Drupal Association,

It is with great regret that my first communication with this body has to be reporting the circumstances of a drupal administrator's unethical practice, rather than simply introducing my organization and commending your efforts in creating a great product; however, the actions of Oleg Terenchuk have mandated this communication.

For whatever reasons Oleg is using his position as a drupal administrator to block, slow my progress, and discourage drupal programmers from supporting my project. In a nutshell, at scale this project will raise millions of people worldwide out of poverty by leveraging the social networking power of the web, hence the MIT backing.

I am writing this communication with two purposes:

1.)to inquire if their might be some mechanisms within your community that prevents administrators, who are by default in advantageous positions within the drupal community from leveraging their positions to unjustly lay claim to, or take over, or fork projects at will, as this type of behavior would obviously discourage many in the drupal community from sharing projects within the community for fear of graft.

2.)To inform you all of a very large “downside” of my project that Oleg is aware of, but seems to think he can overcome with very limited knowledge of how the system works, a downside that potentially can affect everyone reading this communication and a lot more.

What have been his actions that cause my concern?

Note: There are numerous details that I can list from my interaction with Oleg, but for brevity's sake I have only listed three items below.

1.As admin he controls who has groups on groups.drupal.org and upon applying for my group Drupal Against Poverty on Aug. 12th, he denied our group application, stating the purpose of the group was too political (content attached). The content was/is not political he just did this to prevent drupalers that saw the Aug12th presentation from immediately signing up to help. Even after we re-wrote and submitted the text for the group he stated that once he had denied it, persons higher up in the community had to approve it and there would be a waiting period
I finally had to approach a drupal programmer from Boston days afterwards to get my group approved who contacted his admin person.

2.Once we published the PDO Development Plan (see Drupal Against Poverty) to our group, literally 100's of programmers worldwide came to the Drupal Against Poverty page and to my demo website, however, only a few were able to register, a friend of Oleg's even tried registering and to this day we have never received notification of this person's registration request. There is no way to tell how many of the 100's of programmers were not able to register due to malcontent interference from Oleg. I no longer fully utilize the site due to Oleg.

3.During discussions with Oleg, I sent him an email regarding his interest in supporting the project. Instead of simply replying to the email, he chooses to go onto the drupalnyc irc channel and “grand stand” for everyone on the channel saying how he has no interest in the project, even going so far as to say he will not respond to anything related to PDO on the irc channel sending a clear message to everyone on the IRC channel that discussing the project is off limits for fear of being banned.

What do I believe is his end game?

I can only speculate as to his motivations, however, given our interaction to date, I would say he is throwing up hurdles to our development, so that he has time to utilize his programming and business resources to launch a functional version of the PDO platform in the market prior to our launch and claim credit.

It should be noted that the PDO donor portal ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars of revenue (we discussed his employer Mansueto Ventures selling PDO ad space for a commission), the donation methodology will eventually create billion dollar balances because we hold funds on behalf of donors in a manner similar to PayPal, and finally MIT thinks this project might win a Nobel Prize.

There are numerous possible financial motivations for his behavior.

Why should Drupal Association be highly concerned about this situation?

Part One:

It will be detrimental to both Drupal and the general open-source community should entrepreneurs, creatives, and other creators of important socially good projects suddenly have to question open-sourcing their projects for fear of administrators of open-source products grafting credit for their work at will. This situation does not foster the spirit of openness and collaboration; and this situation is currently on an inevitable course to becoming highly visible to millions of people. Having a self-run community is great, but there does need to be a mechanism within the community to assure that admins can't graft anything of interest and that assures people are rightfully credited for the contributions.

Part Two:

The “downside” of the PDO system that Oleg is ignoring in his short-sightedness, but is well aware of is something called “The Consumption Paradox”, which will affect all of us. The world is already on an unsustainable course of development due to our method of production, whether PDO exists or not. However, there is market dynamic logic that you all will understand:

If one launches a website that converts millions of the poor worldwide into market consumers on the level of western consumers, -without- compensating for their additional consumption of natural resources and increased carbon footprint... then basically one ends up accelerating the time line to calamities associated with our currently unsustainable development path.

1.(*See www.thestoryofstuff.com* to understand the seriousness of accelerating consumption)

The published 40% of PDO Stage One design is the “nucleus” of the system, where the other stages and safety protocols are unreleased. PDO strategy is simple, release part of it so everyone knows it works, but only release the other parts of the system that control the additional consumption once a trustworthy network of programmers and business people have been located.

PDO's financial value brings out a lot of greed in a lot of people, the data mining possibilities offer a lot of opportunities to abuse the general public, therefore the other stages of design will remain unpublished until proper conditions have been met.

It has always been and still is the plan to share the other stages with the open source community, however given circumstances, my caution has proven to be prudent. So while Oleg may be a gifted programmer, everyone reading this has to decide whether to do nothing and let a 24 yr old with limited knowledge of the system utilize your community's resources to build and get support for something he does not know how to control.

Or, Drupal Association can provide some form of assistance to the designer of the system, that's offering Drupal Association exclusive access to the other stages of design as means of helping to expand the Drupal community worldwide and creating cohesive, global PDO system.

I have read your charter and made inquiries, therefore I know that there may be limited actions that you can take regarding Oleg and/or even supporting PDO, so I suggest the following:

1.Endorse PDO by name – this would send a clear message to the community as to the origin of PDO functionality.

2.Remove Oleg from his admin role for misuse of his position – this would allow me to be able to use groups.drupal.org, without worry of his meddling

3.Do nothing and wait for this to become a very public scandal that will tarnish the drupal brand (not to mention the effects of the “Consumption Paradox” that will effect everyone)

The entire premise of this communication rests upon each of you believing that PDO can actually bring an end to poverty in years to come and truly fuel the level of consumption that I have alluded to. I understand that none of you have actually seen the PDO presentation therefore you have no clear understanding of how important of an innovation or size of “paradigm shift” that this project represents. But something should be obvious: MIT is not known for stupid people and they are willing to put their money behind this project:

http://web.mit.edu/mitpsc/resources/fellowships/involved/summer/selectin...

The drupalers that attended the Aug. 12th presentation are all highly skilled & intelligent, note their reactions to the presentation on this blog:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/24561?no_cache=1255551657

Also, next month PDO has been invited to Cambridge to hold a public demo / fundraiser that will be broadcast live via the web. I recommend you all tune in or attend f you can.

If anyone would like to contact me for a guided tour of the system and/or discuss this matter further, please feel free to contact me using the information below. Thanks in advance for your efforts.

Darryl Penrice
Executive Director
Poverty's Demise .Org (PDO)
darryl@povertysdemise.org
(347) 219-2463

CommentFileSizeAuthor
#3 drupal_text.txt795 bytesGhetto_Prodigy
drupal_text.txt795 bytesGhetto_Prodigy

Comments

chx’s picture

chx commented

It's not clear to me why any specific organization should have a group on gdo. Number 2 describes you set up a site where people tried to register and fail and what this has to do with gdo, again? About what happened on IRC, I would not be surprised if you were sending Oleg a number of messages and he simply decided to tell you on IRC that please leave me alone on IRC at least.

Amazon’s picture

Amazon commented
Priority: Critical » Normal

First a clarification:
1) The content on Drupal.org and groups.drupal.org is moderated by the drupal.org and groups.drupal.org moderators. These moderators are given a lot of leeway but are expected to collaborate with other moderators to reach consensus if a dispute arises and is contested. So your request should be addressed to the moderators, particularly the groups.drupal.org moderators. The Drupal association supports the Drupal.org website, but doesn't not control the content.

Oleg is certainly within his privileges to reject a group submission. Given your long description of your activities and world view I can certainly understand why he might question the motivations of your group. It's not a geographic group and it doesn't seem to be a Drupal working group, in that it's focused on your development model, and not on working on Drupal itself.

I agree with Chx that you've not clearly stated how logins were blocked, unless you mean a group on groups.drupal.org.

Ghetto_Prodigy’s picture

Ghetto_Prodigy commented
StatusFileSize
new drupal_text.txt795 bytes

Hi,

First with regards to the IRC, feel free to check the logs, I had not sent him many messages. He chose to go to the IRC to "grand stand" following an email communication. You'll also see that I have not regularly discussed PDO on the channel we have our own IRC channel.

With regards to Oleg, rejecting our group, it was done with malice. I have decided to use drupal as the content management system. In development of this charity platform it is our goal to create a drupal installation package that can freely be distributed throughout the world. Just like CivicCRM has a gdo group my organization needs a drupal working group to coordinate. If you read the attached text description of our group you will see that it was not geared towards politics, nor was it geared towards fund-raising, it was geared towards the exact purpose of g.d.o he had no legitimate reason to deny the group. Other programmers at a Hackaton on Aug 16th... (drewish) also thought Oleg's denial of our group was foolish after over hearing us discussing the situation. Drewish even jumped in the conversation and pointed out to Oleg that there are Indy Media groups that discuss "the freedom of speech" in their group posting, therefore denying my posting which was/is devoid of any political content did not make sense.

After the 16th is when I had to approach people in Boston for assistance in getting my group approved. The night of my presentation Oleg asked me numerous questions about how to use my project to expand drupal around the world and he even asked me about jointly approaching financial sponsors using his resources at Mansueto Ventures realizing that this project is worth millions of dollars. Knowing that I am not a high level coder, the next day he begins throwing up road blocks, with the logic beating me to market with a functional platform. At one point in our communications he directly stated "I have money and resources, what's to stop me from copying it." It was at this point I informed him of the Consumption Paradox.

Once we were able to eventually get a group established and published, yes he blocked people from registering. I intentionally had one of his friends that saw my presentation attempt to register to verify his actions. To this day we have not received notification of the individual's registration. If you review the server logs for visitors to the Drupal Against Poverty page from Sept. 6th through the end of Sept. you see mass amounts of hits from the drupal community that were blocked from registering, put out a mass message to the key drupal community ask them about the registering and if there was any odd communications from my group. If you google "project development plan" (a pretty general term) you will see that my group is in the top 5 search results because of the amount of traffic we receive from the drupal community worldwide.

As for my world views and my motivations, with all due respect I have literally created a means by which to end poverty using the Internet and instead of registering a company worth millions of dollars as a forprofit entity and keeping the revenue for myself; I registered the company as a nonprofit that redirects all the profits generated to the poorest children on Earth, establishing a market based social welfare payment that is not derived from a government budget and is therefore dependable. At the same time I am intentionally attempting to open-source the project as means of preventing others from utilizing my work to potentially abuse the general public. So while I may not fit the typical profile of an philanthropic individual and open-source advocate, I sincerely hope that my actions speak louder than words.

I am still getting support from other members of drupalnyc that saw the presentation understand my motivations. Folks that have been friends with Oleg longer than I are coming to my assistance. One of his own friends came to me in confidence to tell me what he is doing. While I know in terms of generating code and making contributions to community Oleg has an excellent track record, but in the real world people sometimes do stupid things when very large amounts of money are at stake. I hope that you guys can take an impartial view of things: this is an obvious good use of drupal that will not only benefit the drupal community, but also provide subsistence support to millions of people worldwide, so why would someone sabotage our efforts? Occam's Razor: Personal Interests.

Finally, if you watched the video that I recommended www.storyofstuff.com you will understand exactly how serious the "Consumption Paradox" is and how important it is that I am able to complete the full system design with the assistance of the open-source community. This 24 yr old is not only making a money grab, but he is endangering people's lives by trying to take control of project that he does not understand that essentially accelerates consumption faster than anyone previously thought possible. This project has endorsements from work from MIT, Princeton, and Dr. Ruth Richards the foremost expert on human creativity, he will -not- be able to re-create the necessary safety protocols and other stages of design that control the consumption. I am trying to do the right thing and donate what I have to the open-source community. I sincerely hope, you will be impartial, investigate, and take action before this becomes a full blown public scandal that benefits no one.

Best Regards,
Darryl Penrice

ps the complaint I posted yesterday was also sent to the Drupal Association (hence the addressing). One of the Association members directed me to post my concerns here.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

The group's creation date is Aug 13 and the group was approved *by litwol* on Aug 17.

4 days is not unreasonable time frame for approval of a group on gdo.

Registration is currently set to open and immediate on this group. The revision logs show that the group was initially set to 'approval required' and that the group owner (dcampbell24) changed this to no approval required on 9/29.3

The logs do not show this behavior. They show someone doing their job as an admin on g.d.o.

You keep adding all this meta/political commentary in your communications that distract from your claim and adding direct, personal attacks on a member of this community that has volunteered without issue for some time now.

Please tone done your rhetoric.

Ghetto_Prodigy’s picture

Ghetto_Prodigy commented

Litwol knew that I would keep persuing the group after the conversation on the 16th in which drewish was involved and pointed why out that denying my group was foolish, so he decided to approve the approve the group as the obviousness of motives would be known. His claim that secondary person above him in the community had to approve the group after his initial denial doesn't seem odd? I contacted a drupal guy out of Boston, who referred the issue to an admin there. Who might have asked litwol what was happening (I don't know this, but moments after I contacted the Boston people, the group was activated).

I instructed my project manager dcampbell to change the registration to open after -not- receiving a notification of approval request from g.d.o. when I had one of Oleg's friend attempt to register.

As for volunteering without issue... there is already a second drupalnyc splinter group being run by jeremy dolson because of Oleg's behavior. Several other members of Druaplnyc have directly stated they only attend the meetup because the office space provided by Mansueto Ventures and others in the community.. and have much harsher language than I to describe Oleg.

As for my postings, I am being very clear about the possible outcome of this situation and motivations because I was asked. I am doing this to make sure that there is public record of happenings. I've not voiced my concerns to other members of the drupalnyc community that have not brought up the issue directly with me because I do not wish to engage in political games. I'm actually trying to help people that need it. And while I think it is an unfortunate situation we have at the moment, he has left me no other choice.

I plan to webcast the Harvard presentation and I invite you all to watch, only once you understand my project might you understand the level of temptation that might have motivated one of your own take not cool actions.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented
Component: Project ownership » Groups.drupal.org

Changing to proper component: groups

I will note that 4 days is a rather fast turn around for group approval as it can take weeks for this to happen. There is more then one person able to approve groups on g.d.o. As to having someone else check, generally that means they ask other admins for their feedback and thoughts and then decide yes or no as a result, so that is not inconsistent with how things work.

I, personally, do not intend to watch your presentation nor do I see it, or its constant mention as relevant to the issue.

gdemet’s picture

gdemet
he/him
Primary language English
Location Chicago, USA
commented
Component: Groups.drupal.org » Project ownership
Status: Active » Fixed

It looks like the only question here that falls within the realm of this issue queue is whether or not litwol abused his position as a g.d.o admin to block approval of the "Drupal Against Poverty" group in violation of established community standards and practices.

Since the group was approved by litwol within four days of its creation and remains live, it doesn't sound like there is actually any issue here to deal with. The fact that some users have had trouble joining the group is probably due to the fact that g.d.o has been in the middle of a transition to Drupal 6 that has resulted in login problems for many users. I also believe that the default setting is to not receive email notifications for groups, so that likely explains why folks may not have been receiving messages they were expecting to get.

Even if litwol was initially against approving the group, it sounds like he changed his mind after talking to another admin, which is consistent with the way in which *.drupal.org site administrators are supposed to deal with these kinds of questions. Beyond that, everything else discussed in this complaint is really outside the realm of what site administrators can or should be spending their time dealing with.

Since the group is working properly, I'm going to mark this issue "fixed".

gdemet’s picture

gdemet
he/him
Primary language English
Location Chicago, USA
commented
Component: Project ownership » Groups.drupal.org
pwolanin’s picture

pwolanin commented

litwol discussed this group application with me and possibly other moderators on g.d.o - as amazon says, the group doesn't seem particularly focused on any of the areas that we typically approve groups for. Thus, I was in favor of rejecting the group. litwol went out of his way to refocus the group towards something that fit within our moderation criteria, so it was only through his extra effort that the group was approved at all. When we are busy, moderation requests sometimes take weeks to be resolved, so four days is unusually fast.

There is no right to have a group on g.d.o, and we reject many requests. This rant suggests you have not taken the time to appreciate the way this community works.

Ghetto_Prodigy’s picture

Ghetto_Prodigy commented
Component: Groups.drupal.org » Project ownership
Status: Fixed » Active

Been away from the computer.

My end goal with this complaint was to bring his actions to everyone's attention, so that he can not duplicate the work later and claim it as his own. Now that everyone is aware of my concerns if litwol does launch a knock-off of this project claiming credit or someone else in this community knock-offs the project, I've done my part of warning of the associated dangers that a lot of well educated sustainable development experts seem to see as a pretty major issue: The Consumption Paradox. I am openly offering the drupal community first access to the next stages of design which are quite essential.

With regards to my use of the g.d.o site when Oleg began his antics I decided not to use the group, beyond the post everyone has seen as not to alert him of my every step. Also, my intent in creating the group was/is to create an installation package of drupal modules that can distributed freely, very much in line with the purpose of g.d.o If Oleg misrepresented the purpose of my group to you pwolanin that is beyond my control. I don't think anyone here can read my original text that was denied and find that it is not in line g.d.o criteria.

What has not been addressed are his grand standing on the IRC channel check the logs. Also, why when 100's of programmers are coming to my group they suddenly can't register, everyone can easily say it was just a bug, which is what I expect him to say but the fact of the matter is that 100's of people came to support this project and could not register... rather convenient, for Oleg. sepeck says your server logs do not show this... which is well, fairly strange because my statcounter logs shows the volume of traffic of drupal folks coming from groups.drupal.org/drupal-against-poverty to my website.

Now, this complaint is just that, a complaint. They are never pretty, they are foul in nature, even more so when they concern an associate. As I stated earlier I hate that my first interaction with all of you is under these circumstances because, yes, first impressions are important. I absolutely considered prior to posting this complaint that all of you have known Oleg much longer than I, therefore this would be an uphill battle. This situation started in Aug., its now October, I did not lightly decide to make this posting and therefore this should not be characterize as random rant. I simply have no other choice because I have made several attempts to convince Oleg not to take this path, all of which he ignored.

While the nature of this project may not concern many of you (poverty), the fact of the matter is that there are many human lives at stake with regards to this project. This is not another module, this is not a random license dispute. I am organizing developers to create something that will touch the daily lives of millions of people. If you all truly believe that the actual chance to build a platform that can literally rid the world of poverty, and attract programmers around the globe into the Drupal Community is "no big deal", so be it.

But I'm still building PDO and the fact remains if there are two systems making the same exact claims to end poverty, questions that need answers will be raised. I have a very long trail proving that I'm the origin of the system. This wouldn't end well, hence I am voicing my concern here as you guys are responsible body.

chx’s picture

chx commented
Status: Active » Fixed

This issue is closed and there is no more to say. I do not think anyone needs to deal seriously with your rather baseless accusations that Oleg has anything to do with a technical problem with your group.

About the communications, both your behavior and Oleg confirmed my suspicions voiced earlier. He simply told you to stop. You instead escalated this to here. Now I am telling you to stop.

Crell’s picture

Crell commented
Component: Project ownership » Groups.drupal.org

hence I am voicing my concern here as you guys are responsible body.

I think there's the crux of the issue. Drupal.org is not the responsible body for what you and someone else do in terms of site building. You presented on an idea at a public meeting that you were planning to build with Drupal. Now that it's known, it's certainly possible that someone else may try to "beat you to market" on the idea, using Drupal or otherwise. Drupal is irrelevant to the question of someone else trying to replicate your planned business model. Any negative impact that such competition would have (to you or to your movement or to anything else) would be the same if they used Joomla, WordPress, SharePoint, or anything else. Whether or not that someone else is involved in Drupal is also, therefore, irrelevant.

This is simply not a Drupal issue one way or another.

Your best course of action is probably to remember that "the best revenge is success".

Ghetto_Prodigy’s picture

Ghetto_Prodigy commented

Responding to Crell...

let me explain something, if it was not clear earlier... this is not a popularity contest between the coolest module, the more gifted programmer, licenses, and so forth...

a functional launch of this system will come with short term kudos and fanfare, but will begin a cascade of rampant human consumption that Oleg, nor anyone else has the proper safety protocols and/or others stages of design to control.

unlike modules, unlike competing projects, in this scenario people will die... not a few people, a lot of people.

Call me and a lot of other highly educated people "chicken little", but the logic is very simple:

The world is already passed the brink of unsustatinable development, now PDO in it's current state is duplicated around the globe and adds not 45 million american hungry mouths, but 100's of millions of hungry mouths around the globe to the eco system in much shorter time than anyone thought possible... without the other parts that I am openly offering to your community, you will create a giant ecological nightmare that will get a lot of people killed.

Who am I? I'm nobody. I'm not a Phd., I'm not an engineer, or even an economist... but I do have endorsements from some very smart people. Also all ego to the side,, its just fact that I am the guy that solved the problem of poverty before any other human in all of history and perhaps I know certain things about the system that are of valuable use. I'm here now, not for fame, not for money, not for popularity... I am telling you that without other parts of the system that I am freely offering drupal... you are going to get a lot of people killed. is that clear enough?

I've done my duty and warned everyone, I've made my offer of assistance... best of luck gentlemen.

fyi, you guys live on this rock too, maybe self-preservation, maybe families and friends should be consider... but hey what do I know?

best of luck

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Our project has a mission

To develop a leading edge open-source content management system that implements the latest thinking and best practices in community publishing, knowledge management, and software design.

This is not your mission. You can take the tools that people have built and use it to present your mission on your own site.

Having passion in your mission does not mean others will.

We are happy that people use the tools we help build sites and present their missions. But still, it will be up to you to built and advocate on your site and infrastructure.

Groups is to be used to further Drupal's mission. If you wish to build a distribution based on Drupal, then that can fall in the scope of the Groups site. It is not a place for advocacy of your mission. Your own site/domain is.

This is not us preventing you from your mission. Your domain is that place to do this. No one has prevented you from doing this despite your relentless attacks on a volunteer in this community.

Best of luck in your advocacy. This is issue closed and locked.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.