> > At the same time, though, if someone is being maliciously hostile what > great cover! A private email is not a PHP-Group managed resource, so no > rules! Twitter, ha, no rules! Reddit? LOL like they enforce anything. > If someone wanted to send a death threat to another developer about PHP > business, I would hope that, as a developer, they are at least smart enough > then to do so using a chat program that is "out of scope" so that they're > untouchable. (If they tried to send someone a death threat on list, we > should ban them for stupidity. :-) ) > > 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.) > <http://www.php.net/unsub.php> > > Larry,
This is a great point, and brings up an interesting potential compromise that might work well for solving this issue. If the issue is that someone might take an on-list discussion and harass someone off-list, why not limit the jurisdiction to individuals who have participated on-list in discussion or voted on the issue? For example, during the very heated discussion over static type hints, if someone who had discussed the issue on Internals had then gone out to Reddit and called Zeev a bunch of terrible things, that could be made actionable under this code of conduct, reportable to the mediation team. On the other hand, we have a lot of people with karma who don't always vote and may not participate in a particular issue on-list. If two people who have karma have a run-in outside the discussion of an issue related to PHP, they should have to be adults and hash that out themselves. And that to me is the crux of the issue. When it comes to making discussions on internals more civilized, governing a person's conduct *as it relates to their participation in the discussion* is about as far as PHP should go. A person who is not a party to the discussion, who does not vote, but does have karma, who happens to tweet "I think X is a moron for proposing Y" is entitled to that opinion, *until they bring it here.* If, on the other hand, the goal of the CoC is not to make Internals a better place, but to govern what people in the community think, say and do when they have no direct involvement with this group, that's another matter entirely. And a much scarier one at that, don't you think? Brandon
