[clug] Member Moderation - Bryan Kilgallin

[Alastair D'Silva]

On Thu, 2019-07-04 at 02:34 +0000, James A Sparks via linux wrote:
> All,
> 
>   I have lurked on the CLUG list for many years and have contributed
> only a few times.  I live in the USA and I have never attended a CLUG
> meeting. I feel the need to contribute here.
>   I do not know Bryan and I have tried to read some offending posts,
> but I have missed the worst of the current problem.
>   

Let's make it clear, the latest incident is that de posted defamatory
statements about one of our volunteer speakers on his personal site,
and then posted a link to that to this list.

He has since altered that content.

He has outright refused to apologise, even after prompting from people
who help run the community.

On an ongoing basis, he responds poorly to mailing lists, with the urge
to respond to pretty much every mail as if it was a personal message to
himelf, primarily with random, offtopic statements that don't make
sense in the context of the thread.

>  I have worked in the Developmentally Disabled community, including
> with people on the Autism Spectrum, as an IT worker but I am not
> formally trained in DD. I have some hands on experiense working with
> some difficult residents of this community.  It takes much patience
> and understanding. The most disruptive residents were not always
> disruptive and they made great contributions. Sometimes they needed
> time-out or moderation. I struggle to express myself with respectfull
> language, but some people live in another world where rules that we
> comonly understand do not make sense to people in the DD community.
> 

Bryan needs specialist care, and as an informal community, we are not
trained, equipped, or desire to cater to his demands.

He has previously stated that he joins these communities on
recommendation from his therapist for social contact, but he has not
been coached (or is unwilling to take on board) how to participate in
these communities.

I used to help run the local hackerspace (which was a spin-off from
CLUG), where he first appeared and spent a couple of years terrorising
the community. We saw the same problem, people were unwilling to
participate in the community due to his abrasive personality and
expectation that everyone must bend to his will. The committee of this
group (who were all volunteers) spent hundreds of hours dealing with
him, to the point of seeing mediators. We tried to reach out and
accommodate, but his unwillingness to treat others which the same
respect (to the point of personally attacking my wife, who up until
that point was his biggest champion and tried to accommodate as much as
possible) won him no allies.

It came to head when he decided it was a good idea to bring a gun into
the space. Now, I'm sure that in the US, you would think "so what?",
but here in Australia, bringing a gun out into the open is a really,
really big thing.

He was then banned from the hackerspace and any further efforts to help
him integrate stopped.

>  I have found the CLUG community to be compassionate and
> understanding, and putting up with a disrupter needs increased
> compassion and understanding. E-mail moderation is not a bad thing in
> extreme cases of abuse. I have seen nothing that suggests a total ban
> of any distrupter. That would be my fear.
> 

Given that he:
a. will not accept responsibility for his actions
b. will not apologise for his actions
c. contintually disrupts presentations & email threads
d. has not learnt from the many, many similar incidents in the past,
even when things have been spelt out very explicitly for him

Can you explain why we should continue to subject the community to his
abuse?

>  I hope I am not misunderstanding this discussion and that I am able
> to contribute to other people's understanding.
> 

I think you are, you need a lot more context than what you have
gleaned.

-- 
Alastair D'Silva           mob: 0423 762 819
skype: alastair_dsilva    
Twitter: @EvilDeece
blog: http://alastair.d-silva.org