It seems the primary change was to make the scope of the CoC apply outside of just chatter in project spaces. With that in mind lines like this seem particularly troublesome:
> Discussing potentially offensive or sensitive issues; this all too often leads to unnecessary conflict.
I understand the want to avoid unnecessary unrelated conflict within the project, but outside? "potentially offensive or sensitive issues" vary widely between people and groups of people, as I'm sure we all know.
> political attacks
Well that won't end well, or have any hope of being evenly applied, considering the omnipresence of partisan politicking especially in online spaces. It is also by definition a "sensitive issue"
It just sounds like they want everyone involved in the project to be bland generic PR people at all times.
That's the literal reading at least. However since CoC violations are filtered through basically one person, personal biases will weigh heavily in how the rules are applied.
Edit: Honestly this just reaffirms my belief that using anonymous accounts not linked to your rl identity for non-work content is a Very Good Idea. But not very in-vogue these days. Regardless of that even, internet mobs are very good at finding out who the real person behind a meme-posting twitter account etc. is.
> That's the literal reading at least. However since CoC violations are filtered through basically one person, personal biases will weigh heavily in how the rules are applied.
Yeah. To me, that part of the explanation read something like "we found democratic governance to be a lot of work, so we've given all our power to a dictator to make things easier for ourselves."
Democratic and consensus-based governance is hard and takes work, but there are well-understood reasons why it's a better way to run a community.
> First, the new code of conduct makes clear that people who participate in any kind of harassment or inappropriate behavior, even outside our project spaces, are not welcome in our project spaces. This means that the Code of Conduct applies outside the project spaces when there is a reasonable belief that an individual’s behavior may have a negative impact on the project or its community.
So, outsiders can muckrake and as long as they are loud enough, someone will be removed?
As long as there is muck to rake and the Project Steward is convinced. If there is no muck, no amount of waving a rake around will work. If you don't believe that the Project Steward will in general work in good faith, maybe you should avoid the project.
(That last bit is true of all open source projects, you just usually don't know in advance who all the stewards are.)
Yes, it has become a common trend on Twitter to attack your opponents by finding out where they work and complaining to their employer trying to get them fired. Making people lose their livelihood is an effective way to shut them up. I would consider this harassment, but apparently it's the type of harassment that these companies don't care about.
A popular recent example is when people attempted to report a developer of the game Kingdom Come Deliverance. It backfired since he also happened to be founder of the company.
I suppose it bears some structural similarities. "You don't need to worry about X if Y." The X and Y are different, though, so as with many cases where the variables change, the relationship may or may not hold.
"Harassment" is an open-ended enough term to make it nearly entirely up to the opinions of the muckrakers and arbitrators as to whether or not you violated the code of conduct. The sane response is to shut the hell up unless you have either tacit or explicit support from the ideologues that gravitate to the positions that let them judge you.
It's not clear in the update so, will "real names" be still enforced?
I got banned three times from the Gopher's Slack workspace for using "John Smith" as my display name. Dave Cheney was one of the admins who decided to block my account, we calmly discussed about it in private and came to the conclusion that, because of security concerns, I would never disclose my real identity. He stated that, as long as the code of conduct requires real names I would not be able to participate in any type of discussion in that Slack instance.
I have felt very sad because I continuously help the community by answering questions on StackOverflow, /r/golang and #golang in two different Slack workspaces where young people and professionals from other programming communities share their willing to migrate to Go because of the tooling and — according to many of them — the welcoming community, something that I also try to promote, which is kind of ironic because I have felt exactly the opposite since the enforcement of that document.
EDIT: As someone commented below, it seems that the admins of the Gophers Slack workspace are not associated in any way with the Go team, at all, so much that their code of conduct is completely different [1] and the only way to sign up for an account there is still the same from +4 years ago [2] a form that requires you to type your real name and agree with their community rules.
There's no reference to real names in the new code of conduct. I'm not sure if there was in the old one either. Perhaps the Slack channel has additional rules.
Contributing to Go has always required real names for the purpose of signing the CLA.
We have had some big problems with a contributor that wouldn't want to reveal his name in the early Go days (for anyone interested search for the atom symbol).
Decency is subjective, and there are enough outliers from 'average decency' that it's important to formally state what is, and isn't acceptable for a community of people.
Society has laws, and any subset of society that forms into a community will draw tighter boundaries around what and how they define whats acceptable within their community.
Then add the lens that within any community there is always going to be power differentials where some people in the community have more power than others, by position, contribution, or just stupid historical reasons like "wealthy and has lots of free time". Declaring how power in the community works (i.e. who is in charge, who has decisionmaking, who has commit access) also needs to be written down.
So, anybody who's ever in a position to potentially be the target of poor behavior is much more likely to feel like the community has their back if something bad goes down, because its all written down about whats going to happen if somebody does behave out of bounds.
Explicit is better than implicit. Different communities/subcultures have different standards of desirable and undesirable behavior - some communities believe that heated and emotionally intense debate is the right way to get a good result and "decent human beings" have a thick skin and try not to get offended, some believe that this precludes good results and "decent human beings" are empathetic and try not to offend.
Since contributing or maintaining an open-source project is a pretty intense commitment to interpersonal interactions (if we all knew what code was right, we wouldn't need maintainers), it's good to know what beliefs a community has about desirable and undesirable means of interpersonal interaction before you commit to joining it.
Note that as a corollary, I think it's important that there exist communities have codes of conduct that aren't based on the Contributor Covenant etc. Linux's Code of Conflict is a pretty good example: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/process/code-of-confli... If that doesn't sound like it describes a community you'd enjoy, maybe it's good to know that well before you burn out on contributing to Linux (as many technically-prolific contributors have done). If it does, great, you'll enjoy the project and the mailing list.
Not necessarily. Being explicit has tradeoffs, both costs and benefits. One of the big costs is that it empowers people to behave antisocially on the "right" side of the explicit line drawn, and teaches people what they can get away with. Like, real life law grants broad discretion to human judges for exactly this reason - so that people playing bullshit games can get benchslapped for it.
Code of Conducts are just markers for "this is SJW territory".
They are not harmless, innocent things.
By comparison, imagine conferences and open source communities would be required to have a little footer saying "We are committed to making America great again" on every web site. Surely a harmless message nobody could possibly disagree with?
So when disagreements arise among colleagues or leadership as to what constitutes "indecency", there's a document to point at that will help settle the dispute.
Everyone's unspoken idea of "decent" varies.
I also find it strange though. At least disheartening that teams feel the need to formalize these things. But at scale, it seems like a necessary evil.
We don't. Code of conduct is a way to gain more power and control, to establish authority, to police community, to silence criticism, to make people obedient to authority out fear of not being accepted or being thrown out. Basically nothing is noble about it.
Pretty simple really, as you scale up the group you cannot rely on everyone having the same concept of what acceptable behavior is. It is like bribery, in the US it’s unacceptable, but elsewhere it’s an everyday occurrence.
> why do we need to formally state that we should be decent human beings?
That's problematic phrasing. "Decency" is subjective and sits too high up on the pyramid of abstractions. Decent people disagree on what being decent actually means. If they're actually going to communicate, the conversation has to be about specifics.
Code of conducts are not really more specific, though. They just say things like "don't make people unwelcome" or be decent, which in the end is not really more specific.
But if there is a CoC, you know they will have assigned some SJW as an overseer deciding what is OK and what is not. You know whose side they will be on. Which is not your side if you happen to be a heterosexual white male.
The tl;dr is, because an implicit code only works as long as no one actually uses it. As soon as an unspoken CoC is actually counted on to do something, people realize they didn't have the same expectations about what it meant, and so everyone on every side ends up angry and feeling they were treated unfairly.
Because empirical evidence is that at least some people have a really hard time with being decent human beings, or at least are happy to not be if given the chance. And some organizations have, historically, tolerated that as long as it didn't affect the working of the organization (too much).
>1. We are all adults. Capable of having adult discussions.
>2. We accept everyones contributions, we don't care if you're liberal or conservative, black or white, straight or gay, or anything in between! In fact, we won't bring it up, or ask. We simply do not care.
I'm glad you posted this.. I had heard about anti CoC a while back(perhaps from you?) but never really dug into it..
Video game journalism was ruined for me back in 2011 and 2012 for reasons we all know and I was hyper aware of at the time. It went through a very dark time and is hopefully coming out the other side now.. I had not really paid much attention to the infiltration of the tech community. While I had noticed a few things such bikeshedding of issues on Github, as well as the whole node.js trigger word ordeal, my distaste for the whole thing at that point led me to largely ignore it..
I've been on a huge information gathering binge since your post though. Randi Harper, electronconf, USC Legends of Gaming, entryism targeted toward GitHub, shaming and threatening tactics used to seed OSS with CoCs.... Wow. I hadn't realized how out of hand and toxic things had gotten. Luckily, it seems that the industry is somewhat successfully pushing back? I'm getting the sense that the larger community has found its voice and is pushing back against the intellectually bankrupt thinking and tactics..
I would think then that you should be supportive of codes of conduct: you know up front that you have a fundamental distrust of the FreeBSD project leadership and GitHub organizational leadership, and not of the Go project's leadership, precisely because they have different codes of conduct saying different things.
(I'm opposed to cargo-culting codes of conduct for this exact reason. By all means, copy the Contributor Covenant word-for-word, but only if you truly agree with every word!)
That is a fair point, using it as a litmus test of what technology leaderships believe.
However, I have this crazy idea that a technologies worth is not tied to the political affiliation of the creator or maintainer. I would like us all to focus on the technology and less on the individual or group.. I imagined it would be easy- as on the internet, nobody can tell you're a dog.
I don't think you're wrong - the technology's worth isn't tied to the politics of the creator or maintainer. It's important that free software is free for literally anyone to use without discrimination, and I think you'd find very few supporters of CoCs who disagree with that (at least, among those who also identify themselves with the free software or open source movements).
But the problem is that the way technologies are developed is inherently not a technical problem, it's a social problem. If it were a technical problem, we'd have code writing and reviewing code, not humans. (I've never heard a single open-source project saying "The problem is that our maintainers have too much free time and there are too many high-quality patches to merge.") It's about how humans interact, and how humans work in community, and how humans provide each other feedback. And this unavoidably brings up all sorts of weird human behaviors that have very little to do with technology.
As a random example, I'm writing this comment from the OpenStack Summit, which is an in-person event that you probably want to be attending if you're involved with development of OpenStack. If you can't get a visa to the country where it is, that's a problem. If the conference venue is located somewhere with laws about bathrooms and gender assigned at birth, and you refuse to use the bathroom that matches the gender assigned you at birth, you probably won't be at the venue for the entire day. Should the project care about these things? Should it decide that these laws are bad and we value our contributors who have these constraints enough to find a locality without them? This has zero to do with technology, but (apparently) we've decided that technical projects give better results with in-person meetings, and if you're going to be expected to attend in-person meetings, you want to know whether the community will have your back.
Nobody cares if you're a dog, if you can interact with the other humans (or dogs) on the project in a productive way. An obvious (and entirely unfortunate) example is how the language of almost all open-source communities is English; if your native language is something else, you'd better pick up a working understanding of technical English. If you're a dog (or a human) who can't do that, and you try to work inside a technical community, people will care - not about who you are, but about how you interact.
But again, this is all about how technologies are developed. If you just want to use it, nobody cares if you're a dog or a corporation or a missile guidance system. And if you want to fork the project (which is really a misnomer, what is being forked is the community), you may. And if you produce patches that are worthwhile and license them freely, and someone in the original community wants to engage that community in cherry-picking your patches, they may.
Something's wonky with your DNS, a minority of the queries I make for dijit.sh take over 3 seconds. Unfortunately, the first one must have timed out when made by my resolver and was negatively cached.
> Discussing potentially offensive or sensitive issues; this all too often leads to unnecessary conflict.
I understand the want to avoid unnecessary unrelated conflict within the project, but outside? "potentially offensive or sensitive issues" vary widely between people and groups of people, as I'm sure we all know.
> political attacks
Well that won't end well, or have any hope of being evenly applied, considering the omnipresence of partisan politicking especially in online spaces. It is also by definition a "sensitive issue"
It just sounds like they want everyone involved in the project to be bland generic PR people at all times.
That's the literal reading at least. However since CoC violations are filtered through basically one person, personal biases will weigh heavily in how the rules are applied.
Edit: Honestly this just reaffirms my belief that using anonymous accounts not linked to your rl identity for non-work content is a Very Good Idea. But not very in-vogue these days. Regardless of that even, internet mobs are very good at finding out who the real person behind a meme-posting twitter account etc. is.