Cellio had questioned the requirements of Stack Exchange's revised-but-not-yet-published Code of Conduct (due out Thursday), which as we understand will require the use of community members' declared pronouns to avoid misgendering people. But rather than discuss this policy, the company determined that Cellio's reticence represented a Code of Conduct violation and withdrew her moderator status. A Stack Exchange spokesperson told The Register last week that Cellio was removed because she "would not use stated pronouns, which violates our current CoC. " 'Fired' Cellio has posted her own account of what transpired, and she claims her de-modding was preemptive: she had not taken any action to violate the CoC. "I was fired because they thought I wouldn't follow the future code of conduct, " she wrote, and has challenged claims of bigotry that have arisen for questioning Stack Exchange's planned rule change. While this affair attracted a lot of attention, it's only one of the many sources of disagreement and tension between community volunteers and the company that profits from them.
On and on. Then there was the issue of the notoriously inept and devious Lake County State's Attorney's Office. This was the crew that had sought to put a man named Juan Rivera behind bars for life, only for his murder conviction to be overturned after 20 years in prison. In the Rivera case, Lake County investigators had been accused of planting blood on the defendant's shoe. I was troubled by this. Vicious crimes disturb me greatly, as I'm sure they do most of us. But finding the culprit — the real culprit, not a scapegoat — soothes us, helps us move on. It's possible Marni Yang didn't shoot Rhoni Reuter. The problem then, if she didn't do it, was who did? Hence my reluctance to dig into the case. Because I know Shaun Gayle. I have always liked him. I haven't seen him in quite awhile, but back in 1994, I wrote a story about him for Sports Illustrated, a nice one in which he is reading one of several children's books he had written to a classroom of enthralled kids. He was sitting on the floor with them, in shorts, a T-shirt and sandals.
On Sunday, David Fullerton, CTO of Stack Overflow, issued an apology over how management had handled interaction with the Stack Exchange Q&A community during discussions about a code of conduct change and other grievances. "In the last few weeks, we made a series of mistakes, both in our actions and in the ways that we communicated those actions, " said Fullerton. "In doing so, we hurt people who believe in that mission and who want to help us make the community welcoming and open to all. " Fullerton's apology represents a second stab at making amends. An apology last week from Stack Exchange director of community Sara Chipps that didn't go over so well – it was downvoted 1, 394 times. The most egregious misstep involved the way a longtime moderator was dismissed, though that's not the only source of rancor. Last week, 20 volunteer Stack Exchange moderators (among about 600) resigned to protest of the removal of Monica Cellio, after concerns she raised about a pending Code of Conduct change led to her removal as a moderator.