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Has there been any project which had its community change its conduct after adopting a CoC? Or any projects which had a profound impact due a CoC? I see that h

Has there been any project which had its community change its conduct after adopting a CoC? Or any projects which had a profound impact due a CoC? I see that having CoC is getting standard with OSS projects, old and new alike. But have no idea if it actually does anything.

kramerger 3y ago
From the comments section: "If you have a CoC, then you have formal rules around moderation with the option to appeal" Basically, when someone does something stupid (and let's be realistic, it will happen) then there are clear rules and processes to follow.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I agree. Establishing processes and telling people what they are is good practice. Just telling people not to do bad/unwelcome/etc. things by itself probably doesn't do much other than maybe remind someone at the margins to think twice before telling that joke.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  And that's fine, pretty much every online community has some of those. It seems a lot of people have a problem with the wording, or the implication that their behaviour may be bad and get them removed.
CJefferson 3y ago
I’m not sure how you would measure such a thing. I am certainly aware of projects which have banned people for CoC violations. These usually aren’t loudly publicized, so I’m not going to do so here. Would those projects have banned those people anyway? No way to know.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
Fair warning, I do not like codes of conduct. They're an authoritarian power play justified by fear. Codes of conduct are more about changing who is in the community than about changing the conduct of existing community members. Periodically someone runs afoul of the ruling elite who pass judgement upon them behind closed doors, usually leading to excommunication. The atmosphere of knowing what you say will be reported upwards and optionally stripped of context and rephrased to your detriment promotes an environment of inclusivity and safety. I'm not totally clear what "inclusivity" means at this point. It seems to be "excluding unpopular people and ideas", which should be termed "exclusivity". I've been known to say openly critical things about parts of our industry in public - basically because a lot of software dev is done really badly - and that sort of general negativity has no place relative to enthusiastically praising whatever nonsense is going on at the time. E.g. you go to a talk on concurrency. You know it's nonsense, the code on the slides was wrong and the speaker has totally misunderstood the domain. So you talk with fellow attendees about how it was really interesting and excellent. One guy says "the first example deadlocks", and that makes someone feel uncomfortable, properly fixed by kicking him out of the conference. This is very inclusive and good for industry. Then you all go off to write code that doesn't work. edit: can't believe I forgot the best part. If there's someone in the community you don't like - maybe their work makes you feel inferior, or they're a competitor in some sense, the burden of proof for triggering evisceration by committee is usually negligible. Tell some people they made you feel uncomfortable, let some of them talk you into reporting it and put them down as witnesses, bang - problem solved. Very convenient. Most of the developed world has really clear ideas about the scary things - sexual assault, harassment and so forth, dealt with by a judicial system. So the honourable goals of the CoC systems could be achieved by following norms of society with the existing structures in place. That seems better to me.
- atq2119 3y ago
  > the burden of proof for triggering evisceration by committee is usually negligible I think this line of thought deserves some exploration. If the burden of proof truly was negligible, CoCs would probably be weaponized more often. My impression is more that the burden of proof is reduced selectively, in favor of people who are good at a certain type of politics / playing social games. So CoCs can be perceived as a shift of power away from technical merit and towards social skills. No wonder there's a backlash from a lot of technical folks. It's also objectively questionable whether such a shift of power is useful for projects. (Humans are always gonna politic, even if it's only nerds, but the normative shift of whether politicking is officially condoned or even valued is what matters) I don't think it's a surprise that we're seeing CoCs in this age of commercialized open source. In the 90s and 00s, open source projects could only survive by technical merit. Nowadays, corporate sponsorship is a very important factor in project viability, and with corporations comes the bigger focus on politics.
  - glonq 3y ago
    > So CoCs can be perceived as a shift of power away from technical merit and towards social skills Towards social merit. If you can't/won't convince the new "powers that be" that you are sufficiently aligned with their dogma, then goodbye.
- kramerger 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    What if you believe that only married male-female couples should have sex and children? Or that people with penises don't belong in womens spaces? Or whatever other currently controversial topic? It has nothing to do with GCC, nothing with code quality, nothing with your contributions to the project, you don't say that in code, in code comments, on gcc mailing lists, anywhere gcc related. But, because of the CoC ( https://gcc.gnu.org/conduct.html https://gcc.gnu.org/conduct.html ), which says: > This code of conduct applies to all spaces managed by the GCC project. This includes IRC, the mailing lists, the issue tracker, events, and any other forums created by the project team which the community uses for communication. (this ^ part is ok, you should behave like a professional when dealing with stuff like this; general (non-gcc-related) politics or whatever non-gcc-related doesn't belong in GCC mailing lists) > In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them. But this part changes everything, and makes CoCs like this one a bad thing. Been on a (eg.) Trump rally in your free time, unrelated to anything GCC? Some overzelaous CoC enforcer bans you, and it's "totally fine", because the CoC allows this.
lionkor 3y ago
I've lead the moderation team for BeamMP (beammp.com, 150k+ User Discord) for a few months, and been part of it for much longer, and the two most positive changes I've seen are: - Regular meetings to keep everyone on-track (as nobody is being paid, its a passion project, etc) - Setting up clear rules and moderation guidelines, together. The team sat together and came up with a list of do's and don't's, best practices and principles to be used when moderating. Such simple ideas as "maximizing interaction" while keeping within the rules and Discord ToS, had a noticable impact. This was also useful to review moderation action that had been taken, and evaluate moderators, and possibly rollback moderation actions that were not in line with the code of conduct. TL;DR: Formalizing rules that have existed informally only makes it easier to review moderation actions, to moderate, and to add new people to the team. It also clarifies to the community how moderation is done.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Do you just moderate stuff that happens on the discord, or do you ban people if they do some "wrong" stuff outside of discord? Because the CoC draft allows excluding people for doing "wrong" stuff even outside of GCC (-trackers, -mailing lists, etc.). There's a difference for baning people in places where they should behave professionally, and banning people for stuff they do outside of those places.
  - lionkor 3y ago
    Outside, too - its a multiplayer game, so official servers are moderated also.
    - redeeman 3y ago
      what about things they do on twitter? or if they walk with unpalatable(to some) slogans down the times square?
      - lionkor 3y ago
        We don't have rules for that
Kye 3y ago
A Code of Conduct is like a contract. It formalizes norms and expectations so everyone is bound by the agreement on what to do when things go wrong. If you need one to set that culture, something's already wrong, and a contract/CoC won't help you.
- Steltek 3y ago
  However if you wait for things to go wrong, determining what your code of conduct _should have been_ will be done in the heat of the moment, which is a far more dangerous place to be.
rurban 3y ago
Most projects when adopting a CoC started their political infighting over alleged allegations exponentially, whilst the technical decision making troubled to the point of full stagnation. conferences became cesspits. project leaders went from knowledgable dictators to well-liked community leaders, who had no idea what they were doing, and into which direction to go forward. the yes-sayers.
hnbad 3y ago
CoCs like all codes of law, exist to have something to point to when it is decided that you did something wrong. They also exist as a signal, both to attract people who agree with it and to deter those who oppose it. Ideally a community should not need this. But most so-called communities are not communities. Membership and participation can be fleeting so there will be a constant influx and loss of members and participants, all of whom hold different values and some of whom the original founders would have never invited in the first place. So the risk is that a project built by people sharing a common set of values may be recuperated by people diametrically opposed to those values. Defining those values helps with that. For the primary demographic of HN, usually "don't be a dick" suffices for this. The problem is that lists of values don't provide an enforcement mechanism. This means you likely end up with one of two situations after a preexisting project adopts a CoC: either nothing changes because the code of conduct is not enforced (or only inconsistently), or nothing changes because everybody already involved in the project agrees with it and those e.g. throwing slurs at existing members or otherwise harrassing them would have been kicked out anyway. The problem is when projects that don't have a strong ideological/emotional investment in codifying a set of shared values (or lack a consistently shared set of values altogether) treat a CoC like a DEI program and just bolt it onto their project to tick a box and stop people from complaining. This misleads those who treat CoCs seriously into joining while also weakening the signalling effect of CoCs for other projects. In my experience this is the case for most OSS projects and in the worst cases it leads to overeager admins enforcing the letter of the law because there really was no spirit of the law to begin with, going through the authoritarian motions of enforcement without any ulterior purpose - and of course these projects will still selectively spare particularly influential individuals regardless of their misdeeds.

kramerger 3y ago

From the comments section: "If you have a CoC, then you have formal rules around moderation with the option to appeal" Basically, when someone does something stupid (and let's be realistic, it will happen) then there are clear rules and processes to follow.

ghaff 3y ago
I agree. Establishing processes and telling people what they are is good practice. Just telling people not to do bad/unwelcome/etc. things by itself probably doesn't do much other than maybe remind someone at the margins to think twice before telling that joke.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
And that's fine, pretty much every online community has some of those. It seems a lot of people have a problem with the wording, or the implication that their behaviour may be bad and get them removed.

CJefferson 3y ago

I’m not sure how you would measure such a thing. I am certainly aware of projects which have banned people for CoC violations. These usually aren’t loudly publicized, so I’m not going to do so here. Would those projects have banned those people anyway? No way to know.

JonChesterfield 3y ago

Fair warning, I do not like codes of conduct. They're an authoritarian power play justified by fear. Codes of conduct are more about changing who is in the community than about changing the conduct of existing community members. Periodically someone runs afoul of the ruling elite who pass judgement upon them behind closed doors, usually leading to excommunication. The atmosphere of knowing what you say will be reported upwards and optionally stripped of context and rephrased to your detriment promotes an environment of inclusivity and safety. I'm not totally clear what "inclusivity" means at this point. It seems to be "excluding unpopular people and ideas", which should be termed "exclusivity". I've been known to say openly critical things about parts of our industry in public - basically because a lot of software dev is done really badly - and that sort of general negativity has no place relative to enthusiastically praising whatever nonsense is going on at the time. E.g. you go to a talk on concurrency. You know it's nonsense, the code on the slides was wrong and the speaker has totally misunderstood the domain. So you talk with fellow attendees about how it was really interesting and excellent. One guy says "the first example deadlocks", and that makes someone feel uncomfortable, properly fixed by kicking him out of the conference. This is very inclusive and good for industry. Then you all go off to write code that doesn't work. edit: can't believe I forgot the best part. If there's someone in the community you don't like - maybe their work makes you feel inferior, or they're a competitor in some sense, the burden of proof for triggering evisceration by committee is usually negligible. Tell some people they made you feel uncomfortable, let some of them talk you into reporting it and put them down as witnesses, bang - problem solved. Very convenient. Most of the developed world has really clear ideas about the scary things - sexual assault, harassment and so forth, dealt with by a judicial system. So the honourable goals of the CoC systems could be achieved by following norms of society with the existing structures in place. That seems better to me.

atq2119 3y ago
> the burden of proof for triggering evisceration by committee is usually negligible I think this line of thought deserves some exploration. If the burden of proof truly was negligible, CoCs would probably be weaponized more often. My impression is more that the burden of proof is reduced selectively, in favor of people who are good at a certain type of politics / playing social games. So CoCs can be perceived as a shift of power away from technical merit and towards social skills. No wonder there's a backlash from a lot of technical folks. It's also objectively questionable whether such a shift of power is useful for projects. (Humans are always gonna politic, even if it's only nerds, but the normative shift of whether politicking is officially condoned or even valued is what matters) I don't think it's a surprise that we're seeing CoCs in this age of commercialized open source. In the 90s and 00s, open source projects could only survive by technical merit. Nowadays, corporate sponsorship is a very important factor in project viability, and with corporations comes the bigger focus on politics.
- glonq 3y ago
  > So CoCs can be perceived as a shift of power away from technical merit and towards social skills Towards social merit. If you can't/won't convince the new "powers that be" that you are sufficiently aligned with their dogma, then goodbye.
kramerger 3y ago
[flagged]
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  What if you believe that only married male-female couples should have sex and children? Or that people with penises don't belong in womens spaces? Or whatever other currently controversial topic? It has nothing to do with GCC, nothing with code quality, nothing with your contributions to the project, you don't say that in code, in code comments, on gcc mailing lists, anywhere gcc related. But, because of the CoC ( https://gcc.gnu.org/conduct.html https://gcc.gnu.org/conduct.html ), which says: > This code of conduct applies to all spaces managed by the GCC project. This includes IRC, the mailing lists, the issue tracker, events, and any other forums created by the project team which the community uses for communication. (this ^ part is ok, you should behave like a professional when dealing with stuff like this; general (non-gcc-related) politics or whatever non-gcc-related doesn't belong in GCC mailing lists) > In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them. But this part changes everything, and makes CoCs like this one a bad thing. Been on a (eg.) Trump rally in your free time, unrelated to anything GCC? Some overzelaous CoC enforcer bans you, and it's "totally fine", because the CoC allows this.

lionkor 3y ago

I've lead the moderation team for BeamMP (beammp.com, 150k+ User Discord) for a few months, and been part of it for much longer, and the two most positive changes I've seen are: - Regular meetings to keep everyone on-track (as nobody is being paid, its a passion project, etc) - Setting up clear rules and moderation guidelines, together. The team sat together and came up with a list of do's and don't's, best practices and principles to be used when moderating. Such simple ideas as "maximizing interaction" while keeping within the rules and Discord ToS, had a noticable impact. This was also useful to review moderation action that had been taken, and evaluate moderators, and possibly rollback moderation actions that were not in line with the code of conduct. TL;DR: Formalizing rules that have existed informally only makes it easier to review moderation actions, to moderate, and to add new people to the team. It also clarifies to the community how moderation is done.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Do you just moderate stuff that happens on the discord, or do you ban people if they do some "wrong" stuff outside of discord? Because the CoC draft allows excluding people for doing "wrong" stuff even outside of GCC (-trackers, -mailing lists, etc.). There's a difference for baning people in places where they should behave professionally, and banning people for stuff they do outside of those places.
- lionkor 3y ago
  Outside, too - its a multiplayer game, so official servers are moderated also.
  - redeeman 3y ago
    what about things they do on twitter? or if they walk with unpalatable(to some) slogans down the times square?
    - lionkor 3y ago
      We don't have rules for that

Kye 3y ago

A Code of Conduct is like a contract. It formalizes norms and expectations so everyone is bound by the agreement on what to do when things go wrong. If you need one to set that culture, something's already wrong, and a contract/CoC won't help you.

Steltek 3y ago
However if you wait for things to go wrong, determining what your code of conduct _should have been_ will be done in the heat of the moment, which is a far more dangerous place to be.

rurban 3y ago

Most projects when adopting a CoC started their political infighting over alleged allegations exponentially, whilst the technical decision making troubled to the point of full stagnation. conferences became cesspits. project leaders went from knowledgable dictators to well-liked community leaders, who had no idea what they were doing, and into which direction to go forward. the yes-sayers.

hnbad 3y ago

CoCs like all codes of law, exist to have something to point to when it is decided that you did something wrong. They also exist as a signal, both to attract people who agree with it and to deter those who oppose it. Ideally a community should not need this. But most so-called communities are not communities. Membership and participation can be fleeting so there will be a constant influx and loss of members and participants, all of whom hold different values and some of whom the original founders would have never invited in the first place. So the risk is that a project built by people sharing a common set of values may be recuperated by people diametrically opposed to those values. Defining those values helps with that. For the primary demographic of HN, usually "don't be a dick" suffices for this. The problem is that lists of values don't provide an enforcement mechanism. This means you likely end up with one of two situations after a preexisting project adopts a CoC: either nothing changes because the code of conduct is not enforced (or only inconsistently), or nothing changes because everybody already involved in the project agrees with it and those e.g. throwing slurs at existing members or otherwise harrassing them would have been kicked out anyway. The problem is when projects that don't have a strong ideological/emotional investment in codifying a set of shared values (or lack a consistently shared set of values altogether) treat a CoC like a DEI program and just bolt it onto their project to tick a box and stop people from complaining. This misleads those who treat CoCs seriously into joining while also weakening the signalling effect of CoCs for other projects. In my experience this is the case for most OSS projects and in the worst cases it leads to overeager admins enforcing the letter of the law because there really was no spirit of the law to begin with, going through the authoritarian motions of enforcement without any ulterior purpose - and of course these projects will still selectively spare particularly influential individuals regardless of their misdeeds.