Is any of this resonating yet?

If not, we need to talk about Greg Cassel.

This morning I was made aware that Greg had resigned from Neighbourhoods - a project and organisation which I helped to form - on the grounds that I was distressing him by not responding to his messages and requests for dispute resolution.

His primary concern in the matter was stated as worry that BIPOC community members would discover my tweets about him and distrust the organisation for having warring team members. I certainly haven't seen anybody else in Neighbourhoods worrying about it, including me. So of course my judgement is that this is only thinly-veiled concern for his own reputation. Besides, BIPOC folks should be distrustful of Neighbourhoods as with any tech organisation. We've a strong foundation of diverse core stakeholders but by no means are we perfect or beyond causing harm.

The friend responsible for bringing him into the organisation apologised to me and said that she had told him that his discomfort, outrage and feelings of persecution in having "lost faith in Neighbourhoods management" because they would not enforce a mediation process were making his downfall a self-fulfilling prophecy. I told her that she was not responsible for his White male fragility, and I think that interaction was settling for us both.

I have moved on so far from Greg & my Twitter altercation last year that I've actually been tagging him in messages in the Neighbourhoods Discord server lately, and good-naturedly including him in conversation. Siddharth and I did once talk about my discomfort with his presence as a community manager with administrative rights and full view of all my perceptually-'private' conversations, but I let that go long ago. Sid and I figured the two of us may need to interact more at some future date due to our shared roles in the project (Greg as a community manager & writer; me as a 'technical consultant' because a free-electron is the safest place for me to be in any organisational spaces which have investors to answer to). And we figured that, if deemed necessary, that would be the time at which Neighbourhoods would need to step in and offer some mediated process towards resolution.

But we never got that far.