On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Marina Zhurakhinskaya <mari...@redhat.com> wrote: > Hi,
Hi, > Many free software organizations have adopted codes of conduct for their > events [1] and some for their communities [2]. Detailed codes of conduct with > specific enforcement guidelines signal to newcomers that the community has > high standards of behavior. They give participants who observe or are subject > to inappropriate behavior something to point to that shows that such behavior > is outside of what is expected and guidelines on how to proceed in getting it > addressed. > > What do you think about adopting a detailed code of conduct, similar to the > one used for GUADEC 2014 [3], for all GNOME events and creating a similarly > detailed code of conduct for the GNOME community? First of all, it is important for people participating in the community activities, be them online (mailing list discussions, IRC, bugzilla…) or offline (GUADEC, hackfests…), to be aware that they have someone they can talk to if they need to. They should also know that suffering from attacks, or feeling like it is the case, is nothing to be ashamed of, and that they can trust the listed contacts to have a listening hear and provide an appropriate response. It is however also very important for them to feel welcome and I know that a code such as the one used for GUADEC 2014 fails to achieve that. As the organizer, I was approached by people, seasoned contributors as well as newcomers, who told me they felt uneasy because the code conveyed the message that there was a constant threat and that they should be on their guard. I share their concerns and I would feel the same way if I had to attend another event with the same code. I want to emphasize that I'm not saying there is no threat at all, and I'm taking this very seriously. What I'm saying here is that we want a positive environment. Long texts also suffer from the TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read) effect, and I'm convinced many people who sign up for events with a checkbox saying "I have read the code of conduct and I agree to this terms" actually think "yada yada yada whatever, I just want to participate and I don't care/have time to read this". Some people have argued to me that it's ok since all we should care about is people signing off the code so that it can be enforced on them. This is a pretty shortsighted way of thinking and I'd say I'd rather have people read and take into account a short message without having to sign anything than them signing something they don't acknowledge and us having to take action afterwards. Another issue I have with strong codes of conduct is that often they try to substitute themselves to the appropriate authorities. There are laws and bodies whose job is to enforce them. The people in charge of a gathering should not have to list illegal activities as unacceptable. Most of us are not lawyers and have limited knowledge of the legality of such texts, even more so in an international context such as ours. We should strive to act as interfaces with the local authorities, not try to supersede them. That is of course not to say that we should call the police when the appropriate response is to call someone out on their bad behaviour, but threatening with sanctions is most of the time inappropriate too. The last point I want to cover is codes of conduct vs. their actual implementation. In many cases, organizers decide on a code of conduct but then they don't properly train the staff or take actions. If you have a look at the timeline of incidents on the geek feminist wiki, you'll find examples of such cases. I consider more important to have people willing to help and prepared than having the code itself. In fact, while I disagree with the GUADEC 2014 code of conduct and they way it was handled, I was happy to give a hand to solve issues at previous events which I helped organize. -- Alexandre Franke _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list