Dear Members of the Funkwhale Collective,

Today, I need to inform you about what happened over the last few weeks regarding Ginny McQueen.

In order to explain the events we need to have some background. Ginny joined the project as a paid contributor early 2019. Some more about Ginny's history with Funkwhale can be read in her Community Spotlight. When Agate stepped down and the Funkwhale project was slowly moving to a new group of people, Ginny left the project.

Now I noticed she was posting on Mastodon again and I had some interactions with her until she remembered me and linked me to a blog post of her about her perspective on what happened.

Even though Ginny stated she couldn't do unpaid work for Funkwhale any more when she left, I didn't realize how bad the situation was until I read her blog post. This is my fault. My reaction to the leave message should have been different: I should have asked questions about the deal and tried to fix the situation immediately.

The issues Ginny raised in her post and the subsequent handling of the situation are all problematic and unprofessional. It makes the project's stated commitment to diversity ring hollow. The emails sent to Ginny were not worded carefully and thoughtfully enough, and talking to her on social media after all this was a huge mistake. And I am sorry. Ginny described her perspective in another blog post.

As stated, "sorry" and "thank-you" don't pay bills, so I started investigating the details of our debt. I talked about this with Sporiff and Agate and we did some calculations which sum up to 8.000€. This is based on the initial agreement between Ginny and Agate, from which Ginny earned 250€/week. This changed with the introduction of NLNet funding, however since Agate stopped working on the items there wasn't any payment anymore and when we started getting money from the funding again, Ginny's payments weren't factored in. So we summed up the weeks between the last 250€ payment and the date Ginny left the project. We substracted the money paid out to Ginny from the NLNet funding. 8000€ was the remaining total.

After consultation with Agate we agreed that I would pay a share (1500€, already done), she will pay some money (this amount is not yet decided) and the rest will be paid out by myself from funded work.