Re: Result of the Code of Conduct BOF at Debconf [and 1 more messages]
Op 05-11-13 19:53, Ian Jackson schreef:
> Wouter Verhelst writes ("Re: Result of the Code of Conduct BOF at Debconf [and 1 more messages]"):
>> Op 15-08-13 11:48, Ian Jackson schreef:
>>> I think the existing draft is far too long. I'd like to propose
>>> something much shorter:
> ....
>>> Debian code of conduct
>>> ----------------------
> ....> >
>>> Debian expects everyone to help keep our community welcoming and fun:
>>>
>>> * Be respectful.
>>>
>>> * Assume good faith.
> ....
>> It has always been my intention to have the section headers in the draft
>> that I'd sent around be normative, with the text in between be
>> "explanations"; people who read the titles (and skip everything else)
>> should understand at a basic level what we expect. We may wish to make
>> this clear through markup.
>
> I think that's a very odd thing to do. A document which was mostly
> non-normative text would be very strange.
Perhaps that's true.
> I appreciate that a lot of people have contributed to various parts of
> the wording. But I think that adding the extra "explanation" actually
> weakens the document. It also makes it harder to get agreement,
> because in principle we need to thrash out all those details.
You make it sound as if that's a bad thing.
I think it's a good exercise to figure out what we think is acceptable
and what we think is not. It's been my experience over the past few
years that while many people agree that (parts of) our current culture
aren't acceptable, the agreement on what those unacceptable parts are,
exactly, isn't so clear. Indeed, I myself have been accused of
antisocial behaviour recently for things that were really meant as a joke.
While I wouldn't want to say that we should go into much detail on what
is and isn't allowed, I believe that just a list of the titles that
we've got currently will probably be too little information, and cause
massive disagreements. I think such a list will cause more problems than
it will solve, since people will start lawyering around their
interpretations of the titles, rather than trying to improve their
behaviour.
I agree that the text should try to be short, and my current draft is
much better in that regard than the initial one. But I think your
extreme will limit the usefulness of the result.
> I have refrained from getting into the detailed nitty gritty of the
> wording of the longer CoC draft, but if I were to review it with a
> careful eye I think I would find a lot to quibble with.
>
> And in Debian every complaint about a document tends to be met by
> adding new wording to clarify things.
Actually, there is precedence to the contrary (GR 2004_003): we replaced
"100% free software" by "100% free".
> That may be appropriate in a
> technical document, but for a political statement like this one I
> think it's harmful. We should err on deleting text.
I agree. I did delete quite some text from my initial draft, actually;
the current version is much shorter. I also don't think that we, as a
project, will make the mistake you think we will be making.
Thanks for your comments,
--
This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space.
If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you
will not go to space today.
-- http://xkcd.com/1133/
Reply to: