There are two sides to every story. The readers of this thread are probably wondering why it has taken so long for the Dev team to respond. The reason for this is that we took the time to confer with each other and to discuss how we should respond. We think the forum is not the right place to respond to such an open letter containing personal critical remarks.
We understand that the impression has risen that the Dev team is on a personal crusade against Cyberman. We would like to emphasize here that this is not the case at all. So one of the first things we want to say is that the Dev team has always highly appreciated and admired his work and effort and still does.
We have extensively deliberated and discussed how we should respond. It’s not as simple as it may seem. With this open letter we and the entire community have been confronted with a one-sided interpretation. Besides that, in our opinion a few issues have not been taken into account in this open letter. After discussing the contents of this open letter extensively among ourselves we have come to the conclusion to place an extensive response that sheds some light on our side of the story and tells the readers of this thread about the efforts made from our side.
In this past year several members have put an effort into contacting Cyberman personally. One of them was Anne-Mieke (Compufairy in the forum / Razorfairy in the IRC). She contacted him by Phone. She did this because Cyberman invests tons of time and effort in our community in general and especially in building and expanding the German community. Knowing he is also THE powerposter in our forums she decided – with agreement of the Dev team - to contact him as she is playing a role in our marketing and general presentation to the World. She reasoned that he could be a great sparring partner to exchange thoughts about the future ideas, plans and developments in CMSMS and its community. She was enthusiastic about the talks they had and expressed this within the team, letting us know that he had a couple of very good points that should be discussed in the Dev team.
One of the questions she asked her fellow members of the Dev team after the constructive talks she had with Cyberman is why he – being an influential, skilled and passionate member of our community - is not part of the our team. She is one of our newer members (joined us in April 2010) and therefore she could not know that Cyberman already had been a member of the Dev team.
When you become a Dev team member you take it upon yourself to fulfill certain responsibilities. To be present in the Dev channel and to communicate and confer with your fellow teammates on a regular basis and to participate in online meetings are part of that.
Dev. Team members may, as needed, have access to CMSMS resources, such as administrator access to the various installs of CMSMS, the forum, the wiki, and login accounts to the server. Not every team member has access to all resources because they do not need it, and this access to resources is cleaned up from time to time.
An advantage you have as a member of the Dev team is that you are close to the source, meaning you have the opportunity to talk, debate and influence all kinds of actual issues. Ideas, suggestions, but also frustrations about CMSMS as a system and everything around it, can be discussed with fellow team members in a direct way.
Of course it can happen every now and then that a member is not able to be in the channel or in communication with us for a short while, this happens to all of us occasionally. Unfortunately Cyberman was rarely present at all and neither was there much communication from him to fellow Dev members. This is the reason why (regrettably) his Dev team membership ended.
We want to emphasize that we are not an elite squad and we certainly do not hide in an ivory tower. We think it’s important people can approach us easily, both in IRC (where the majority of the Dev team members are daily present) and on a personal basis. This is why our contact data is visible on the developers page of the main site.
In response to the friction which was a result of our decision to shut down the hacks and patches board Anne-Mieke grabbed the Phone and again contacted Cyberman. During this conversation she proposed Cyberman to rejoin the Dev team and to get actively engaged in dialogues, discussions and decisions and to attend our official monthly Dev meeting as this would give him the opportunity to share his thoughts and ideas in a more influential way. She emphasized that his participation would be highly appreciated and cheered on by the whole team. Unfortunately he declined because of the investment of time it would require, which we respect.
So Anne-Mieke made him another proposal. She offered to arrange a Skype conference call on a short term with Ted, Robert (Calguy) and him in order to give all the opportunity to get into a “man to man” dialogue. We’re sorry to say that Cyberman again declined, stating this was difficult due to the fact that he feels his verbal command of the English language would be insufficient. Anne-Mieke then offered to participate too so she could assist in overcoming the language barrier as she is fluent in both English and German, he still declined.
A few days later we figured that it might be good if we offered another alternative through means of the Language Partners Board. This part of the forum has been set up especially for the members in our community who run and moderate the international CMS Made Simple domains. This is a “members only” board. All foreign moderators (including Cyberman) have received a message about it and an invitation to join the board. In part of the first posting of the board we stated: "
This board provides you with a more inside track to the decisions made by the CMSMS Dev Team. However access to this board does NOT mean that you have a vote in any issues that the CMSMS Dev team has to decide upon. We hope that this board provides you with a channel by which you can better understand what decisions are made by the development team, and why they have been made."
One of the goals of this board is to provide a private channel where the international site and forum moderators can voice their opinions, suggestions and concerns and they can get into a dialogue with the Dev team. We think it’s obvious that – even though final voting is an exclusive matter for the Dev team - well founded input in this board is taken into serious consideration!
A very important part of this board is dedicated to making a united effort to present all international sites in a uniform way to the World to show we’re all part of the same worldwide community that presents itself as one identity. We reached out to the international moderators and combined our efforts and skills to port the CMSMS main site theme to their websites. DrCss has dedicated a large portion of his time to assist in the CSS issues. One of the sites that already has been ported to the new design is
www.cmsmadesimple.ru, thanks to the highly appreciated efforts of Sonya. The same goes for
www.cmsmadesimple.hu. Most of the other international sites currently are still in the style of our former design, with exception of the French and the German site. As we speak the transformation of the French site is in progress.
We regret to say however that there has been almost no participation from Cyberman there either, whereas we thought we had offered a good opportunity which could have lead to a healthy discussion.
Finally we would like to respond to the remark about the banishment of a forum member that was referred to in the open letter. There has been good reason to do so. As Cyberman emphasizes in the German Forum section and which is also emphasized in all other language sections including the English one, there are certain guidelines. The person we banned had repeatedly ignored these guidelines in ways that were not only offensive to the developers (including third party developers) and the people who volunteer to give support, but also offensive to read for general visitors of our forum.
This also addresses the teams decision to remove the flag for the German site as there are some very derogatory remarks made about the system in general, the forum, and some forum members in particular.
We would like to offer Cyberman (for the fourth and last time) to go into a direct live dialogue with the entire Dev team to discuss and solve his (and our) griefs and to resolve this situation for once and for all in good peace in an online meeting. We leave it up to him to decide if he wants to invite the members that he speaks for in the 'open letter' to join the dialogue.
We propose to have this meeting in a separate IRC channel, and hereby ask Cyberman to inform us of three possible dates before the 7th of January. To ensure that the majority of the Dev team members can be present we friendly but urgently request of you to inform us about the possible dates as soon as possible and to plan the meeting between 7pm and 9pm (your local time).
The Development Team has had the opportunity to draft, review, approve, and voted in favor of publishing this response.
Cyberman didn't get banned. His rights were taken, he left himself.
