Paris 'Love Nest' & Debian Outreachy: from Lycée Lakanal to ENS Cachan, Cr@ns, nepotism
Outreachy & Debian have started asking women to spend time applying for a new round of internships.
Every woman I've worked with has had at least one story about missing out on a job or promotion because a girlfriend jumped the queue.
Outreachy has been exploited in various ways that run at odds to the interests of women and diversity.
Is Outreachy a social engineering attack to trick women into dating male developers?
I was a mentor and administrator in both Outreachy and Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for a number of years. I can confirm that other developers either asked me to consider their girlfriends or pursued romances with women after they were selected.
Rather than cleaning up the program, if that is even possible, the immature people spread rumours that my own intern was dating me. This type of rumour is offensive to any woman but in this particular case, it was even more offensive because she got married during the same summer as her internship.
Here is a screenshot of Ariadne Conill from the Debian / Zizian gossip hit squad spreading rumours about my intern:
Another rumour they created concerns abuse. Cardinal George Pell was convicted on 11 December 2018 and a few days later, on Christmas Eve, rogue Debianists sent out an email with rumours about abuse.
In a healthy organization, the leadership figures would defend the dignity of the volunteers and our families and say what needs to be said to stop the rumours. In the world of Debian, when the leaders fail to maintain peoples' dignity, the only option we have is to publish the full evidence so the community can see who really abused who. Then we can see who is lying. This is a horrible way to do things, especially with a subject like abuse but this is the result when the leaders fail to resolve the disputes with dignity.
I've never published any private evidence except in those cases where it was necessary to rebut lies that people spread online. For example, when people spread the lie that my intern was a girlfriend, I eventually published the emails showing that it was really Nicolas Dandrimont who promoted his girlfriend for Outreachy. Now it is time to put that affair under the microscope and see if this is where the abuse happened.
On 16 April 2015, A/Prof Lucas Nussbaum, former Debian Project Leader, appointed Nicolas Dandrimont and Sylvestre Ledru as the Debian Outreach Team, along with two non-developers, Molly de Blanc and Tom Marble. Nussbaum is a professor at Université de Lorraine, France and both of the developers he appointed, Dandrimont and Ledru, are also French. A few days later, Neil McGovern won the election and during his year as leader he left the same Outreach administrators in place. In April 2016, Mehdi Dogguy was elected leader. He is also from France, like Dandrimont and Ledru and he too left them in their posts for the duration of his term. Dogguy works in HPC at Electricité de France (EDF) and he is based near Paris.
Nicolas Dandrimont submitted his application to become a Debian Developer in February 2013. He received advocacies from Arno Töll and Mehdi Dogguy. The application manager (AM) was Martin Zobel-Helas.
On 5 July 2013, the AM report was published, including quotes from Dandrimont's original application:
A few weeks ago, zack asked me to become a GSoC organization admin for Debian, and I (foolishly? :D) accepted
This implies that his application to become a Debian Developer may have been fast-tracked so that he would be available for the unpaid work of GSoC administration. zack was the former Debian Project Leader, Stefano Zacchiroli, who was assistant professor of computer science at University Paris Diderot (PPS lab) as well as a researcher at IRILL.
In 2007, when I entered ENS Cachan, I joined CRANS, a student group that manages the whole network in the residences there ...
[ snip ]
CRANS is a "nest" of Debian Developers (well, I know of three, Cyrille Chepelov, Vincent Bernat, and Stéphane Glondu), ...
What happens when you take a "nest" of male students and you add a young woman? By Dandrimont's own admission, the woman became his girlfriend. What started out as a mere nest is now a fully feathered Debian love nest.
Looking at his girlfriend's CV, the page about education tells us she started her undergraduate studies at ENS Cachan in September 2011. On the page about her voluntary activities, she tells us that three months later, in December 2011, she became a trainee for the male students running the CRANS network.
In July 2016, the former Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli (zack) had told us about his wife giving birth to their first baby. When leaders do something big like this, it has a tendency to fertilize the minds of those around them. Other developers start seeing themselves on the road to fatherhood. Remember, Zack and Dandrimont are both based in Paris and Zack was the former leader who promoted Dandrimont to become a Debian Developer for the purpose of mentoring programs.
Outreachy rules tell us that Outreachy is for women to gain their first contact with the open source community. In October 2016, when Dandrimont's girlfriend applied to Outreachy, she already had five years experience collaborating with other Debian Developers in CRANS. This is an obvious violation of the rules. Given that Dandrimont was an administrator of the program, why didn't he tell us about this?
Here is the Outreachy Eligibility page from 2016. From the rules:
Eligible participants must meet all the following requirements:
[ ... snip ... ]
Because the program is intended to help newcomers and contributors who are relatively new to the FOSS community ...
This pattern of rule breaking is an uncomfortable subject because we can see that Nicolas Dandrimont has subsequently been appointed to the Debian Account Managers team.
Looking at his girlfriend's education history again, we can see that she was an undegraduate in Biology and Health. What motivated a Biology student to become a volunteer in a student-run IT network project so soon after arriving at university?
To look for answers, we take a side-step. Pierre-Elliott Bécue. Bécue sent his application to become a Debian Developer on 10 November 2017. He told us he joined CRANS one year before Dandrimont's girlfriend, at the end of 2010. The French web site for ex-boyfriends/ex-girlfriends (copains d'avant) has a list of high schools he attended. He did his final year of high school, from September 2009 to June 2010, at the elite Lycée Lakanal.
Lycée Lakanal is roughly equivalent to the highly-selective and elite Melbourne High School in Australia. Significantly, it is a preparatory school for teenagers on their way to the ENS Cachan. The high school is located in the neighbourhood of Sceaux, adjacent to Cachan in the south of Paris.
Returning to the CV of Dandrimont's girlfriend, we can see that she spent three years at Lycée Lakanal, from September 2008 to August 2010.
When she applied to Outreachy & Debian in October 2016, she told everybody she was 24.
Therefore, when Bécue arrived at Lycée Lakanal in September 2009, she may have been 16 or 17.
Even more awkward, when Dandrimont's girlfriend arrived at Lycée Lakanal in September 2008, she was 15 or 16. Dandrimont, who was already at the neighbouring ENS Cachan, is four years older.
It is fair to ask if she already knew Bécue from high school and if she already knew anybody from the "nest" as a consequence of the fact these schools are in adjoining neighbourhoods. This gives us some clues about how a Biology student arrived at ENS Cachan and almost immediately chose to become a volunteer in a Debian Linux nest. She may have already met some of these people prior to arriving at the ENS.
In 2015, news reports appeared about students from the ENS Cachan visiting local mosques to show empathy. Islamic terrorists had conducted coordinated attacks on Friday, 13 November 2015. There had been a series of reprisals against the Muslim community. The news reports all have pictures of Nicolas Dandrimont and Maria / Pauline Climent-Pommeret together sticking hearts to the door of a mosque. One report contains quotes from Dandrimont's girlfriend:
C’est un message de soutien et de fraternité pour ne pas être divisé dans les moments que l’on vit.
Translated to English:
It is a message of support and brotherhood to avoid being divided at this difficult moment.
Look at how rogue Debianists, including her boyfriend, attacked my family. Why did they make this initiative for mosques after the terrorist attacks but they attacked my family when my father died? There is a smell of hypocrisy.
Notice that in the news report and in her application for a paid Outreachy internship with Debian, Dandrimont's girlfriend is using the name Pauline Pommeret. In her web site and in the web sites of other institutions where she had internships, she uses the name Maria Climent-Pommeret. The news report tells us her Twitter name is Chopopope. Here they are together eleven months before she applied for the paid Outreachy internship:
The time that they recruited the woman into the nest, December 2011, was at the peak of the Debian pregnancy cluster. In other words, the older generation of Debian Developers, being role models for Dandrimont and Bécue, were sharing rooms with female colleagues at DebConf and fathering children with those same colleagues.
At the time Dandrimont told us he would recuse himself from his role as an administrator, the other administrator in the program was Sylvestre Ledru. Ledru, by coincidence, was also based in Paris at the time and part of the same Debian France cabal. Therefore, Ledru may have known more than the rest of us about the number of years Dandrimont's girlfriend had been in their nest.
Ledru's approval of the candidacy:
Subject: Re: Recusing myself from Outreachy applicant selection decisions, internships funding Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2016 14:53:57 +0200 From: Sylvestre Ledru <sylvestre@debian.org> To: Nicolas Dandrimont <olasd@debian.org>, leader@debian.org, outreach@debian.org CC: mapreri@debian.org, pocock@debian.org Le 14/10/2016 à 12:37, Nicolas Dandrimont a écrit : > Hey all, > > As of today, the person I'm involved with, Pauline Pommeret, is applying to an > Outreachy internship in Debian (on the GPG cleanroom environment project - I > don't see her mail on the list archive yet, so something must have gone wrong, > but it should arrive soon enough). > > To avoid an obvious conflict of interest, I am recusing myself for any > decisions regarding applicant selections for this round. I don't think you should. I think you proved that you care a lot about Debian and its community and you will remain a good judge. If she is selected, this is going because of the quality of the proposition. Sylvestre
Notice that in Dandrimont's email, he refers to his girlfriend using her pseudonym, Pauline Pommeret and at no point did Dandrimont tell us that is not her real identity. Volunteers only discovered by chance that Pauline is not her real name.
Mehdi Dogguy, then Debian Project Leader (DPL), was a recipient of the email. We did not see him comment on it at all. As noted earlier, he is also based near Paris but he may not be as close to the group as those in the immediate geographical proximity of the nest at ENS Cachan. Given that all of these people mingle at events in Paris from time to time, he may have met the girlfriend and he may have had a better perception than those who only saw it on email.
Prior to working for Mozilla, Ledru had been based at SciLab Enterprises in Versailles. That is the same region of south-west Paris where we find the Lycée Lakanal. Ledru arrived there in 2006, before Dandrimont, Bécue and Climent-Pommeret arrived in the region. Versailles is about five minutes from the nest at ENS Cachan, as the crow flies.
The last line of Ledru's email, "If she is selected, this is going because of..." reveals the nature of the arrangement: having an independent developer conduct the selection process is a charade that helps give legitimacy to an outcome that no other female intern can trust.
Notice how quickly Mozilla rushed to censor my blog in January 2019 without giving any valid reason. Mozilla's manifesto claims we are committed to transparency but the hit squad didn't want to see an elected community representative sharing copies of these emails.
Looking at Maria / Pauline Climent-Pommeret's LinkedIn profile, we can see Dandrimont's girlfriend received a whole series of very short internships and placements and some of them appear to be institutions where other Debian Developers are present.
Shortly after Mozilla & Debian censored my blog, Le Figaro published an article about France's elite universities in 2019, discussing the concerns about merit, elitism, dating (copinage) and nepotism.
It appears possible she came into the group when she was a teenager, so it is more than just a casual girlfriend situation. As the saying goes, birds of a feather stick together. She is like a little sister for denizens of the Debian CRANS "nest". Other women competing against a woman like this for any internship, in any institution with Debian Developers, may not have a fair chance. Looking at all the very short placements on her CV, it feels like they are handballing her from one internship to the next until she is big enough to find a husband and make her own nest.
In hindsight, there is absolutely no way I would select another Debian Developer's girlfriend for an internship in these cirumstances. If I had all this information in front of me at the moment her application was presented on the mailing list, I would have been very concerned at the possibility that she had entered the nest as a teenager and Debian money would be used to dampen any regrets she may develop retrospectively about hooking up at such a young age.
Yet Dandrimont wasn't even telling us her real name. While supposedly "recusing" himself, he was helping her conceal her nesting history.
We saw similar phenomena in the Catholic abuse crisis. Some victims were offered valuable and prestigious scholarships at elite schools for themselves or their children. The scholarships are more than money: after somebody has put the name of the school on their CV, it is harder for them to turn around and criticize the institution. We see the same phenomena with Debian. It is ironic that Outreachy, a program that claims to promote diversity, is really being used to pay for women to stay cool about their nest-life.
We may never receive full details about behaviour in the nest. What we do know is that over $120,000 was spent on legal fees to censor web sites about Debian nest behaviour.
None of this information appeared in public by accident. Joerg Jaspert (ganneff) spread rumours about abuse and this forced everybody to ask who abused who.
Shortly after he started spreading abuse rumours, Jaspert was elected to the parent representative committee for Dalbergschule in Fulda.
Eggs in the nest / Debian pregnancy cluster reports
- Margarita Manterola (marga, Google) & Debian DebConf13 Swiss venue intrigue
- Debian Pregnancy Cluster, when I stopped using IRC
- Polygamy, from Catholic Synod on Synodality to Social Control Media & Debian CyberPolygamy
- Outreachy & Debian pregnancy cluster, Meike Reichle evidence
- Lucas Nussbaum & Debian pregnancy cluster
- Stefano Zacchiroli (Zack) & Debian pregnancy cluster
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.