The PSF Fellowship is a recognition of community work that’s not as glamorous as a Community Service Award and you get to vote without paying/proving how much time you’re spending working for the community.  That’s all. Your name is on a list on the internet and you get free lifetime PSF membership. In return you’re expected to be a model member of the Python community, which obviously includes adhering to the community code of conduct. (2/7)

The main organ of the PSF dealing with this is the CoC WG. They advise the PSF Board and the Steering Council in matters of conduct violation. They can—and sometimes do!—recommend for the relevant body to ban people from PSF resources like Discourse or GitHub, both temporarily and permanently. What currently nobody can’t, is remove a name from the “exemplary Python community members list”. So someone can be named exemplary but banned from PSF events and systems. Absurd! (3/7)

The discussion mainly diverged into concerns about rogue boards. Given the current political dynamics in the real world, I’m sympathetic to people being wary of giving more power to centralized entities. But THIS power is useless for a power grab and—if anything—a great canary in the coal mine. (4/7)

Now, if you don’t have experience with CoC enforcement, you might wonder why this is not done in public. Or you might wonder if anything is being done at all, when no one is talking about it?! Rest assured, there is action, but it’s handled in private to protect the reporter, the reported, and to not open up the PSF to libel litigation. The fact that you don’t know about it is by design. (5/7)

But from an absolutely self-interest point: would YOU want to be litigated in public because someone doesn’t like what you said or just plain misunderstood your point? I’d personally rather not be stuck between two angry mobs, donglegate-style. As a reminder: both sides lost their jobs and were subject to weeks-long harassment (online and offline!)—as were many PyCon and PSF volunteers. (6/7)