Re: [PATCH] add a Code of Conduct document

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 24, 2019, 21:09 UTC
Message-ID: <20190924210918.GC20858@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <89c6f5b7-aeab-740c-06b6-e50232266fd4@web.de>

On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 10:14:55PM +0200, René Scharfe wrote:

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> > +* Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks
> 
> Hmm.  Trolling can be helpful, if done right.  I consider this to be a
> good example: https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/.  Wrote some
> texts that look like that..

I suppose one man's joke is another man's troll. Is the manpage generator too mean? I don't think so (I think it's quite funny). I guess somebody could. But at some point all of these terms are open to interpretation, and we're going to have to rely on discussion and precedent.

I don't think step 1 would ever be "report the manpage generator to the committee, and get it banned!". For one thing, we have no control over their domain, and it really exists outside of our development community. So at most we say "yeah, we don't like that; please don't". But more importantly, I think step 1 is somebody saying "hey, this kind of seems in poor taste", and then we all have a discussion about it.

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> "Personal and political attacks" sound really scary and don't seem to
> match trolling and insulting in severity.  Perhaps I don't understand
> the intended meaning.  In any case, I also wouldn't want anyone to be
> beaten up or swatted, get a lower social credit score or be forced out
> of public office over participation in our project.

I take political attacks to be things like "Everyone from Country X is a moron", or "People who support political party X are jerks". You might even have a legitimate complaint about somebody's politics, but if they're not bringing their politics into the project, it seems wrong to attack them over it.

I do think there's some grey area there, though, because there _is_ some intersection of politics (e.g., a discussion about licensing could easily get into discussion of laws and IP). But if people are talking constructively about it, and not attacks like "the party you support has a dumb interpretation of the GPL", that seems fine to me.

Again, I really think the point here is not to enumerate all possibilities. It's to set some general expectations, and to make it clear that we value the idea of having a genial atmosphere for communication that we have a document and a reporting mechanism.

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> > +* Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a
> > +  professional setting
> 
> This is very vague.  It could match eating at your desk, tipping, not
> tipping, not wearing a tie, or talking back to a senior developer.

Here I'd go back to "discussion and precedent" from above. Community norms are a moving target to some degree. Wearing a tie was unprofessional at one point, and now that is very much not the case, at least in the programming profession. I think we have to stay somewhat vague and rely on the social interactions of the community to resolve things (and again, this is more or less what the status quo is; the document is mostly a commitment from project leadership to take seriously discussion and complains about behavior within the project).

-Peff