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I hear you, I definitely agree with your premise, but my worry is that this will basically boil down to a political test to participate in many FOSS communities

I hear you, I definitely agree with your premise, but my worry is that this will basically boil down to a political test to participate in many FOSS communities. At what point do you deem social behavior unacceptable? It's a fine line to draw and one that might be difficult for many communities to do correctly.

HerraBRE 10y ago
Drawing that line is exactly what codes of conduct are supposed to do - and like everything else in our community, these are documents which are copied, forked and improved by pull requests.
- problems 10y ago
  The problem is it still needs to be up to project leaders to make a determination of whether or not the behavior violates those codes of conduct. And they might not be particularly well equipped for that. What's considered "harassment" for example? Does 1 off comment count or does it need to be systemic? What if it was a heat of the moment situation and an apology was made afterwards? Does expressing an opinion less than the generally accepted one about a rape case for example count as misogyny? What about mental health comments not in line with generally accepted opinions, but which might still hold some validity? How about defending political opinions based on your religion? There are too many questions that I know many people would respond very differently to.
  - HerraBRE 10y ago
    There are indeed many questions. But a lot of people have spent a lot of time thinking about these things. The answers are out there... I think if we take a step back and don't try to invent all the wheels ourselves, we'll find that almost all of these questions have established answers from the world of business and human resources. We do have to get past the first step though, which is agreeing that these are problems we care to solve. The wider community is still divided on that, as illustrated by this thread and the comments on the OP.
    - problems 10y ago
      I don't think "the answers are out there" so cut and dry. There's many political and social opinions that there isn't a clear resolution on. So unless we have a very good way to solve this concretely and provably I think it's best to not get involved in trying.
      - inopinatus 10y ago
        No, that is a reason to keep trying and iteratively improving. Just because a problem is hard, doesn't mean we should all give up on it.
        problems 10y ago
        That's all well and good for most things, but something that commonly involves shunning people from your communities I don't think so. You need a higher standard - one which we don't have. Even HR people can be fired and are somewhat liable for their decisions. When it comes to oversight, there's just too little here.
    - forgottenpass 10y ago
      There are indeed many questions. But a lot of people have spent a lot of time thinking about these things. The answers are out there... Yet conspicuously absent in your post is a link to where those answers are. I suspect that because as soon as you link to one you've actually drawn a line in the ground. Instead of codes of conduct which sort of fuzzily describe that one exists "out there." And once you start talking about where lines are really drawn, it becomes easy see how little agreement there actually is. Even among people that are more-or-less on the same page regarding which problems "we" care to solve.
      - makomk 10y ago
        Indeed. Fredrik deBoer wrote a good post about this kind of vague certainty as a more general aspect of a certain kind of politics: http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/12/06/condescending-certain-and-incoherent/ http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/12/06/condescending-certain-an...
gdwatson 10y ago
"At what point do you deem social behavior unacceptable? It's a fine line to draw and one that might be difficult for many communities to do correctly." This is key. A large part of contemporary American (and, as I understand it, European) politics involves struggles over the size of the Overton window. This means that even people with little interest in the project will have a strong incentive to use the project's code of conduct as a tool for defining the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the communities that overlap with the project.

HerraBRE 10y ago

Drawing that line is exactly what codes of conduct are supposed to do - and like everything else in our community, these are documents which are copied, forked and improved by pull requests.

problems 10y ago
The problem is it still needs to be up to project leaders to make a determination of whether or not the behavior violates those codes of conduct. And they might not be particularly well equipped for that. What's considered "harassment" for example? Does 1 off comment count or does it need to be systemic? What if it was a heat of the moment situation and an apology was made afterwards? Does expressing an opinion less than the generally accepted one about a rape case for example count as misogyny? What about mental health comments not in line with generally accepted opinions, but which might still hold some validity? How about defending political opinions based on your religion? There are too many questions that I know many people would respond very differently to.
- HerraBRE 10y ago
  There are indeed many questions. But a lot of people have spent a lot of time thinking about these things. The answers are out there... I think if we take a step back and don't try to invent all the wheels ourselves, we'll find that almost all of these questions have established answers from the world of business and human resources. We do have to get past the first step though, which is agreeing that these are problems we care to solve. The wider community is still divided on that, as illustrated by this thread and the comments on the OP.
  - problems 10y ago
    I don't think "the answers are out there" so cut and dry. There's many political and social opinions that there isn't a clear resolution on. So unless we have a very good way to solve this concretely and provably I think it's best to not get involved in trying.
    - inopinatus 10y ago
      No, that is a reason to keep trying and iteratively improving. Just because a problem is hard, doesn't mean we should all give up on it.
      - problems 10y ago
        That's all well and good for most things, but something that commonly involves shunning people from your communities I don't think so. You need a higher standard - one which we don't have. Even HR people can be fired and are somewhat liable for their decisions. When it comes to oversight, there's just too little here.
  - forgottenpass 10y ago
    There are indeed many questions. But a lot of people have spent a lot of time thinking about these things. The answers are out there... Yet conspicuously absent in your post is a link to where those answers are. I suspect that because as soon as you link to one you've actually drawn a line in the ground. Instead of codes of conduct which sort of fuzzily describe that one exists "out there." And once you start talking about where lines are really drawn, it becomes easy see how little agreement there actually is. Even among people that are more-or-less on the same page regarding which problems "we" care to solve.
    - makomk 10y ago
      Indeed. Fredrik deBoer wrote a good post about this kind of vague certainty as a more general aspect of a certain kind of politics: http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/12/06/condescending-certain-and-incoherent/ http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/12/06/condescending-certain-an...

gdwatson 10y ago

"At what point do you deem social behavior unacceptable? It's a fine line to draw and one that might be difficult for many communities to do correctly." This is key. A large part of contemporary American (and, as I understand it, European) politics involves struggles over the size of the Overton window. This means that even people with little interest in the project will have a strong incentive to use the project's code of conduct as a tool for defining the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the communities that overlap with the project.