Contributors and Community

Effective today, John De Goes has been indefinitely barred from participation in Typelevel projects. This most directly impacts Cats Effect, but applies to our other repositories as well. The cause is John’s combative style of interaction in Typelevel channels. His interactions when in agreement are always cordial, but when he disagrees with something or someone, the results are inevitably drawn out, intensely aggressive, and stressful. We have tried for the past three years, via one-on-one discussions and multiple warnings, to arrive at a style of respectful collaboration that we can all live with. These attempts have consistently failed, despite considerable time-consuming effort.

Our overriding goal is the well-being of our contributors. Too much of their energy and enthusiasm is being drained away by these conflicts, and we’re concerned about the potential chilling effect on new contributors as well. While we appreciate John’s technical insight and expertise and the time he devotes to sharing those things, neither outweigh the well-being of our contributors and community.

We are very much aware that, particularly with actions such as this, a lot of questions and concerns naturally arise. We want to be as open and as transparent as we can be, and we invite anyone who has concerns to engage with us in the Typelevel Admin channel on Gitter. If you prefer private correspondence for any reason, please feel free to directly contact the Typelevel leadership directly at info@typelevel.org.

While we are aware that the timing of this announcement is likely to be conflated with the recent action by Skills Matter, that timing is completely coincidental. This action by Typelevel has been independently in process for a considerable period of time.