I lack the energy to contribute to GHC directly, but these guidelines
are far too easy to abuse by someone acting in bad faith and we know
that bad faith actors have been adjacent to our community and acted on
things that have taken place within it.
From where I'm sitting, guidelines like this risk doing even more
damage than not having any. Not only do they lack the means to handle
incidents that have already occurred, they actively discourage the
community from finding those means.
As someone these guidelines have been drafted to help include, I fear
they increase the burden on my participation and that of others like me.
For a community to hold together without sinking to the worst of
behaviour, there needs to be some acceptance that we will all fail to
act in good fatih on occasion, that some people will act in bad faith
and that behaviour in bad faith may take a great deal of explaining to
anyone who is not the target of it or familiar with its mechanisms.
I have spent a great deal of time running spaces within the wider
community and I have witnessed these things repeatedly. I also lack the
resources some people here have available to mitigate the risks others
have openly posed to members of the community including myself and Simon.
One solution - whether GHC itself needs it or not - might be to pair
guidelines for respectful communication with guidelines for when
respectful communication is failing to occur.
Simon, I appreciate both the work you've put in and your love for the
communty. I hope you can appreciate that where I appear to be cynical or
even sowing discord here, I am acting out of love and care for a
community that at its best has done a great deal for me. I apologise for
being the one to open up what I see as a somewhat inevitable discussion.
On 06/12/2018 10:35, Simon Peyton Jones via Haskell wrote:
Friends
As many of you will know, I have been concerned for several years about the standards
of discourse in the Haskell community. I think things have improved since the period
that drove me to write my Respect
email<https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2016-September/024995.html>,
but it's far from secure.
We discussed this at a meeting of the GHC Steering
Committee<https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals> at ICFP in September,
and many of us have had related discussions since. Arising out of that conversation,
the GHC Steering Committee has decided to adopt these
Guidelines for respectful
communication<https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/GRC.rst>
We are not trying to impose these guidelines on members of the Haskell
community generally. Rather, we are adopting them for ourselves, as a signal
that we seek high standards of discourse in the Haskell community, and are
willing to publicly hold ourselves to that standard, in the hope that others
may choose to follow suit.
We are calling them "guidelines for respectful communication" rather than a "code of
conduct", because we want to encourage good communication, rather than focus on bad behaviour. Richard
Stallman's recent post<https://lwn.net/Articles/769167/> about the new GNU Kind Communication
Guidelines<https://gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html> expresses the same idea.
Meanwhile, the Stack community is taking a similar
approach<https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2018/11/proposal-stack-coc>.
Our guidelines are not set in stone; you can comment
here<https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/commit/373044b5a78519071b9a24b3681cfd1af06e57e0>.
Perhaps they can evolve so that other Haskell committees (or even individuals)
feel able to adopt them.
The Haskell community is such a rich collection of intelligent, passionate, and
committed people. Thank you -- I love you all!
Simon
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