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This is a question worth discussing. But I'm not sure I like the implicit assumption that a "community" is a discrete entity entirely divorced from all other su

This is a question worth discussing. But I'm not sure I like the implicit assumption that a "community" is a discrete entity entirely divorced from all other such entities. If you're contemplating a person's activities outside a particular social group, you aren't asking "does this affect my social group?", but rather "what impact does this have on society at large?" I can't see that it's controversial to suggest that someone may act in one context in a way that should have consequences for their activities in another context - we quite happily accept, for instance, that a violent drunk ought not to be permitted to teach children, even if they have never been drunkenly violent towards children. I don't see that a software development project should be any different from any other subset of human society in this respect.

mjg59 9y ago
Software development projects are somewhat different in that they frequently include a large number of people from very disparate cultural backgrounds and little in-person social contact. The lack of the sort of social cohesion that we see in more traditional social groups is part of the reason that open source projects are increasingly adopting explicit behavioural guidelines, but the risk there becomes that those guidelines are considered the totality of what should be taken into account when determining whether someone does more harm than good within a community. Coming up with a more formalised set of considerations for external behaviour would help there.
- eponeponepon 9y ago
  I don't think this is peculiar to software development though. The same is true of discussion fora, gaming organisations, multinational businesses - the extent to which it's an issue in the modern connected world is greater, sure, but it's not a direct result of wider communication. I'm willing to bet it was an issue thousands of years ago in busy trading centres too. edit: this is an interesting aside: "Coming up with a more formalised set of considerations for external behaviour would help there." Isn't this to some extent what religions have been trying to do for millennia?
  - mjg59 9y ago
    The same is true of those other groups, but the goals and incentive structures are somewhat different there. The prevalence of codes of conduct in open source projects and relative rarity of them in other online groups suggests that there's some sort of difference in how people view them.
- VLM 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on how the given postulate of "very disparate cultural backgrounds" correlates with the assumed authoritarian outcome of convert to a set of religious purity laws and rituals and (very long) list of groups and opinions that must be hated and shunned, at the point of a sword, or die? Am I missing the chronological component, perhaps today's revealed truth is permitted goodthink, but converts from historically variable backgrounds are permitted as long as there is absolutely no variation in current opinion, sorta a sinners redemption argument? "very disparate cultural backgrounds" should mean more than "how many angels dance on the head of a pin" level of disagreement between authoritarian fundamentalist sects, or in the context of the actual demographics of software development, which ivy league school a young wealthy urban coastal left wing white male attended. In a field suffering from a demographic crisis of non-diversity, it seems weird to propose a religious purity test to kick out the non-believers as some kind of inherent good, because the result of implementing a religious purity test can't possibly be good for diversity. The argument seems to be "If we just get rid of everyone who thinks differently than us using ever more elaborate formalized and authoritarian religious purity tests, then we'll have all the benefits of diversity with none of the costs" but I don't think the real world works that way. Historically trying to strengthen a dying movement by radicalizing it even further from mainstream has generally failed to revive the movement. Its an interesting chicken vs egg problem where dying ideologies and radicalization usually correlate, and the question is causation, which causes the other? I'm assuming, given your support for radicalization, you're on the team that sees dying ideology as a cause of radicalization. I realize using logic in a discussion about religion is irrational in and of itself, but thinking purely logically, if you see the legacy ideology as dying, then why not "switch over" ahead of time and be ahead of the pack if the legacy view is going to die out and be replaced anyway? Or do you see it as, yes 99% of the time, historically radicalization has destroyed the movement, but this time radicalization is the occasional rare situation where it'll work? And if so, why this time with this movement? There doesn't appear to be any observable reason to think today's movement is unusual.
  - mjg59 9y ago
    I'm sorry there's just a whole bunch of words here that don't seem to correspond to anything I said.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  > Coming up with a more formalised set of considerations for external behaviour would help there. I think this is backwards – the more formalized such considerations are the more conflict there will be. Formal rules invite 'lawyering' and lobbying and now your project or community becomes another battleground for never-ending political conflict. Empirically (but not rigorously, by me anyways), the best groups seem to regulate themselves informally.

mjg59 9y ago

Software development projects are somewhat different in that they frequently include a large number of people from very disparate cultural backgrounds and little in-person social contact. The lack of the sort of social cohesion that we see in more traditional social groups is part of the reason that open source projects are increasingly adopting explicit behavioural guidelines, but the risk there becomes that those guidelines are considered the totality of what should be taken into account when determining whether someone does more harm than good within a community. Coming up with a more formalised set of considerations for external behaviour would help there.

eponeponepon 9y ago
I don't think this is peculiar to software development though. The same is true of discussion fora, gaming organisations, multinational businesses - the extent to which it's an issue in the modern connected world is greater, sure, but it's not a direct result of wider communication. I'm willing to bet it was an issue thousands of years ago in busy trading centres too. edit: this is an interesting aside: "Coming up with a more formalised set of considerations for external behaviour would help there." Isn't this to some extent what religions have been trying to do for millennia?
- mjg59 9y ago
  The same is true of those other groups, but the goals and incentive structures are somewhat different there. The prevalence of codes of conduct in open source projects and relative rarity of them in other online groups suggests that there's some sort of difference in how people view them.
VLM 9y ago
Could you elaborate on how the given postulate of "very disparate cultural backgrounds" correlates with the assumed authoritarian outcome of convert to a set of religious purity laws and rituals and (very long) list of groups and opinions that must be hated and shunned, at the point of a sword, or die? Am I missing the chronological component, perhaps today's revealed truth is permitted goodthink, but converts from historically variable backgrounds are permitted as long as there is absolutely no variation in current opinion, sorta a sinners redemption argument? "very disparate cultural backgrounds" should mean more than "how many angels dance on the head of a pin" level of disagreement between authoritarian fundamentalist sects, or in the context of the actual demographics of software development, which ivy league school a young wealthy urban coastal left wing white male attended. In a field suffering from a demographic crisis of non-diversity, it seems weird to propose a religious purity test to kick out the non-believers as some kind of inherent good, because the result of implementing a religious purity test can't possibly be good for diversity. The argument seems to be "If we just get rid of everyone who thinks differently than us using ever more elaborate formalized and authoritarian religious purity tests, then we'll have all the benefits of diversity with none of the costs" but I don't think the real world works that way. Historically trying to strengthen a dying movement by radicalizing it even further from mainstream has generally failed to revive the movement. Its an interesting chicken vs egg problem where dying ideologies and radicalization usually correlate, and the question is causation, which causes the other? I'm assuming, given your support for radicalization, you're on the team that sees dying ideology as a cause of radicalization. I realize using logic in a discussion about religion is irrational in and of itself, but thinking purely logically, if you see the legacy ideology as dying, then why not "switch over" ahead of time and be ahead of the pack if the legacy view is going to die out and be replaced anyway? Or do you see it as, yes 99% of the time, historically radicalization has destroyed the movement, but this time radicalization is the occasional rare situation where it'll work? And if so, why this time with this movement? There doesn't appear to be any observable reason to think today's movement is unusual.
- mjg59 9y ago
  I'm sorry there's just a whole bunch of words here that don't seem to correspond to anything I said.
aeorgnoieang 9y ago
> Coming up with a more formalised set of considerations for external behaviour would help there. I think this is backwards – the more formalized such considerations are the more conflict there will be. Formal rules invite 'lawyering' and lobbying and now your project or community becomes another battleground for never-ending political conflict. Empirically (but not rigorously, by me anyways), the best groups seem to regulate themselves informally.