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Comment by CrazyStat | Hacker News Reader

> One community member made one decision for one conference which they probably thought wouldn't be a big deal (I understand now that it is, but to an outsider "keynote downgraded to regular presentation" don't seem like much).

One person should not have been able to reverse the decision that was made by a collective leadership vote. The fact that was allowed to happen is a failure of governance.

One of the people who left was the one who initially nominated ThePHD for the keynote. To have your nomination approved by a vote and then unilaterally overturned by someone working through backchannels would make me angry, too. If I was volunteering a bunch of time to a project that did that to me I might consider stepping down over it.

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It's a bug. Bugs happen. Systems are still systems whether they deal with people or code.

When big bugs happen, we evaluate why, and improve the system so it performs better next time. We don't blame people, we focus on what allowed people to make bad decisions. In this case, it sounds like a bad decision making process that needs a patch.

Sure, but if you don't have authority to make the patch, and especially if this sort of thing has happened repeatedly--as the linked post suggests--sometimes it's easier and better for your sanity to just leave the system.

100%. That's why I ducked out of the boy scouts, why I ducked out of Amazon, why I ducked out of my abusive family.

Some things you do have to step away from.

Thank goodness you're here to tell us what literally no one thought about.

Other comments are calling for name and shame, or saying that groups cannot make decisions and there should be one authority.

So, while others may have thought the same as me, I am not reading a lot of comments that are in the tone of, "we're here now, how do we make the machine resilient so we never get here again."

It's a bug when it happens to good people who are both willing and able to improve the system.

When it happens to bullies, they consider themselves smugly successful and coast onwards to the next fiasco.

It's still a bug. You have to ask "why" more. Why did the system allow bullies to be leaders? What should be done to prevent that?

Part of the problem here is too much collective decision-making.

Sometimes it's much better to just assign someone responsibility for something. Then if they screw up, they can learn from it, or you give the job to someone else.

I think a lot of the issue here is due to the fact that there was seemingly a one week period between the decision being made and it actually being communicated.

And then, because no one has been given authority to make decisions and actually be a leader, then everything they say has to be in this weird passive voice like "It's been decided that.." which makes it sound like a conspiracy when it's really just a fear of delegation.

The ruling committee should nominate someone to do things, and then let them do it. They should never try to actually run things themselves, it's always a disaster.

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