I Am Guilty
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Having expressed my resentment, I’d like to do the same with my guilt. The story of the relationship between Gittip and activist users, especially over the past six months, is complicated. The theme I’d like to highlight here is that I am guilty of trying a bit too hard at times to get others to join me in a particular style of open discourse and conflict resolution. I’m sorry.
There are times I’ve stirred controversy by sticking to my principles. This time doesn’t feel quite so simple. A part of this story is that I seem to have violated my principles: I don’t want to coerce others if I can at all help it! The loss these past two weeks of 6% of our users—representing 18% of our volume—is an unhappy event for Gittip and for our current and former users, and is partially the result of personal failures on my part. I’m sorry.
Looking forward, we plan to take this experience on board at the company level by getting clearer on the distinction between Gittip spaces and non-Gittip spaces, and the distinction between Gittip’s users, our contributors as an open company, and our owners and staff. We’ve begun making procedural changes as well as changes to Gittip’s legal structure to avoid some of the confusion on our part that contributed to this situation in the first place.
