Reflections on community time, rules, guidelines, and banning Andy

The admins have recently spent some time reflecting on the
past 18  
months
or so the microformats community, our progress on various
efforts,
participation, and how time has been spent.

One of the larger conclusions is that a significant
(majority) of  
admins'
time has been spent dealing with community meta matters,
identifying and
diagnosing misbehaviors or other community damaging patterns
within the
community, careful drafting of additional how to play wiki
editing [1]  
and
mailing lists [2] guidelines.

Unfortunately this has meant that significantly less time
has been spent
over the past 18 months or more on doing actual microformats
work,
resolving issues, iterating and improving existing specs and
 
documentation,
and helping guide the development of new microformats as
well as improve
the process for the development thereof based on all the
feedback.

An analysis of the "how to play" and "mailing
list" rules and guidelines
has revealed that the vast majority of these rules have been
created in
response to the community misbehaviors of one individual:
Andy Mabbett.

This is an acknowledgment that the continued process of
identifying a
misbehavior, creating a rule to avoid it, and then warning
subsequently,
has been insufficient, or rather has merely resulted in
admins spending
most of their time on microformats on administrivia rather
than actual
microformats, and that this lack of active productive
participation is  
due
primarily to the actions of one individual.

As a result we have decided to ban Andy Mabbett from
community
participation (wiki, lists, blog comments, IRC) for a period
of 18  
months.
This is not Andy's first ban and this action is not taken
lightly.

The how-to-play and mailing-lists pages have been updated
with  
annotations
documenting which of the rules have been created directly
due to one or
more of Andy's actions (wiki edits and/or emails).

As time permits, the admins will both hyperlink each of
those  
annotations
to the specific email in the archives or edit in the wiki
history that
caused it, as well as annotate any remaining rules with
their causes as
well.  We believe this will help provide better transparency
and
accountability.

In addition, in the coming days and weeks we will be taking
the time  to
document more how-to-play and mailing-lists rules and
guidelines (most  
of
which are directly due to Andy's actions as well) in the
hopes of  
further
minimizing community misbehaviors, and making it clearer to
newcomers  
what
kinds of behavior are or are not acceptable.

Ryan King (on behalf of the microformats admins[3])

[1] http://micro
formats.org/wiki/how-to-play
[2] http://mic
roformats.org/wiki/mailing-lists
[3] http://microforma
ts.org/wiki/admins
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Hi Ryan,

On Mar 4, 2008, at 10:08 AM, Ryan King wrote:
> The how-to-play and mailing-lists pages have been
updated with  
> annotations
> documenting which of the rules have been created
directly due to one  
> or
> more of Andy's actions (wiki edits and/or emails).
>
> As time permits, the admins will both hyperlink each of
those  
> annotations
> to the specific email in the archives or edit in the
wiki history that
> caused it, as well as annotate any remaining rules with
their causes  
> as
> well.  We believe this will help provide better
transparency and
> accountability.

Thanks for taking the time to explain and document your
actions  
clearly. I'm sure this was a difficult decision, but I
appreciate the  
hard work all of the admins have put in to do this as fairly
as  
possible.

Sincerely,
Ernest Prabhakar

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