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Re: GR proposal: code of conduct



On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 06:31:13PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> While it's probably too late in this process to change what we're going to
> vote on, I just ran across this today, and it may be of general interest
> in the context of codes of conduct.
> 
> http://adainitiative.org/2014/02/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/

So, I've read that, and I'm pretty much in disagreement with what they say.

They advocate an approach of enumerating badness, which I don't think is
a good idea. The main reason why it seems to do so is "because the bad
guys will otherwise start arguing with you about semantics".

That may be a good way if there are a lot of avenues for the banned
people to appeal their ban, but AIUI that just isn't the case in Debian.
Someone who's banned from our mailinglists can complain to listmasters
that the ban wasn't fair (and explain their case), or maybe appeal to
the DPL if that didn't help, but that's about it. There is no hearing or
anything of the sort, and since most bans are just for a few weeks
anyway.

More than that really isn't necessary IMO. As others have said, posting
on our mailinglists is a privilege, not a right. If you abuse that
privilege, we have the right to ban you from it, and there's no reason
we should give abusers a lot of consideration.

We should not ban for years on end by default, but then we're not doing
that.

As I'm sure you'll know, the downside of enumerating badness is that the
enumeration will never be complete. Therefore, the suggested code of
conduct deliberately tries to explain what you should do (in a positive
sense), and is somewhat vague in what you shouldn't do, so as to leave
room for reasonable interpretation.

I think that's a far better approach than what's advocated in the above
link.

-- 
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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