Re: Code of Conduct violations handling process
Hi all,
Le mercredi, 3 septembre 2014, 18.55:04 Ian Jackson a écrit :
> I hope that regardless of your opinions about the specific incident,
> you would support the ideas that:
>
> - If we have a CoC it should be enforced.
(Snipped a lot of administrativia suggestions.)
"To enforce" is the wrong verb, I think.
I've always read and understood the CoC as a declaration of intent, a
generic behavior framework; in short, what I understand as a "Code of
Conduct": "this is how we collectively intend to behave to make our
face-to-face events the best possible experiences for all attendees".
Such a code will always lay down blurry lines, which trespassing will
always be highly subjective.
Seeing the CoC as a guideline, I don't think we should add _more_
administrativia to _enforce_ it, much the contrary.
People will hurt others' feelings in various situations, but most of
these situations don't need to be treated with a big administrative
overhead. In fact, approaching another attendee and telling her "I
didn't feel treated with respect when you {said,did} that and that." or
"Did you notice that this statement of yours might have been taken as an
offense by this other participant?" [0]. There's no need to refer to the
CoC when saying so, but it helps adjusting each other's behaviors for a
healthy conference.
The CoC should not be seen as law, it certainly isn't: by its nature, it
doesn't say "this class of actions will give you a yellow card, this
other class will get you expelled from the conference" (and it most
certainly should not). I think that we should all consider ourselves
guardians of the CoC and push towards its goals throughout the various
Debian events we attend. When severe violations occur, we do have
antiharassment@d.o which _must_ have some interpretation and action room
to proceed to useful feedbacks to offenders or actions against them. All
severe violations _will_ be different and will call to different
actions.
In conclusion, I think we should stop building administrative procedures
to enforce the CoC but start integrating it as a part of our collective
and individual responsibilities as Debian events attendees; there's
antiharassment@ for the upper tier of violations. We should stop seeing
the CoC as ways to restrain others, but rather as a set of tools to
collectively make our conferences better places to be. We can all make
this happen without layers of appeal bodies.
Cheers,
OdyX
[0] I've got this type of feedback twice during the conference, and I'm
very thankful of both.
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