gotten pretty stale and buried in the 1 year and ~150 comments (with a ~majority? of them not being particularly useful) of the previous PR.

Based on the state of the comments section in the first PR, and the closing comment, I hoped it would have been clear that the close action was not taken with some "anti-fullrbf" (or "anti-some-person") goal in mind, nor taken lightly. However even if we play devils advocate and assume that either of these was the case, then I would say that it has back-fired :)

It’s insulting at the utmost when a moderator funded by a commercial organization such as spiral / block inc is personally calling you to a culture of “collaboration, mutual respect, shared commiment", when such said organization had a complete lack of ethics in the past towards you, while you personally have spent months and years handling and fixing security issues on the open-source project powering some of their business lines today (and when you contributed on said open-source project before the existence of said organization by the way), all of the time in pure goodwill and in the interest of the end-users.

To be clear, I am not aware of the circumstances of the "complete lack of ethics" allegedly shown to you by Spiral in the past (nor interested to know), so can't comment on that claim, but I don't think it would be productive to hash that out here in any case.

I'll always advocate for "collaboration and mutual respect" in shared projects, even adversarial-minded ones like bitcoin. 🤷🏼‍♂️ Reading your comments in the LDK thread you linked, I'd say we align pretty well on wanting to minimise legal/social attacks in the space (I'd consider this part of "wanting to to see a productive atmosphere of collaboration in the space" and not wanting legal threats thrown about where possible).

With a PR to add conflict of interest rules now open #7 on the back of this discussion, I think it would be best for us now to focus not on more hypotheticals, but on measurable actions. If there are moderation decisions you disagree with then please flag them in this repo (or to the new email!) so that we (moderators) can explain ourselves, improve ourselves, or be reprimanded/removed as appropriate.

I think we can close this issue, merge the conflict of interest guidelines (once reviewed), and comment on actions taken from this point in time forwards?

ariard commented 1 month ago

Thanks willcl-ark for the answer.

If you feel there is ambiguitiy in the rationale for closing that PR then that's my fault and I would like to fix that. I did leave a comment detailing specifically why that action was taken on that PR, but if I did not explain the rationale enough then let me know what's unclear and I will do my best to explain it further.

From my perspective the action appears pretty "successful", with the new PR receiving targeted technical review -- something that had gotten pretty stale and buried in the 1 year and ~150 comments (with a ~majority? of them not being particularly useful) of the previous PR.

Based on the state of the comments section in the first PR, and the closing comment, I hoped it would have been clear that the close action was not taken with some "anti-fullrbf" (or "anti-some-person") goal in mind, nor taken lightly. However even if we play devils advocate and assume that either of these was the case, then I would say that it has back-fired :)

Personally, I'm mostly good on your closure of the fullrbf PR by Peter Todd, though I'll observe closing a PR for spammy comments it's penalizing the PR author. Said PR author who cannot forbid people to share comments on its work (afterall it's the aim of open-source to have open review), neither really make the sort between what is purely spam from what kind be very technical opinionated comments.

A last point, I don't think it's the role of the moderator to appreciate that a PR is at "stale", it sounds more a maintainer role. And in anycase it's better to ask the PR author (a) if they still wish to work more on the PR and (b) after a while, especially if no answer is given, to close the PR.

To be clear, I am not aware of the circumstances of the "complete lack of ethics" allegedly shown to you by Spiral in the past (nor interested to know), so can't comment on that claim, but I don't think it would be productive to hash that out here in any case.

I'll always advocate for "collaboration and mutual respect" in shared projects, even adversarial-minded ones like bitcoin. 🤷🏼🏼‍♂️ Reading your comments in the LDK thread you linked, I'd say we align pretty well on wanting to minimise legal/social attacks in the space (I'd consider this part of "wanting to to see a productive atmosphere of collaboration in the space" and not wanting legal threats thrown about where possible).

With a PR to add conflict of interest rules now open #7 on the back of this discussion, I think it would be best for us now to focus not on more hypotheticals, but on measurable actions. If there are moderation decisions you disagree with then please flag them in this repo (or to the new email!) so that we (moderators) can explain ourselves, improve ourselves, or be reprimanded/removed as appropriate.

I think we can close this issue, merge the conflict of interest guidelines (once reviewed), and comment on actions taken from this point in time forwards?

This is certainly not the space here to hash out the circumstances about Spiral past "complete lack of ethics", that I'm alleging, neither it would be productive. That said note again the fact you're publicly associated with Spiral for your grant open-source funding, and an external observer (even someone with no alleged griefs like myself) could very probably hold a skeptical doubt too that your moderation actions are at risk to be biased in favor of Spiral / Block Inc commercial or "fame" interests.

I'll always advocate for "collaboration and mutual respect" in shared projects, even adversarial-minded ones like bitcoin. Reading your comments in the LDK thread you linked, I'd say we align pretty well on wanting to mi> nimise legal/social attacks in the space (I'd consider this part of "wanting to to see a productive atmosphere of collaboration in the space" and not wanting legal threats thrown about where possible).

Same, I'll always advocate the respect civility and courtesy, even in adversiarl project like bitcoin. On the comment linked in the LDK communication space, and given the years-long of track records I had contributing on that specific project, I can only have a more than reasonable doubt of the good faith on the Spiral team in matters of "minimizing legal/social attacks" and give them the benefice of "good faith”.

In open-source one does not show up with a code of conduct written in a private corner as "done deal” then immediately waive about legal actions in lack of disrespect (especially given the poor track record of the comment author here, i.e TheBlueMatt, displayed in matters of open-source ethics since the beginning of his professional career circa 2011). Again asking for "collaboration and mutual respect" one has to be consistent in the conduct of its actions, otherwise it's sounds like "virtue-signaling" to mask corporate interests or please the medias / podcasts of the day.

With a PR to add conflict of interest rules now open #7 on the back of this discussion, I think it would be best for us now to focus not on more hypotheticals, but on measurable actions. If there are moderation decisions you disagree with then please flag them in this repo (or to the new email!) so that we (moderators) can explain ourselves, improve ourselves, or be reprimanded/removed as appropriate.

I think we can close this issue, merge the conflict of interest guidelines (once reviewed), and comment on actions taken from this point in time forwards?

My viewpoint is not only based on pure and gratuitous hypothesis, though also on the rich history of the bitcoin core project (before I started to contribute), and my own experience as a contributor about situations where I've been involved or only a more distant observer.

I think it's better to have the conflict of interest guidelines merged before to close this issue.