On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 01:19:11PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > In general, I understand where Wouter is coming from, and the points that > Steve made about inspiring people to behave better in public. However, > this one paragraph really lept out at me. > > Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes: > > > This Code of Conduct is afraid to scare away potential contributors; so > > a lot of effort has been put into making this a positive, welcoming Code > > of Conduct rather than a negative, scary one. > > I think this is a mistake. > > The experiences of other groups have mostly convinced me that the point of > a Code of Conduct should be to scare away potential contributors who > cannot or are unwilling to behave according to the standards that we > expect of our community, and to reassure the people who would be injured > by violations of those standards that we're serious about declaring those > people unwelcome in our project. Not welcoming them and attempting to > quietly encourage them to become better people (which doesn't work). Indeed. Perhaps I should clarify that, personally, I don't see someone who is prone to aggressive and abusive behaviour as a "potential contributor" in the above-quoted paragraph, and I don't think the project should, either. I think that people who have no respect for their peers, regardless of their technical abilities, should have no place in our community. [...] > If you want a diverse and welcoming atmosphere, particularly for people > who aren't interested in aggressive communication patterns or who are > historically excluded, you have to not welcome the people who make the > environment hostile and uncomfortable for the people you want to attract. This is absolutely true. However, I don't think you can do that through a code of conduct; people who are abusive and aggressive tend to have little consideration for other people's words. Instead, you should gear your *actions* (in this case bans, whether temporary or permanent in nature; law enforcement if thing get *really* serious) towards making the environment not welcome for such people. The proposed code tries to institutionalize and further encourage what is effectively already happening. Put otherwise, a code of conduct should be geared towards who will read and heed it, not towards who will blatantly violate it, even in the face of requests to stop doing so. > It's not exactly a zero-sum game, but it is a choice. You can choose to > attract one type of project participant or the other, but not both at the > same time. > > I think the Code of Conduct presents an opportunity for us to be clear > about what type of project participant we're interested in, and what type > of project participant we're not interested in, and that we shouldn't be > afraid to be a bit confrontational here. I think the current text does attempt to be clear about what we're interested in. Having a list of things that we want to see implies people can infer what we're not interested in, even if it's not explicit. I don't think being confrontational is very helpful in this kind of document. -- 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/
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