Hi all,
On 11/10/2019 06:58, Jeff King wrote:
I snipped your concerns with some of the language. I do agree with you
that a lot of is open to interpretation. But I also think it's
impossible to get it 100% airtight. My feeling was that it was a good
idea to go with some existing, well-established text, even if it has
some wiggle room. And then rely on the existing community and especially
the people listed above to do that interpretation.
So...
Just pointing out some concerns of mine. No ack from me
(but it's not a NACK, either). I'm pretty ambivalent...
For me it is obviously an ack, but I wanted to make clear that I think
your concerns (and those of others who spoke up, like René and Gábor)
are certainly_valid_. I just think that adopting this CoC is, while not
perfect, the least-bad option.
I'd also say that we might consider living with it for a while (6
months? a year?) and seeing if people have an interest in revising it
after that point based on experience.
I also didn't positively ack the CoC (code of conduct).
I'm not sure it addresses the broader _underlying_ issues that may need
to be addressed that are behind the pressure for CoCs. I'd also
commented [1] on the git-for-windows CoC partly because the CoC didn't
positively address the need for tolerance.
These CoCs are essentially defensive, rather than forward looking. In
essence they say:
We are a welcoming and inspiring community, open to anyone and
everyone(all 2^16 variants).
We list various egregious behaviours that are unwanted and hence
intolerable.
We list responses to such intolerable behaviour.
However we (in the CoC document) don't really address what we may need
to do to extend the community to the broader many.
Part of the wider problem is we often don't appreciate our pre-existing
organisational biases (e.g.[2, 3]) that we fit into within a community.
For example the implicit gender bias toward independent sole author
contributions[4], rather than the inclusiveness of co-authorship as a norm.
While following peff's "interpretation" document link [5], I did see, in
the wider kernel document, that it does have a "Co-developed-by:" option
[6] but then requires a secondary "Signed-off-by:", thus making those
who co-author do extra work, which shouldn't be required.
Thus, while the CoC is good, for clarifying the egregious behaviour
issues, it doesn't really address the wider 'Diversity and Equality'
*expectations* within the community.
Philip
[1] https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/pull/661#issuecomment-186846113
[2] "institutional racism"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
[3] "institutional sexism" ... no Wikipedia article?
[4]
https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/sponsored/3082288/want-to-increase-diversity-it-starts-with-the-job-ad
[5]
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-conduct-interpretation.html
[6] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-patches.html
