Update #5 on “Stepping back”

Edit to add this set of links to the posts in the series

In Update #2 on “Stepping back” I alleged that some of the public statements by the Tusky project, prompted by Stepping back from the Tusky project, were lies.

It is my responsibility to present evidence for that. This is the last of a collection of posts that do that, or otherwise respond to the public statement by the Tusky team.

[!NOTE] See also Update #3 on “Stepping back” and Update #4 on “Stepping back”

You may be reasonably concerned that the following selectively quotes from the discussion. To allay those concerns the full discussion is archived at chat.md. You might want to read that first, or have it open in another window.

I have not addressed every statement made by the project in what follows. Blame Brandolini's law. Given the volume of trivially provable lies the project's contributors made in the statement they produced I leave it to you to decide how trustworthy the remainder of their comments are.

The “Conflict with Nik Clayton” section

Nik would have expected to find documentation of the decision to hire Z, but in this case would not have been able to do so because the hiring predates our current project documentation process. - Tusky Contributor response to Nik Clayton

This is a lie. I was not asking for documentation for decision making around Mike's hiring.

I was asking why the invoice showed a payment for work that was demonstrably not done.

Even if Mike's contract was for time, not specific results, the invoice should have reflected that. E.g., “X hours spent under contract Y”.

The three invoices actually said (in their entirety):

When he was shown the documentation of what Z had done and why Z was paid for it, he was unable or unwilling to drop the matter - Tusky Contributor response to Nik Clayton

This is a lie. I was not shown documentation of what Mike had done.

Had I been, that's still not relevant, because my concern was not “What other work has Mike been doing?” my concern was initially “Why does invoice #125597 list work that was demonstrably not done?”, followed rapidly by “And why are these other two invoices so generic?”, then followed by “Why is the response to what should be straightforward questions so hostile?”

There are three people who had admin rights to the Open Collective project and could respond; connyduck, tak, and maloki.

Of those three, the only person who responded was maloki, and the entirety of her response pertaining to the work was the following two sentences.

It's soma, and we had an agreement that he'd be paid for the first 3 months on an hourly basis with a max ceiling. Part of their work was also offloading me, and was supposed to be working on the FAQ, but you submitted your update of it while they were working on it.

If you can straight-facedly refer to that as “shown documentation of what Mike had done”, well, you're a better dissembler than I am.

Note also that the second sentence attempts to deflect blame on to me for apparently doing work that overlapped with Mike's.

Given that my questions were not answered it is not surprising that I was “unable or unwilling to drop the matter”, and I replied:

My PR that updated the FAQ (also my first project contribution) was submitted on Dec 17 2022, and merged on Dec 22 2022. There was no public indication before then that anyone else was working on it.

The three Mike Haynes invoices on OpenCollective have the following dates and descriptions (Mike Haynes – Open Collective):

  1. January 31, 2023 (“First invoice submission to Tusky”), 120964
  2. February 16, 2023 (“Invoice for first half of February”), 123650
  3. March 1, 2023 (“Work on 'bookmark tab' feature (#2368); Work on 'copy hashtags into reply' (#3013); Work on 'positional substitution format' (#3297)”), 125597

For the first two, what work was actually done? I can't find any PRs or issues (either open or closed) in the tuskyapp/tusky or tuskyapp/faq repositories that would match, and SomaRasu (Mike Haynes) · GitHub shows no apparent contributions.

I assume there is a straightforward explanation for this, I'd just like to know what it is.

But as and when there's a legal structure backing Tusky this will not fly. Invoice 3, in particular, looks fraudulent.

To be super clear — I'm 100% not saying it is fraudulent. This could be as simple as “Some work was intended to be done, it wasn't, other work was done instead, and the expense description was not updated”.

But we should be able to explain what that work was, and we should have processes in place so that this does not happen again.

I take a moment to note that some people have suggested that “I'm 100% not saying it is fraudulent” is a weasel-worded way of trying to suggest that something is, in fact, fraudulent.

With no other context, I could understand that point of view. However, this is not a context-free discussion. At this point I have been working on the project for approximately eight months, landed more than 150 PRs, replied to countless user questions from the Tusky account, and run the two most recent releases.

And the project's statement says they had “the intent of admin status being transitioned to him” and described me as the “primary code contributor”.

With that context it should be clear that raising any concerns like this are not an accusation of wrong doing, but an expression of concern that other people, without the relevant context, may look at the same information I did and assume fraud.

Maloki did not take it that way, responding:

Can You stop? Because let it be clear, this attitude would mean that all my contribution also isn't valid and shouldn't have been paid for because there wasn't any proof. This is an admin issue. The admins had agreements in place with people involved.

This is the first suggestion in the discussion that any of Maloki's contributions are questionable, and she raised it, not me.

I was not the only person to think like this. Charles (charlag) wrote in response to the above:

mal with you I think it was quite different. I don't know anything about this (which is probably my fault) and to me it also looks very odd.

if in your case it's a regular payment in this case it does really look like payment for work that wasn't done. I think big point of OC is transparency and this does not look good for us.

should it have been labelled differently? as in, “project management work” or similar (I assume you mean that by offloading).

I really don't think anyone is trying to put your contributions or payment into question but I agree that we should be transparent and should have a record of agreements

Charles has clearly understood the context in which I asked the original question (“I really don't think anyone is trying to put your contributions or payments into question”).

Maloki reiterates that she believes this information should not be transparent, replying to Charles:

When I'm trying to explain I really don't appreciate a fucking wall of text about how I'm clearly wrong. Like whatx the Fuck. And it's part of why we've worked on improving the process. But all these conversations aren't going to be for and open to the contributors.
And for a long while it was mostly me and Conny that had a quick chat about stuff and agreed to things. And then course corrected as needed.

During this discussion Mike writes:

I just want to say: this was work that was intended to be done, but unfortunately I couldn't get done, primarily due to my inability to wrap my head around getting a PR submitted. I did have code written for these issues, but I'm not sure if I still have them stashed or not.
I'm really sorry for any confusion I caused and for how I approached the OC invoice system. Conny had told me going forward if I were to submit any invoices that a PR(s) needed to be provided

I start a 1:1 discussion with him to see about getting any of the that he did do merged in to the project. That takes about two hours over two days, and one PR is merged the next day (more details in Update #3 on “Stepping back”). The work for the other two invoices is, to the best of my knowledge, still not complete.

Separately, I respond in the channel to Maloki.

Your explanation didn't (and still hasn't) addressed the “Why has an invoice been paid that describes work on three specific GitHub issues, when all available evidence shows that no work was done on those issues?”.

The explanation could be as simple as “Admin mistake, they worked on X, Y, and Z instead, we forgot to update the description in OC”.

This question is still unanswered.

but we as observers to the conversation feel that Maloki was generally only responding with the same harsh tone that she was being addressed in - Tusky Contributor response to Nik Clayton

I will let readers decide whether my tone was harsh. As already noted, the complete chat logs are at chat.md.

Multiple contributors had asked Nik to slow down or temporarily stop because they had no capacity to respond, for valid health reasons including hospitalization

The only people who could answer the questions authoratively were the project's three financial admins on Open Collective. They were:

Maloki repeatedly asked for the discussion to stop, saying (over multiple messages):

Can You stop? [...] This is an admin issue. The admins had agreements in place with people involved.

these conversations aren't going to be for and open to the contributors.

it's not a question that necessarily should be posed in the contributors channel

the contracts and agreements we make with people is not for public consumption, and I don't believe they have to be, which is why I was very thorns out on this question. You don't need to know any details of the agreement whatsoever besides “this was a past agreement and it got paid for”.

As already noted, Charles was the first person to reply, and replied several times during the discussion despite health issues. Charles is not an active financial admin for the project on Open Collective, and the contributions (although helpful) were unasked for, and the decision to join the discussion was their own.

Nik insisted on his solution and that it be implemented immediately. - Tusky Contributor response to Nik Clayton

This is a lie.

While the discussion was going I hastily organised my thoughts in to a strawman proposal for an expenses policy and a grants policy, and wrote them up. I had hoped that these would stop the discussion from spiralling down the drain of what had already happened, and allow us to productively focus on active changes we could make to stop it happening in the future.

They are clearly not ready to be “implemented immediately” as there are a number of TODOs, and a significant number of open questions for discussion in the grants policy.

I presented this to the group as:

[...] Since a more specific expense and grant policy might be useful, I've thrown these together for discussion:

As you'll see, plenty of open questions on both.

and

[...] The clearest explanation you will see of this is my strawman proposals for an expenses policy (https://gist.github.com/nikclayton/5c4118c7f153b0a8ade904cfccde5fdd) and a grants policy (https://gist.github.com/nikclayton/bd1146e24e97b113c6d14f31bbd8a36c).

Since we definitely have strong differences of opinion around project governance and finance issues, and since those documents set out my current thinking, could you review those, and provide feedback?

There was no feedback on these from anyone, and I never mentioned them again in the chat.

I know I've already said it, but to be clear, any suggestion that I had a solution and insisted it be implemented immediately is a lie.

By the time the week came to a close, Maloki felt the conversation had spiraled out of her ability to de-escalate - Tusky Contributor response to Nik Clayton

I had already made multiple attempts to de-escalate the discussion, including:

Maloki refused to engage with any of these. As already noted, the only thing she seemed to want to do was shut the discussion down.

Mcc and Maloki were going to introduce Nik and the other contributors to L.J. within 24 hours and let her propose a process for resolving the conflict, but did not get the chance - Tusky Contributor response to Nik Clayton

I have no idea how true this is. Obviously, I had no knowledge of it at the time.

I note that Maloki's last message in the discussion (to which I did not respond) was:

We're not tone policing the issue. We're specifically asking you to stop.

This was sent 2023-08-25 (Friday) at 13:08 CEST.

Not “pause”. Not “wait until we can gather some more information”. Not “wait until I can get a mediator”.

From my perspective the discussion was over. I had raised what I thought were reasonable concerns, in the correct forum, and been given incomplete and evasive information. Clarifying questions resulted in demands that the discussion be shut down, and my attempt to redirect the conversation to a more productive “Here's how we could do things in the future” direction were ignored.

At that point further discussion or engagement seemed both futile, and was also directly contrary to Maloki's final message.

After drafting the blog post, getting some trusted friends and former colleagues to review it, and modifying it based on their feedback, I posted a brief resignation note on the contributors channel (with instructions on how to remove me from the shared project infrastructure).

The “Payments which Nik has questioned” section

We, the remaining Tusky contributors, have several issues with Nik's post. We disagree, based on the information that both we and Nik have been given, that the payments Nik objects to were inappropriate at the time. - Tusky Contributor response to Nik Clayton

I'll be (mercifully) brief here, because this section mischaracterises what I was saying, and then argues against that mischaracterisation.

So, for the nth time — I do not think that the payments were inappropriate, given the context that was provided in the discussion.

I still think:

  1. The invoices did not follow the OC policy
  2. Maloki's response, demanding that the discussion be stopped, that it was not appropriate for contributors, and that contributors should not have a role in holding the financial admins to account is completely inappropriate

We also object to how he mischaracterizes the positions of Tusky as a project - Tusky Contributor response to Nik Clayton

I am always happy to correct anything that I've written. If anyone from the team can (a) point to something specific, (b) let me know about you think is a mischaracterisation, and why, and I agree with you, I will correct it, and post about the correction.

and feel that he retroactively imposed future standards, which would apply should we move forward with the idea to incorporate the Tusky project, to past leadership’s decisions. - Tusky Contributor response to Nik Clayton

Again, a mischaracterisation. Also, a deflection.

First, my expectations of how a financial admin should behave when responding to questions is not related to past leadership decisions.

It may be what past leadership has tolerated — I was only involved with the project for eight months, so I can't speak to that.

Second, my standards are second to the legal agreements that the project entered in to when it signed the agreements with Open Collective and the Open Source Collective (OSC) as the project's fiscal host (yes, the the fact that two different organisations have such a close name is confusing).

Unfortunately, I can't tell what the agreement the project signed says, because the financial admins don't think it's appropriate. All I can do, as I have done, is point to where I think the project may have breached them either in fact or in spirit.

The “What Does Tusky Use Donor Money For?” section

we actively solicit people outside the project when there is work which needs to be done but which no one is available to do - Tusky Contributor response to Nik Clayton

I believe, but cannot prove with 100% confidence, that this is a lie.

[!NOTE] See also Update #2 on “Stepping back” — nikclayton

Demonstrating some proof of active solicitation of people outside the project should be straightforward.

For the past four and a half years the project has paid (Tusky · Expenses – Open Collective, and ignoring the payments to Mike which I have already noted):

The remaining payments have been to Maloki, one of the financial admins.

In those same four and a half years the project did not actively solicit people outside the project by:

The only other place I could think to check is if the Tusky Mastodon account received DMs from people asking for contributions.

Obviously I don't have access to that, and even if the project was receiving those requests, the public payment history on Open Collective demonstrates that the project was generally not making payments to outside contributors.

I would be delighted to document the ways in which the Tusky project actively solicited people outside the project, should the project provide any.

But until that time, I believe the project is demonstrably, repeatedly, lying to you.