Larry, Thanks for your detailed letter. I think that I'm not that far off from your position, but clearly, there are some differences of opinion that lead us to different conclusions. Given the length of your email, I'm going to be very^H^H^H^H selective in what I respond to.
> I'm inclined to see the (partial) validity in most arguments, even if I don't > entirely agree with them. Same here. In fact, being able to see things from other people's point of view - and being able to articulate it, even if I disagree with it, repeatedly came up as feedback for me over the last 20 years (yikes) of my career. > However, it also means that extreme positions frustrate me to no end, > because I cannot bring myself to agree with the extreme position even if it > has valid points to make. I actually try to understand very extreme positions too, even if I completely disagree with them. Being able to understand how people reach extreme positions is extremely important in combating them (in case of any doubts, I'm *not* talking about internals at all here). > To be clear, the "there's a risk of abuse so do nothing" crowd I haven't seen a crowd that supports the 'do nothing' approach, at least not vigorously so. The way the RFC was presented, the CoC and the ways to enforce it came hand in hand as one integrated, inseparable bundle. I've yet to see anybody saying 'we must not do anything', even though some did argue there's no real need for change. I believe most of those will be fine with a CoC that is a Mission Statement, or for that matter, a true Code of Conduct (which means it does not contain enforcement measures). > is saying, > implicitly, that the known and existing problem of people getting death > threats Let me stop you right there. I don't know that there have been death threats going around here. I've never seen one with my own eyes, or for that matter, heard about one 2nd hand. I don't know for a fact that there have been threats of ANY kind of violence. I know that Anthony reported four threats of violence, but even if he fully believes he was threatened with violence, I'm not sure that had we had access to the messages sent to him, we'd all agree that these are true threats of violence, or just a broad interpretation. Given that I was presented in numerous forums as a true 'enemy of the state' during the STH RFC - and certainly felt that there was a mob with electronic pitchforks working in tandem to blame me for all sorts of things I either didn't do, or were completely legitimate but presented as illegitimate by interested parties (on internals, Twitter and Reddit) - I now feel almost offended that I never once got any threats of violence, let alone death threats, in the context of the PHP project. On a more serious note, yes, I find it difficult to believe true threats of violence were made, although I believe Anthony may have felt that way. And that is exactly the problem with the judicial system. All judicial systems are inherently subjective. That's not something we can fix by working harder or spending more time on the RFC in my opinion (although as I told Anthony, I'm game for helping out - but think it's fundamentally impossible to fix). The state laws we all live under are subjective, subject to abuse - and they do break all the time. Even when they work out - there are different opinions regarding the effectiveness of the penal code, vs. rehabilitation efforts. World history is full of examples in which certain events - real, staged or imaginary - were used as pretext to attack/persecute other groups. I'm NOT saying this is what's happening here, definitely not purposely, but I am saying that it's impossible to hold the stick at both hands - if we want to take into account that there have been death threats or other threats of violence - which is mind-boggingly far-reaching from my point of view, we need to see evidence - not just to know whether it's true or not, but also so that we can each form our own opinion about them and whether they truly constitute threats or not. If people are not willing to present that evidence - which I fully respect and is entirely within their rights - I, for one, cannot accept their existence as evidence. At best, it's an uncorroborated testimony - but a more accurate description would be 'calling for conclusion'. > It ignores that the status quo is also subject to abuse; it's just a > different kind > of abuse (taking advantage of the lack of accountability and lack of due > process we have now), and perhaps easier to abuse by a different type of > person. This keeps coming up, but without any substantiated evidence that there's lack of accountability or that we're somehow being harmed by lack of due process. Not a single case has been presented for public scrutiny as a way to 'test drive' the CoC, despite repeated requests from David, Stas and myself (and perhaps others). As an analytic person that believes in science, I'm very reluctant to believe what I can't either see myself, or that's been widely researched and proven with sound scientific method. The evidence presented as grounds for needing this CoC is either weakly supported, or not really relevant - at least the way I understand it the CoC - to the kinds of problems people want it to solve. In fact, whenever this point was brought up - the main response seems to deal with the 'toxic nature of internals', or how 'unfriendly it is', putting off people from contribution. I have two things to say about that: 1. I want to understand how the CoC+judicial elements would have been used to fix that, in concrete examples. The way I understand the point of the CoC, it was supposed to deal with extreme cases, and not create a thought or behavior police that would be invoked on a daily basis. Which one is it? 2. I don't think that any CoC can make internals 'friendly'. To me, it's unfriendly simply because of the sheer volume of messages, and knowing that if I want to present a new idea or voice an opinion in a discussion - it will be scrutinized from every possible angle by dozens of people - some of which who hold a very different view than mine on where the language should be going. A CoC can't fix that. People who aren't up for that - who aren't willing to accept the fact that they would need to defend their position against people who think 180 degrees from them - are probably not fit for a place like internals. Sure, we can do more to avoid negativity that doesn't cross lines - and try foster positivity, so that the challenge becomes more of the to-the-point criticism and less about style/person. Which brings me to the next point. I maintain that a 'toothless CoC', or in simple English - a CoC, the behavioral equivalent of a Mission Statement - can do a lot more than a judicial system to improve the quality of the discussions on internals, simply because if the only practical recourse in case of breaking it is mediation (i.e. achieving peace) - the chances for abuse are slim to non-existent (more on that below), and it's clear to all parties involved that the goal is the greater good of everyone - not punishing a particular individual. With a 'penal code', when things heat up - the motivation to throw accusations around would likely grow tremendously, and with the risk of punishment hovering above the process at any given time, with a practical 'Anything you say may be used against you', the likelihood of having a true, open discussion seeking peace is a lot slimmer. > There is a vast difference between "this could be abused in > these ways" and "zOMG fascist!!1!" If anything, the repeated use of the > latter (which is complete hyperbole and belies a total lack of political or > historical awareness) actively undermines the former, and makes trying to > address and account for the abuse risk harder, not easier. It is the mirror > image of "he offended me so burn him at the stake!", a hyperbole that is > over-used to the point that it undermines those who are trying to deal with > actual abuse and harassment. As a side note, I don't believe Paul called Anthony a fascist at any point. Although I didn't review all of the many occurrences he used the word so I could be wrong, I believe he used that adjective to describe the RFC, and not its author. This is not splitting hairs, it's a very important distinction. Granted, with my background and the sensitivities I have, it definitely wouldn't have been my choice of words. My guess is also that Paul wanted to intentionally explore the boundaries of free speech here. We all need to realize there's a fundamental difference between criticizing an idea, and criticizing a person who brings it up. As with other areas in life, I think it would be a better world once that's realized. > The other "contra" position is to make a CoC toothless. The argument here > being "if it can't actually be enforced, then it can't be abused." > Which is, well, partially true, but if anything, not having a real process > around > it makes it *more* likely to be abused by the professionally-sensitive, not > less, because the enforcement falls back on the "court of public opinion". > The professionally-sensitive tend to be really really good at manipulating > that > to their own ends, without any due process. In fact, I would trust a > reasonable group of mediators as "judges" with due process far more than I > would a mob court. I would feel safer, as an accused, with a known process > and people I respected managing the process than with it playing out as a 100 > message long thread plus who knows what happening on Twitter and and/ > Reddit. To be perfectly honest, I simply don't understand the point you're making about the 'professionally sensitive'. This isn't a rhetorical question, I truly don't understand what you're referring to here - and how a toothless CoC can somehow be abused by such people. Examples would help. While I think the court of public opinion can certainly be problematic, so can a 'triumvirate' of sorts. I'm not sure which is better. But more importantly, in my opinion, that's actually an irrelevant comparison and I'll explain why. In my experience, when systems are in place - they start being used. I see that in all facets of life, including here, the technological world, law, everywhere. That leads me to believe that if we have a system in place, it will undoubtfully be used, and when there are rules that are ready-to-execute on, it will be all too easy to reach extreme outcomes. The fact we don't have a real structure in place, except for the RFC process (which arguably, we have to at least ratify as a way to ban or otherwise punish people because it was most certainly not designed for that purpose) - is, in my opinion, a Good Thing. While I'm not denying the fact that bad things can happen - and may have happened already (outside my knowledge) - I do want the burden of banning or otherwise punishing a person to be exceptionally high, and not something that's structured and ready to execute on. Now, had we had horrific things happening on a regular basis - I may have thought differently (in which case I still think we'd have an enormous problem in our hands, as in how does a bunch of people that are no legislators nor lawyers create a good judicial system overnight). But until we see evidence to that effect, my working assumption is that this is simply not the case right now. > If the CoC is toothless, the teeth will simply come out elsewhere in ways we > don't like. If it has teeth, we can determine how sharp those teeth should be > in order to achieve the goal of a less antagonistic, more collaborative > community. That's one of the main things that worry me here. Mixed messages and duality about the purpose, goal and applicability of the RFC. Is it to clean internals from 'toxins' - implying far-reaching effects, or is it handling extreme cases? At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'd like to understand - with concrete examples - both what the goal is and how proponents of it believe that the 'toothfulness' of it is going to help achieving that. Especially if the goal is to 'detox' internals, I'd like the examples to be of things that actually happened, and not theoretical. > I'll take that a step further: Having a CoC with no teeth has a higher risk of > abuse than it having teeth, because those who would abuse it can use that > lack of teeth to their advantage. I think that the use case of a CoC+judicial system being abused is clear. Someone is falsely accused - either due to malice or by a broad interpretation of real facts, and mistakenly punished by a team of non-professional judges using an amateur rulebook. With systems in place, that's a likely scenario, almost bound to happen sooner or later - and depending on the interpretation / goal of the CoC (see the 'mixed messages' above) - can actually be quite common. Things are pretty bad even with professional judges and laws that have been refined for centuries, they can truly be disastrous with amateur ones using pseudo laws invented from scratch. The situation in which a CoC+mediation team can be abused isn't clear to me. The only thing I can think of is an extreme case, where the offender truly makes threats of violence and/or repeatedly breaks the CoC and completely disregards both calls to cool off and more elaborate mediation efforts. I don't believe we've ever experienced such a scenario, and nothing I've seen in the PHP community leads me to believe that's likely to change. But in case it does happen - that's exactly the exceptional circumstances where a public RFC could be in order. > The other objection has been the scope of activity that is covered, and how > far out from the centerpoint of this list it should extend. This is also a > very > legitimate concern. Certainly, I know I hold certain social and political > views > that many on this list would disagree with, perhaps be offended by. And I > most definitely would not want my activity in some other unrelated > politically-incorrect realm to be used as grounds for kicking me out of PHP. > I > would not want a repeat of Brendan Eich here, to cite a recent example. That's one huge inherent advantage of limiting ourselves to mediation only, as it naturally limits the scope of application for the CoC. The fact you're supportive of XYZ, unless it personally harms another person - is inactionable, and that's a Good Thing. If one's only recourse - barring extreme cases like threats of violence or sexual harassment - is mediation, one is much less likely to be trigger-happy with accusations, as there's no 'gain' to be had. > That's why the scope needs to cover "involves PHP business, regardless of > medium" rather than "just on certain pieces of server infrastructure". It's > trivial to circumvent otherwise. Now, how do we define "involves PHP > business" in a way that, for example, forbids someone from harassing a gay > person about PHP business but doesn't penalize someone for participating in > an anti-gay-marriage protest in their home town? That's the question we > should be discussing: How that balance works to minimize that risk, and avoid > it being abused to Eich someone. (Yes, I just used Eich's name as a verb.) Another inherent advantage of stopping at mediation. The scope can be as wide as we'd like, since the goal is to bring peace, and not bring people to justice. As much as it's popular to bash internals - I think we ultimately all want PHP to succeed, even if we have different ways on how to achieve that. I think that for the most part, there's a lot of good will around our virtual table. Mediation could have improved the process & outcome of numerous 'skirmishes' that took place on both internals and elsewhere in 2015. An amateur judicial system? I'm afraid to even think about the possible scenarios. > Yes, that means empowering certain people to make subjective decisions. > That is not, in and of itself, evil. Could it be abused? Yes it can. > But that is a problem *we already have*. I think we're going to make it fundamentally worse and much more dangerous by structuring it in a ready-to-go process, with a dedicated team that has responsibility to act according to it. Very different from the burden of someone going through the - admittedly, headache - of proactively coming up with an RFC and explaining why person X deserves to be punished. Like I said, it's also quite questionable whether we really have that problem today as the Voting RFC doesn't deal with penalties, and I hope you can take my word for it that I never anticipated or even dreamt that it would be used in such a context. At the very least I think the RFC process needs to be amended if we want to be able to use it for such purposes. Personally, I'd make the bar a lot higher than 2/3s. Truly unacceptable behavior - such as threats or sexual harassment should easily garner >90% support for penalties. > Possible mitigation for that subjectivity: A clear expectation that members of > the CRT get some training in mediation, conflict resolution, and dealing with > CoCs. Such training does exist, and would probably be good for them to get. > Thoughts? Great idea which I think we should do, but for a mediation team. Not a mediation team that can sudo() into a judging panel. Of course, if we pick this approach that's better than not having them trained, but again, I look at the judicial systems of democratic states, with law codes that evolved for hundreds of years, that employ professional legislators, lawyers and judges, built brick upon brick upon brick in precedence and find tuning - and see how often they fail, sometimes spectacularly and sometimes silently, and I'm wondering what makes us think that a bunch of (barely) amateurs (myself included!) can come up with a system that won't break left and right. > In short (because I know this email is crazy long): I agree with the concept > behind many of the concerns raised about a CoC. They're legitimate and the > risk of abuse is real. Unfortunately, the "therefore do nothing!" or "make it > so weak as to be useless" As I mentioned numerous times on this thread before, the position I'm advocating is NOT useless at all. In fact, I think it stands a much better chance at improving the spirit of internals, as instead of things revolving around being able to prove things and potential penalties - good will is almost enforced (except for truly extreme cases). It's a lot more likely to get invoked more frequently than the report-investigate-punish one, including non-extreme cases, that have more to do with style than actions that truly cross the line of acceptability. Some of the most famous CoC's in the world came with no penal codes against them, and these shaped humanity. Some that come to mind - the Ten Commandments, the Hippocratic Oath and the Golden Rule. That last one is extremely relevant to our discussion too. Last, we can (relatively) easily 'upgrade' from a CoC+mediation to a CoC+judicial system, if we see things are going south - in which case I'm sure it'll also enjoy much wider support. The other direction is a lot more difficult (read: impossible). Once the systems are in place, it's a lot more difficult to fix them and virtually impossible to undo them. That I think should be enough for us to at least start by focusing on our values and mediation - find the commonalties among us instead of focusing on where we disagree. Thanks for reading! Zeev -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
