Without the doc, if I hurl nasty insults and personal attacks, the community will tell me to fuck off and not accept my work. Won't they?
"Be respectful. If someone violates this, give them the benefit of the doubt and talk to them about it before bringing it to the community. We're all adults here, lets act like it."
It seems better to allow people to say what they want (with the assumption that it's reasonable and respectful) and provide a path for conflict resolution than to try to codify exactly what "respectful and reasonable" means. Both because that's different for every community, and any strict set of rules is ripe for rules lawyering/abuse.
This kind of thing isn't that necessary. Though some rules (like, I dunno, no posting dumbshit gifs) might tend to increase the quality of conversation. These particular ones seem more about making someone feel they've made an impact, rather than driving a high quality community. Though the justification will be that by policing everyone's behavior, we'll end up with all sorts of great work being done by people that are too offended to otherwise participate.
More likely, if you want to drive involvement, is to make sure your project itself isn't intimidating for people to start on. Good starter docs, explanations on how to submit changes, volunteers that gently help new comers, etc.
The Open Code of Conduct is a design-by-committee list of all the reasons you're a terrible person and you just don't know it yet, but don't worry as soon as you slip up we'll wage a campaign of harassment against you because you're "privileged" and you deserve it. And don't you dare criticize it, because "reverse"-isms don't exist.
She saw something she disagreed with in a Twitter conversation, and saw that the author's Twitter bio mentioned he contributed to Opal.
She then submitted an issue to that project suggesting he is not someone they should have in their project: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
This was a bit controversial.
There isn't really a right or wrong answer, in that the stereotype is usually true that workplaces that are horribly mismanaged or have certain inherent issues tend to be unionized because they really need it, and workplaces that are better managed or have different inherent conditions tend not to have a union. Likewise there are some groups of humans that need more... political thought police... than other groups of humans. And the groups that need thought police, frankly, do need them, and the groups that don't, tend to really not need them, to the point where it wouldn't be just a merely useless appendix but an actual cancer on the group.
Most of the drama (for both unionization and conduct codes) comes from insider debates about exactly which category a group belongs to, worst case its kinda 50:50, or from outsiders just rabble rousing as political operatives often do. Sometimes ignorance breeds hatred, when otherwise well meaning folks who don't really know anything, none the less have very strong opinions based on lack of experience, or anecdote.
ESR has written about one of the CoC authors here: https://archive.is/6F9Yr
Tldr: the people who claims to deliver a product providing order and civility (the "CoC") are usually the people who are conducting the abusive behaviour.
In such a CoC is very alarming signal with regard to who is in charge of a project's management.
> We will not act on complaints regarding:
> ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
This code of conduct applies both within project
spaces and in public spaces when an individual is
representing the project or its community.
For example, suppose on my personal website I include a link to my resume, and on that resume I list my work on the project. Suppose also on my personal website I have have a blog, and on that blog I post an article containing sexualized language or imagery.
Am I in violation of the CC?
The use of sexualized language or imagery is one of the specific examples given in the CC of a violation.
I would say that, based on current common usage of English, stating on a site unrelated to the project, as part of biographical information (such as a resume) that I contribute to the project would NOT be "representing the project or its community", and so would be outside the scope of the CC.
Some links: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 https://twitter.com/elia/status/611319469982527488 https://github.com/opal/opal/pull/961
Opal's code of conduct says:
"This code of conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces where an individual explicitly associates their presence with the project; non-project related material on accounts explicitly marked as personal should not be considered to be so associated."
Having someone post things in a public place where they identify as a member of a group can reflect badly on the group. It is in the group's best interest to enforce that people who identify with a group on a certain medium do not say/do things that would not be allowed on official group channels.
This specific instance seems to have been intended to be interpreted differently than it was and did not need to be brought into the spotlight.
Have we been reading the same thing? What about the part where they consider "other unethical or unprofessional conduct" to be violations of the CC?
This whole thing is set up to be arbitrary and highly political in its application. I invite everyone to see the broad and hand-wavy language for themselves: http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/2/0/code_of_conduc...
It's only 18 lines long, if you can believe it.
None the less, for a corporate interpretation of the exact same topic but with respect to email:
http://www.emaildisclaimers.com/Sample_disclaimers.htm#Liabi...
Generally speaking identifying yourself as a legal representative of a project or community has all kinds of interesting legal problems; you don't want the project sued because some idle conversation between some contributor and a service provider was seen by the provider as a verbal contract between them and the project for their services.
Another example would be copyright, if the project owns the copyright to your self made pr0n example (because you posted it on the project wiki) then you're probably in huge trouble, but if everyone legally agrees you own the copyright and not the project, well, its kind of hard to argue you represent someone you're clearly not legally working for.
It seems like you don't need a laundry list of things that are not OK to harass people about unless certain types of harassment are OK. For example "differences of opinion" is not on the list. Is it OK to harass someone who disagrees with me? I doubt that's the intention, and it's probably covered by the rest of the covenant, but if that's the case why do they need to list out all the things it's not OK to harass people about? It just seems needlessly complicated and ripe for causing further drama.
Maybe they're just aping what they see in other places. Eg freedom of religion should be a no-op, fully covered by other rights. Folks should be free to think and do as they please. Religion shouldn't be an excuse to get away with other things. Yet this wording seems copied around as if it was deep or something. Same thing here, with a few added classes?
Are you sad that it's being made explicit and being talked about or that it's being talked about in terms of identity politics?
The Contributor Covenant's approach seems to be to make a clear statement of intent, and relying on the community to apply it correctly. It doesn't specifically ban, say, offering a backrub, but the necessary and appropriate response to someone saying "ha, but there's no rule against repeatedly offering a stranger backrubs, IS there?" isn't to draft a new rule, it's to show them the door.
And, as I've been repeating ad nauseam, these codes of conduct fail to distinguish between genuine harassment and garden variety ass-hattery. Attempting to govern the latter is a fool's errand, and good for nobody in the long run.
I don't think anybody can honestly claim to have never fallen short of absolute professionalism and kindness. These codes of conduct are little more than pretexts to ostracize and publicly shame arbitrary individuals.
What exactly constitutes "representing the project or its community"?
It refers to anything that the mob disagrees with.
This is the most scary development in open source I have witnessed.
I will have nothing to do with an open source project that means I cannot express my views in public (whatever those views might be) without fear of reprisal.
Related HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043356
Edit: looking at the discussion in general and this article by ESR[1] in particular, I'm surprised they didn't just drop this COC nonsense entirely instead of adopting a new "flawed" one.