Hi @RMoore,
Thank you for reporting this news. I previously looked for but could not find news (I could not figure out how to get this information when I searched about the results of the appeal a while ago).
To our knowledge, there has been no real communication from the ELM community, unlike the Paris RB community, which seems to have taken matters into its own hands.
As far as I can tell, most of the communication has been done in this Discourse post (News about the Elm Europe organizer [TW]) from Evan, and some prior messages on Slack (that have since disappeared due to Slack’s message retention). I don’t remember if/how much that has been shared in other places such as social media.
I don’t have an opinion on whether that counts as sufficient communication from the Elm community. If you don’t think it is enough, please let us know what additional communication you would expect to see.
Remember that some people in Paris RB have known for years that he was accused of rape, and nothing was done. Who here knew? Why so little communication? What were the consequences?
I remember last seeing Thibaut at Elm Europe 2019, as well as at an Elm Meetup in Paris at the end of 2019 (which he didn’t organize), and wasn’t aware of accusations or indictments at the time, and only became aware of it in 2021 at the time of the Discourse post. I can’t project my lack of knowledge onto others, so I can only guess that no-one else here in the Elm community about it.
What were the consequences?
The consequences of not knowing about this in 2018-2019 was the organization (or rather, the non-cancellation) of Elm Europe conferences and maybe some Elm meetups (depending on when that baton was passed), and obviously the possibility of incidents during that period. No incidents have been openly reported in the Elm community though, which I’m really hoping means none happened.
After those two events, as far as I can tell, Thibaut has been pretty absent from the Elm community. He had already planned to not organize an additional Elm conference in 2020 (in hindsight, I don’t know whether his accusations/trials were taken into account in his decisions), then COVID happened and news about his trial reached us in 2021.
Seeing as he is currently in prison and for a few more years (until 2027? Is that correct?) and his actions have been condemned by members of our community, I don’t know if there is much that we ought to do about his particular case.
About other Elm events, we’ve unfortunately had few since COVID. We recently had Elm Camp this year, which contained a code of conduct condemning these actions and offering support should incidents like this happen again (Elm Camp), which as far as I’m aware is the appropriate preparation one can do. And if you know about improvements they can implement, please reach out to them, I’m sure they’ll be happy to hear about that.