Re: Raise your hand to Ack jk/code-of-conduct if your Ack fell thru cracks

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email>
Date: Oct 17, 2019, 13:56 UTC
Message-ID: <00cb61a1-0044-1faf-b237-2ac449a34091@iee.email>
In-Reply-To: <20191011055827.GA20094@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Hi all,

On 11/10/2019 06:58, Jeff King wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> I snipped your concerns with some of the language. I do agree with you
> that a lot of is open to interpretation. But I also think it's
> impossible to get it 100% airtight. My feeling was that it was a good
> idea to go with some existing, well-established text, even if it has
> some wiggle room. And then rely on the existing community and especially
> the people listed above to do that interpretation.
>
> So...
>
>> Just pointing out some concerns of mine.  No ack from me
>> (but it's not a NACK, either).  I'm pretty ambivalent...
> For me it is obviously an ack, but I wanted to make clear that I think
> your concerns (and those of others who spoke up, like René and Gábor)
> are certainly_valid_. I just think that adopting this CoC is, while not
> perfect, the least-bad option.
>
> I'd also say that we might consider living with it for a while (6
> months? a year?) and seeing if people have an interest in revising it
> after that point based on experience.

  I also didn't positively ack the CoC (code of conduct).

I'm not sure it addresses the broader _underlying_ issues that may need to be addressed that are behind the pressure for CoCs. I'd also commented [1] on the git-for-windows CoC partly because the CoC didn't positively address the need for tolerance.

These CoCs are essentially defensive, rather than forward looking. In essence they say:

We are a welcoming and inspiring community, open to anyone and everyone(all 2^16 variants).

We list various egregious behaviours that are unwanted and hence intolerable.

We list responses to such intolerable behaviour.

However we (in the CoC document) don't really address what we may need to do to extend the community to the broader many.

Part of the wider problem is we often don't appreciate our pre-existing organisational biases (e.g.[2, 3]) that we fit into within a community. For example the implicit gender bias toward independent sole author contributions[4], rather than the inclusiveness of co-authorship as a norm.

While following peff's "interpretation" document link [5], I did see, in the wider kernel document, that it does have a "Co-developed-by:" option [6] but then requires a secondary "Signed-off-by:", thus making those who co-author do extra work, which shouldn't be required.

Thus, while the CoC is good, for clarifying the egregious behaviour issues, it doesn't really address the wider 'Diversity and Equality' *expectations* within the community.

Philip

[1] https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/pull/661#issuecomment-186846113 [2] "institutional racism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism [3] "institutional sexism" ... no Wikipedia article? [4] https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/sponsored/3082288/want-to-increase-diversity-it-starts-with-the-job-ad [5] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-conduct-interpretation.html [6] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-patches.html