@stephenpurkiss thank you for sharing your thoughts and experience. Greg introduced me to Holochain last year when I was dealing with censorship online. I’m an advocate for freedom of speech and expression… I could no longer ignore what was going on once I saw they had been banned from the forum. I admit I’ve known of the issue for awhile but wanting to stay out of any conflict, I chose to stay quiet. But I can no longer act like this isn’t happening. Greg is an intelligent and accomplished human. He’s been spreading the word of Holochain, making content, participating in the community in every way available to him. I’m not sure how Greg’s post went against the code of conduct, but I do know it’s no longer an issue we can skirt around.
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Thanks for clarifying and trust me, I would prefer to stay out of conflict but somehow I seem to find it, and what’s more it’s that entire attitude of wanting to stay quiet that results in being where we are today. That is kinda precisely the point I am trying to make when you say this:
We can, because we have a choice, we either like it or not, we freely choose to be involved in someone else’s business, and thus we can shout and scream all we like but we know what the setup is and still we choose to be here.
So we either trust and keep being here, or we don’t and move along. Cos I’m not seeing much response and interaction from many others either way so am assuming/presuming everything’s ok and nobody else has that big an issue with it, and we’re just throwing our toys out of the pram lol!
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i find this rhetoric to be extremely cowardly and i too am appalled like my dear sister @polyannie01 — it is bizarre that this kind of rhetoric would even be attempted to be used in this context — as if the people here are some kind of idiots who can’t perceive orwellian doublespeak when we see it
from my perspective, while greg was certainly illuminating points which could be triggering, nothing he said was “out of bounds”, unacceptable, or overly hostile — i too find him to be an extremely intelligent, creative, and well-intentioned human and he was bringing up legitimate concerns that should be addressed with respect rather than dismissed with indignity
until i hear further explanation, i will conclude that there is something going awry with the inner workings of this organization that has brought so much hope to people and a belief that things like what is happening here in this thread would not happen
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Given:
…I am guessing the decision wasn’t based solely on the recent interactions I’ve been involved in so like yourself I’m eagerly awaiting further explanation and I guess just seeing how it goes. I realise these situations aren’t easy to deal with and I can feel issues on both sides so not ready to throw in the towel just yet. And if I’m wrong then well, at least I learned a little Rust along the way lol 
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A community for decentralized social applications banning people from participating in a discussion is a little like a snake biting it’s own tail.
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You know, I think you could be right on the money there!
In Alchemy and Gnosticism
Early alchemical ouroboros illustration with the words ἓν τὸ πᾶν (“The All is One”) from the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist in MS Marciana gr. Z. 299. (10th Century).
Its black and white halves may perhaps represent a Gnostic duality of existence, analogous to the Taoist yin and yang symbol.[13] The chrysopoeia ouroboros of Cleopatra the Alchemist is one of the oldest images of the ouroboros to be linked with the legendary opus of the alchemists, the philosopher’s stone.
In Gnosticism, a serpent biting its tail symbolized eternity and the soul of the world.[14] The Gnostic Pistis Sophia (c. 400 AD) describes the ouroboros as a twelve-part dragon surrounding the world with its tail in its mouth.[15]
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung saw the ouroboros as an archetype and the basic mandala of alchemy. Jung also defined the relationship of the ouroboros to alchemy:[22][23]
The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. The Ouroboros has been said to have a meaning of infinity or wholeness. In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself. The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. This ‘feed-back’ process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which … unquestionably stems from man’s unconscious.
The Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann writes of it as a representation of the pre-ego “dawn state”, depicting the undifferentiated infancy experience of both mankind and the individual child.[24]
In Cybernetics
Cybernetics deployed circular logics of causal action in the core concept of Feedback in directive and purposeful behaviour in human and living organisms, groups, and self-regulating machines. The general principle of feedback describes a circuit (electronic, social, biological or otherwise) in which the output or result is a signal that influences the input or causal agent through its response to the new situation. W. Ross Ashby applied ideas from biology to his own work as a psychiatrist in “Design for a Brain” (1952): that living things maintain essential variables of the body within critical limits with the brain as a regulator of the necessary feedback loops. Parmar contextualises his practices as an artist in applying the cybernetic Ouroboros principle to musical improvisation.[28]
Hence the snake eating its tail is an accepted image or metaphor in the autopoietic calculus for self-reference,[29] or self-indication, the logical processual notation for analysing and explaining self-producing autonomous systems and “the riddle of the living”, developed by Francisco Varela. Reichel describes this as:
‘…an abstract concept of a system whose structure is maintained through the self-production of and through that structure. In the words of Kauffman, it is ‘the ancient mythological symbol of the worm ouroboros embedded in a mathematical, non-numerical calculus.’ [30] [31]
The calculus derives from the confluence of the cybernetic logic of feedback, the sub-disciplines of Autopoiesis developed by Varela and Humberto Maturana, and calculus of indications of George Spencer Brown. In another related biological application:
It is remarkable, that Rosen’s insight, that metabolism is just a mapping…, which may be too cursory for a biologist, turns out to show us the way to construct recursively, by a limiting process, solutions of the self-referential Ouroborus equation f(f) = f, for an unknown function f, a way that mathematicians had not imagined before Rosen.[32]
Second-order cybernetics, or the cybernetics of cybernetics, applies the principle of self-referentiality, or the participation of the observer in the observed, to explore observer involvement in all behaviour and the praxis of science[33] including D.J. Stewart’s domain of “observer valued imparities”. [34]
(/ht @TyeRish)
The Holochain discussion forum is as you say:
It is not however a decentralized social application, so suffers from precisely the same problems as it is attempting to solve.
Perhaps the only way for it to survive in this form until the transition to decentralized is complete is to utilise the feedback loop and endure the riddle of life, birth and death as best it can knowing there are infinite possibilities in the way others will perceive actions, knowing some will come along from time to time where tough decisions will need to be made.
We live in a world of central points of failure, we are (well I am I guess I shouldn’t speak for everyone else!) here to change that however are stuck in it for the time being, it is going to be our ability to recognise, understand and deal with it that is going to be our success, whether individually, as our own groups “inside” or “outside” or not at all. Gosh, amazing times we live in, no?! What an opportunity we have to rise above our own assumptions, presumptions, projected traumas, and so on and take a minute or ten to consider how much of ourselves and our own issues we are splattering out over someone else’s efforts to change things we align with too. And yes, I’m talking about myself a lot here as I write yet another huge comment response lol!
For me, the response so far from both “inside” and “outside” communities has been impressive and encouraging. This can’t be easy for all involved - but I didn’t get interested in this community in the first place due to the easiness of the problems it’s trying to solve. I wasn’t quite expecting to be typing this a week on from discussing beginners learning exercises though, and whilst I have my own reservations about how I have approached the issue, what’s done is done and I can only believe it will strengthen everyone and the project whatever happens.
But then again maybe I’m just an old deluded techno hippy Guess we’ll see, thanks for sending me on this Saturday tangent @toledoroy, as someone who’s clinically classed as “Pathological Demand Avoidant” (that’s me saying the “misunderstood” line on the 1min intro video on that site lol) I’ve particularly enjoyed this morning of avoidance tactics!
A community for decentralized social applications banning people from participating in a discussion is a little like a snake biting it’s own tail.
Not really, IMO.
Note before I say anything more that I’m not taking any particular side in the current conflict, this is just a general comment.
But as I understand it, the intentions behind Holochain are to enable the creation of social organisms with membranes, meaning an outside and an inside, and rules for participating or not. So it is perfectly consistent with the Holochain/Ceptr ethos to ban people from participating if they participate in ways that detract from the well-being of the rest of the organism.
People who are banned would always have the power to create their own decentralized social organism, of course, with rules they prefer.
It’s kind of like the meme: “If you don’t like it, fork off!” In other words, forking is a feature, not a problem.
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The title caught me from my e-mail and the longer conversation led me to dig in. Thanks @stephenpurkiss for facilitating a discussion in a reasonable and seemingly neutral way. This thread seems generative.
So we currently have two stories, one “inside”, one “outside”.
So, I believe I may be the middle ground - hence chiming in. For context, I’ve been orbiting this project since about 2019 and have attended hackathons in Prague, Barcelona and Lisbon. As such, I’ve met a number of the core team and community managers. I’d consider a number of people around here as friends. I’ve also had a good deal of tension with a core team member thanks to a misunderstanding that continued to compound for quite a while.
I mention this misunderstanding because despite our unpleasant interactions being expensive for both of us, the bitter taste IS fading (though I’ve certainly taken some distance). IMO this is because despite our interactions agitating the hell out of each other, it seems pretty certain we were both operating from a place of positive intent; albeit from different value sets. I feel what happened is probably similar to whats currently causing the frictions mentioned in the thread above.
I must say that I don’t think things have turned quite as darq as they sound and seem like the usual growing pains in group endevours; there’s conflict, controversy, confusion and contradiction. I’ve enough lived experience to know this, but am certainly still learning to handle it in an effective manner myself. What I can say though - with relatively large degrees of certainty - is that at the meta level this is likely part of a relatively ‘normal’ unfolding process of a growing open source project (or organism/organisation in general).
I’m tempted to pick out a number of specifics above, but wont. The facts of whats happened and said are probably what they are, but I don’t personally think there’s enough data to say much is actually evident yet (inclusive of my own experiences, sorry yours have sucked too Greg). I really don’t think anyone in either the “in” or “out” group are acting with malicious intent (though I do reckon both have f**ked up in various ways as humans tend to).
I’ll just ask the two questions that count; how could things be improved (without impacting future optionality)? Who’s motivated to do it?
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That’s an interesting interpretation. I remember that part from the HC videos 
I guess we could look at social norms as definitions of a social protocol.
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Hey everyone,
I’ve been the lead organizer for the Devcamp7 and was responsible for team coordination and content planning. I have also participated in European-time Hackalong calls last year on a regular basis. I feel compelled to share my perspective as I feel there’s some context missing in this thread.
European-time Hackalong
I have met with Greg in the Hackalong calls last year, where he also was a regular for quite a few months. Hackalong was created as a space for development related discussions (About the Virtual Hackalong category) prioritizing developers, but people of all backgrounds were welcome. Both organizers and participants tried to make the environment safe and pleasant, providing explanations for missing context and holding space for different opinions to be heard. Greg has made a good first impression, being polite and excited about the technology and possible solutions, but then he displayed a consistent pattern of behavior which didn’t fit the culture:
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he started interrupting development-related discussions with off-track, irrelevant topics. When being politely reminded about it, he didn’t change his approach. Having Greg’s interruptions meant that other people who are more shy and may not feel so confident speaking in English couldn’t participate so easily. It also made it harder to moderate the space, putting emotional burden on the people involved.
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During his interruptions he would often criticize developers for talking about the architecture and design instead of producing the useful opensource code, citing his show-dont-tell approach. While I share the result-oriented approach in the business setting, I find it completely inappropriate to enforce it on a group of volunteer developers having a general technical discussion about things they’re excited about. Blaming volunteers for the lack of results from their happy-hobby-time is a recipe for a burnout.
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Greg would often bring in an explosive and annoyed temper, raising his voice and making demands and accusations when he wasn’t getting what he wanted. This behavior extended to other calls as well.
Devcamp7
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We’ve had participants from almost all the continents, including Africa and Latin America (nobody from Antarctica though, weird). And I took notice of it because I wasn’t expecting the first event I helped to organize ever to be that global – how cool was that! I don’t think it’s polite of me to tag our non-white, non-US based participants just because of the color of their skin – wouldn’t have wanted this for myself.
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With most of the organizers’ team being located in Asian and European time zones, we have actually made our sessions schedule inconvenient for most of our participants from the Americas, leaving all of the US based folks at disadvantage. We have received comments about it (polite inquiries, not entitled demands), and as much as we wanted to accommodate everyone, it was just too much to ask from a team of volunteers who need to sleep at night.
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I have put in the effort to share the content as much as possible, and both organizers and participants reminded me to do that when I was forgetting, which was very helpful. There are publicly available posts about learning Rust and Windows environment setup. Our github repo is publicly available and I have specifically made sure that code has abundant comments so that people without prior Rust experience have easier time reading it. Core concepts of Holochain are available as well on the official site and this is the doc which we used when preparing the content. Nobody is hiding the knowledge.
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There were decisions made about limiting the amount of people admitted into the Devcamp7. By being a lead organizer for this event I took a responsibility for the quality of experience that our participants had. Having people who consistently interrupt the conversations, may behave aggressively and do not respond to feedback would’ve meant failing those who behave in a respectful manner and came there to learn, therefore Greg wasn’t admitted.
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Thank you @e-nastasia for providing this much-needed context and thanks for all the work you’ve put into this. Sounds like you’ve helped to foster lots of hAppy devs from around the world!
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I’ve been concerned with the general problem of building collaborative communities that really work, and think this is especially important for the Holo community, as I see it as building the infrastructure that will make large scale collaboration much simpler and more successful in wider society.
One of the keys to this is to nurture a culture of skilled communication where people are committed to converging when they differ, and doing this without upsetting others. Especially, there needs to be a ‘peacemaking’ support group, who can intervene when needed, respecting all sides in a conflict.
I’m not sure of what is behind the idea of ‘membranes’, but I do see the need to build circles of trust, which may be locally closed. Is that what it’s about?
Gary
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I agree! I would however slightly rearrange “large scale collaboration” to “collaboration scale” - I am suffering a little lack of sleep due to early morning freezer delivery and night before Xmas feeling lack of sleep however when I read the above it sounded like BIG networks as opposed to networks of all sorts of sizes. I’m sure you meant this too!
This is where I’m not so sure there is an answer and it is something that is developed over time. You have your hypothesis, someone else has theirs. When I read your paragraph above, it reminded me of the community I was in previously, and I see what they did as both a success and a complete failure, an even more digital totalitarian situation than before, and this is the route we are heading in terms of digital communities so I see it as probably the most important issue we have as humans right now. And probably why I got a bit enthusiastic about it, however I do feel I went a little OTT so believe it or not am trying to ‘ground’ my involvement a little more as I see what I was projecting from previous and can look at this situation with a little more balance now, and grateful for what it has taught me so far about both myself and this community and what they are building.
What precisely happened to cause this thread was as I interacted with the community here certain topics were brought up in the conversation that I, like you, am passionate about. Just a few months prior at the end of last year I decided I had to make the leap of faith from a community where I had invested much of my life in to one which I had been watching from the sidelines for many years but not really said hello to.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me at the end of last year was when I was yet again helping in a situation organising and connecting companies across continents, putting my everything in to what I now see is very narcissistic and in a situation where the entire ecosystem itself is still back in the dark ages when it comes to what on the outside it professes to be one of those at the forefront yet the reality of the story is very different when you actually speak to people on the ground. I hope you understand why I am being a little careful about my wording here. I am sure everyone has good intentions, it is the system that is the problem and one that I feel, as you do by the looks of it, that this community proposes to be part of helping resolve.
One of the best hints at ways forwards was from a video posted in another thread where I picked up three key points:
- “The model is never the thing - it’s the best epistemically we can do at that moment”
- “Wisdom is the difference between the optimisation function and the right choice”
- “They’ll do it and they won’t even realise necessarily that that’s what they’re doing“
I added some notes to the thread “The War on Sense-making - Daniel Schmachtenberger”.
As far as I understand membranes is the term used to conceptualise these ‘circles of trust’ you mention. You write your rules, and whilst I may trust Person X in one membrane, I may not trust them in another. With current systems it seems it’s either trust or don’t trust in a blanket way.
In terms of membranes where the organisational side is concerned then yes they’ve set out theirs for the community as they’re growing it and it seems two people went beyond those T&Cs and understandably had to be dealt with otherwise what’s the point of having the membrane? I see a situation has been going on a while, we’ve had response explaining the context a little further and whilst there’s all sorts of loose ends and questions still that could be asked, I’ve seen and heard enough about both myself, the community, and the ‘perpetrators’ in order to take this as a learning experience and increase my trust for the participants I believe in, who at the moment is me, and Holochain Not necessarily sitting happily together in a tree but respect for each other’s missions. Been trying to figure out my OSX setup issues again today, I don’t think my curiosity about Holochain is going to end anytime soon lol!
Happy Easter if you celebrate such a thing, from just south of you in the Essex countryside!
Thanks for the comments Steve. I just looked further back in this thread, and can see that the situation is quite complex and not easy to resolve. My sense is that the things Greg thinks he was banned for are not the same as what those banning him were looking at.
Just keeping up with this thread is a big task. The solutions I would like to see are not simple. They involve a clear vision of a kind of convergent communication that needs to be widely accepted by the group, including ways of handling problems that treat all involved with respect and empathy.
How and where could we even raise such an issue?
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There is a “Start Here → Participation Guidelines” section which contains a Code of Conduct and a How we Grow which states:
Personally I believe having these discussions in the open is key to progress so I would, as I did with this, post in the “General Chat → Suggestion Box” category.
My only piece of advice would be remember that none of us have the answer otherwise we wouldn’t be in the current situation. We all have ideas about what we think would be the ‘right’ thing to do, and I believe it is our duty to ensure we express those in as best a way as we can, not to either sit back and watch without speaking our mind, or on the other extreme to assert that our way is the way. That I guess includes this paragraph I just wrote
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It is quite possible that these are the reasons or some of the reasons Greg was not admitted into a recent DevCamp. However, this thread is about way more than not being admitted into a DevCamp. I think some of the main points are getting lost now.
(1) We are all now talking about building community processes which is exactly what greg started this thread to talk about. And he expressed it in an elegant, clear, and in-depth manner. Where is the offense in that?
(2) Greg was then banned entirely from the holochain forum with still NO EXPLANATION even though it was promised that explanation would come. This is an extremely egregious and intentional lack of consideration and vulnerable transparency. It also breeds disrespect because promises are not being kept and then avoided (thus far). I would bet it is not malicious (though I can’t be absolutely certain) but it certainly is intentional.
(3) Someone else who quietly behind the scenes encouraged Greg to voice his opinion here on this thread was also banned from the forum also with no explanation (thus far)!
Now we are all discussing the nuances of community building here. But the violations present in this thread (thus far) do not require nuanced thinking. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a holochain developer 
) to figure out that when you ban two members, the community will probably appreciate an announcement about the reasons why, especially if you promised you would do that.
Perhaps there are things happening behind the scenes that caused Greg to be banned, but why in this thread? He said nothing in this thread that should be considered to be a “final strike” or something like that? Right? Doesn’t that part not make any sense?
And what about the person who has nothing in this thread but simply encouraged greg to share his feelings? Getting banned for simply encouraging another to share their vulnerable feelings and critiques on a forum? That’s as far as we know…
Please excuse me if a formal announcement was made about this in an alternative thread and link me to it
Even still, overall holochain seems to be one of the shining lights out there so I will still support in any way I can the beautiful vision
And therein lies your issue.
Whilst you continue to support that which you disagree with, that with which you disagree with will continue to exist and grow.
Which was kinda my point when I was discussing the options for governance. If we want this ideal of both the tech and the community, then it is going to take more than simply scribbling it on the screen.
Fabulous quote from this recent conversation:
“Everyone wants the Drive-thru not the breakthrough”
Are you still missing the extreme irony, @stephenpurkiss, that the whole point of this thread was to take action on this issue and that person was then banned from the community
Effectively that message by the people with the “power” to ban was that they were going to take extreme action to shut down conversations like this.
Besides, your little trope about scribbling on a screen is stupid and demeaning. Are computer programmers just scribbling on a screen? Are writers of books just scribbling on a screen?
This is the main forum and medium of communication for the holochain community. What kind of action would you like? Do you want to facilitate an in-person meeting flying people from all around the globe to meet in one area? Do you want to facilitate everyone who cares to get on a zoom call to hash this out?
I’ve spoken my truth and I’m willing to do next steps but I can’t do anything if the people with the “power” to ban aren’t willing to communicate.