Create a Code of Conduct #942
Comments
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How to behave on the project should be obvious, but I'm not against this. |
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If I am able to draft a code of conduct this weekend, will you review and give feedback? I'm pretty swamped at the moment… Is anyone else interested in taking this on? Will you accept a code of conduct which extends to all community venues, online and in-person, as well as in all one-on-one communications? |
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I will review it, and accept it as long as it extends only to things that are strictly related to the project (issues, gitter, mailing list, stackoverflow, whatever), which means interactions related to it, I'm all for inclusiveness. It should not extend to what one has to say on their own when not talking about the project and everything related to it. In this case @elia saying what he thinks on his Twitter is irrelevant to the project, if he starts attacking a contributor or refusing contributions because of his views, then that is not acceptable. |
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Among my other useless contributions to OSS: http://contributor-covenant.org/ Not that it applies here. |
👍 I do not need a code of conduct imposed on me, thanks. |
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@vais Well, maybe you not, but judging by how other people have responded to other issues and pull requests here, I think it's fairly obvious some of the contributors do. |
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@lutoma granted, I am new to this project, but I have no idea what you are talking about. What are you referring to? |
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@meh I think perhaps that what people say on a medium where they explicitly bio themselves as a contributor will reflect on the project whether you intend it to or not. Perhaps if opal is intended to truly be a politics-free zone it should have a principle of "don't identify as an opal committer on a medium in which you're expressing political opinions" - and once that separation is truly present, "judge people only on their conduct within the project" becomes much more clearly sensible. |
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Oh, @strand, @meh you might want to look at http://www.irc.perl.org/rules.html wherein the "Community Policies" section is intentionally an unpacking of "behave like a reasonable person"; a number of us went several rounds of editing to get it to the point where it wasn't perceived as intended to be a political weapon. @vais please see http://shadow.cat/blog/matt-s-trout/on-codifying-conduct/ for an explanation of why in practice it's worth having such an unpacking, and that once you detach the idea from the howling crazies who're often the proponents of the worst written such documents it's actually a really useful one. |
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The core trick with a Code of Conduct is enforcement. You have to have a process where if someone is found in violation they can be dealt with transparently and publicly. This can be just as simple as a warning process that progresses to a ban from the project... or it can be more nuanced. But a CoC is nothing without enforcement. That might seem obvious but I see a lot of places forget that. |
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@shadowcat-mst Awesome, it sounds like we actually might be able to have a productive discussion in this issue. Thanks for that. 👍 Hopefully all the crazy drama and political browbeating will remain confined to that other thread so we can work on solving actual problems here. |
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It's actually calmed down in that other thread (mostly due to the trolls either being banned or losing interest) but a CoC is a great idea and I hope this will be super productive 👍 |
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Here's my code of conduct: just be a decent human being. That extends to recognising that people are the result of everything that has been part of, or influenced their lives up to that point. That means some societies are lagging, and it falls on those of us ahead to help get them up to speed. Witch hunts belong in the dark ages, they do nothing to help with (true) progress. |
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Okay, now on to productive discussion. I'm not sure I agree that "don't identify as an Opal committer on a medium in which you're expressing political opinions" would be a good policy. The fact that someone is an Opal contributor is pretty much public information whether you advertise it or not, and people should absolutely be allowed to express their political beliefs (even unpopular ones), regardless of what open source projects they contribute to. Ideally, people should be able to draw a distinction between the beliefs and opinions of an individual, and the goals of a project they contribute to. Opal is pretty clearly about writing a cross compiler for converting Ruby code into JavaScript. There's not a lot of room for injection of political beliefs there. Furthermore, I think with OSS the beliefs of individual contributors should reflect even less on the project than they otherwise would in a commercial product. Anyone can become a contributor to a OSS project. All they have to do is write good code. "Official" maintainers are simply those who are technically competent enough to be trusted to make commits directly to the repo without having to go through someone else first, and even the very definition of an "official" repository is pretty arbitrary, since anyone can fork the project and create a new "official" repository if they don't like the direction the project is going. Maybe that's being too idealistic though. |
Well that's all a code of conduct really is. The thing is you then have to define what you as a project/org/whatever consider to be the definition of "decent human being". I think you'd be surprised at how many people disagree over the details of that. Well.. obviously you would because you don't see the need for a longer one than that ;) |
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@Ajedi32 I proposed that (independently of the document-to-copy suggestion) simply because, in practice, it seems to me that this would be a good way to help the project remain actually apolitical, rather than 'apolitical except when somebody sees a tweet they find objectionable and reads the twitter bio for places to report it' - whether you think it's a morally good thing is I guess independent of whether it's useful to the project anyway. |
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@AstonJ I tried to cover why that turns out, sadly, to not be quite enough in practice in http://shadow.cat/blog/matt-s-trout/on-codifying-conduct/ - maybe give it a read and see if things make more sense. |
Agreed with this. This is why people put disclaimers up like "the views in here are my own and don't represent... yadayadayada" Now I think that's a bit much for some random contributor with one small PR but for someone that's a maintainer of a project or a major known contributor to one... reasonable. That said - it's coming at it from the wrong direction. Having a community Code of Conduct says what the community finds acceptable and not-acceptable. Then if someone ends up poorly representing the community they can be called on it. It someone's Twitter account is full of hate but no-one knows they are a contributor - and they aren't advertising that fact - then it's not really an issue (for the community that is). |
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@shadowcat-mst that's a great link. |
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I think there's an important distinction not being made here between a core contributor that is a member of the organization and controls the repository and any given random person who might submit a pull request or an issue to the project. An organization absolutely requires a code of conduct, and that code of conduct very likely should extend to a certain extent to the activities somebody engages in outside the walls of any particular github issue or pull request. Your core contributors represent your project, and when you refuse to hold them accountable for the things that they say, in public, in the same space they are discussing the project, then you can't really rely on them as a community leader. Open source software is and always has been far more about community than code. When you start an open source project, you are starting a community. When one of the members of your organization, one of the people you are building your community around, is advertising your project in one post and then spewing hate in the next one, and you say that doesn't matter, what you're actually saying is that you care more about the technical contributions of that contributor than you do about everyone he alienates in the process. By backing him you are saying to everyone that he has insulted and dehumanized "his code is more important than you". You may not need a code of conduct for every person that submits a pull request to your project, though I think real and enforced standards for how people should behave in issues is important and a good idea, but it's absolutely necessary that you hold the people you have selected as community leaders and project overseers to some kind of a standard. |
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On the Opalist website (which is a separate project from Opal, just to be clear), I included this language on my "Submit a Link" page:
I think something along those lines as part of a short blurb about contributing to the Opal project seems reasonable. However, I'm very leery of anything that would suggest that maintainers or contributors to the project need to police themselves on what they should or shouldn't say or do online in places that are separate from the Opal project. That sounds like precrime/thoughtcrime mentality and not freedom. And isn't OSS about freedom after all? |
This spurred a lot of discussion in this thread about when and where this might apply and what is a personal vs. professional medium. I'd like to point back to something in the original Issue description that triggered this Issue.
This is important. It means that someone is mixing their public comments related to both their personal views and their work. Effectively, you could say that one is being used to bootstrap an audience for the other. This means that you can't separate these issues by the medium in which they are placed because people are actively mixing their personal and professional speech and benefiting from it in one context while avoiding accountability in the other context. If someone keeps their personal views private you'd be hard pressed to find people who are going to dig them up and ask that they be expelled from public projects they are involved in. That's not the issue we're talking about and pretending that it is pollutes the real conversation we need to behaving which is that contributors live very publicly and the entirety of their public presence is how they are viewed by all participants. If projects wish to be inclusive they need to consider the entirety of that persons public interactions, ignoring it just means that you'll write a policy that doesn't effectively promote inclusiveness. |
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After having a discussion about something similar, I must say that my opinion on it was this:
Of course, this is just my opinion on the matter, and you may feel free to copy it or ignore it. |
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I vehemently oppose any code of conduct that censors or punishes any behavior unrelated to and/or outside the scope of Opal. People have a right to hold and express their own opinions, even if they are unpopular or hurtful. |
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@jaredcwhite This isn't about "thought crime" but about the conduct of an individual in charge of a community. This would be a non-issue, or at least a much smaller one, if he wasn't in a position of authority here, but he is and that's very important context. If you are responsible for running a community and a project, and you are also conducting yourself publicly as an asshole, that's relevant. You can't just publicly attack an entire group of people and expect that you should still be allowed to run a community that cares about them and their contributions. He can say whatever he wants on his twitter, but he shouldn't expect that the community won't hold him accountable for his speech and that his reputation and standing won't suffer, especially if what he says is harmful and discriminatory. |
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@utterbull the problem is when those opinions might affect previous,current or future contributors and users of the project. No contributors code is more important than the community at large. @shadowcat-mst , @CoralineAda thanks for the links. |
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@adambeynon I agree that the community is more important than any one individual, but I still maintain my earlier position. A code of conduct that punishes or censors contributors is a violation of the rights of every single individual in the community, and therefor the community as a whole as well. |
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Yeah, you can't even be an open bigot anymore without people getting mad at you and questioning whether you should be in charge of running a diverse and inclusive community. What's the world coming to? |
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@utterbull I understand, and I second that. But (some of) they managed to hijack this discussion nevertheless, and there's nothing one could had done to prevent it (except by locking it from everybody that is not a member of the project). This discussion is not about the Opal community anymore. We had been played. edit: I replace "You" with "We" in my last sentence, as I'm part of it too. I'm including myself in my criticism |
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@Lisias not just twitter, its also on reddit, tumbler and at least two chans. It's like a proxy war between superpowers and neither side actually cares about Opal. But yeah the SJW blew it up on twitter first to kick off the dogpile. Persinally I think JavaScript is botnet and Opal should instead focus on Ruby to full Java or even better to ActiveX plugin :^) Everyone just loves ActiveX right? Should I start a fork for the ActiveX version? I'll let the SJW wright the code of conduct, I'm sure they would all work on it for free. |
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No, @lesley2015 , WE are the problem. We let them do it. |
Now that, I agree with fully :) |
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@Lisias In fact, meh dealt with the problem pretty decisively when it first came up. Closed the issue with "Bring contributions, they will be accepted with open arms, bring morals and politics in here, and you will be shown the metaphorical door." Kinda went downhill from there though once the Twitter mob got word of the situation. |
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What does this discussion have to do with Opal? Why am I participating here, even though I've never used Opal? Let's stop this madness and take it off of GitHub. |
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Let's recap SJWs start an issue where there is none, then pretend the issue was caused by people they oppose, force a CoC which allows them to target people they don't like and justify the backlash against their terrorism is proof that the CoC was needed in the first place. Am I the only one to notice something very very wrong with this? |
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First off I have nothing against GLBT people. I am empathetic to anyone who struggles to find a job and has problems fitting into society and has been bullied and picked on. As someone who is mentally ill I've had that happen to me. The difference is that I have nobody defending me because of my mental illness, there is no political correctness that can be used in my case. Political correctness can vary based on person to person. What we are seeing here is debates of "I'm right because my feelings are hurt and political correctness" instead of "I'm right because of this evidence here and this scientific theory here and this logic and data here." in STEM we go by evidence and the peer reviewed scientific method. We don't go by feelings and political correctness as the guide to what is correct. In all of the time debating over a CoC, it could have been time to submit code to Opal and make it better. Instead we choose to fight over what someone might have said or implied by taking their words out of context, and in some cases some have spoken in ignorance because they didn't take a genders study class to find out how to deal with transgender people. We have a lot of SJWs who attack religious people here and troll cisgendered people as well proving hypocrisy. We have a lot of zero day accounts that just add noise to the conversation and get us nowhere. If you can write code, then submit some code to project Opal and see how it goes. If you can't write code and just came here to troll people, you are what is wrong with the STEM industry and you need to leave, or choose to drop the trolling and learn how to code and submit code to help out. |
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@orionblastar I tried to propose an alternative to literal Orwell. People thought I was trolling and rejected it based on that alone. At this point contributing to projects that just sway in the wind and bend to the largest noise becomes increasingly frustrating, because you're working on a community, for years and suddenly outside forces come in and demand you change the way you think because they feel being offended gives you any rights. It doesn't. |
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@orionblastar but the coc they want fights against the pervasive cult of meritocracy which is what your promoting. They don't care how good you code only that you agree with there ever progressing progressivisam. And when your not progressive enough for the new fad to be championed they will eat there own. |
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You know what the sad thing about this is? All we are doing by including a CoC is to give trolls a pole to hang someone from. You only have to wait for the next time someone on the team gets baited. That's why it is a bad idea. It's also a bad idea because you don't need one. If I can go about making a full-blown clone of MPC-HC without a uml diagram much less a full-fledged coding standards doc, just like many other projects out there even more complicated than that, surely you can make do without a CoC. Furthermore, the development team changes all the time and CoCs literally become outdated. It's stupid. Furthermore, as developers who have to review pull requests and judge code based on functionality instead of who wrote it, we are obligated to inform all lawyering snowflakes who want their hand held with a set of rules like they had on the school playground that obstructionists to that process are not welcome. In my opinion, the best approach from now is to revert the commits about this, lock the threads, and get back to work. |
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@Ajedi32 One is not responsible for what others do with he, but he's responsible for what he does with what was done with him. WE (as as group os persons) failed to address correctly the problem, and after, we failed on keep the alleged problem in perspective. As I said before, it's damn to easy to anyone from "out there" came here and play havoc with anyone of the community members. Instead of protecting one of your own, you choose to impose an CoC that endorses the problem, instead of prevent it: you blamed the victim (elia) for the bad behaviour of a external person that came here to enforce her own personal agenda. The deadliest poison in the whole World is all but inoffensive if you choose not to ingest it. But you choose to ingest it. |
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If you guys are still fighting, here's how I see it. I'm transgender. I'm mostly accepted now, as we can see. People will fight for my rights, even non-LGBT people. You know how I got here? I spoke out. I used my free speech and spoke out against what was morally popular, and because I was allowed to speak my mind, no matter how strange, offensive, evil, corrupt or perverted people thought of transgender or even LGBT people as a whole, we were able to reach this place where a person like Coraline can be a PERSON WITH A LOT OF POWER, regarding this project. Transgender people are gaining rights, and it's ONLY thanks to free speech. I would never DARE limit anyone's free speech. Being transgender was once thoughtcrime. If that view ever happened again... If there is ever a time where I must once again speak out, I would want to have FULL RIGHTS to freedom of speech. I would want FULL protection to be able to voice my opinions, no matter how wrong or offensive. This CoC issue has become popular enough on the internet that we must think outside this project. Opal is big news now. It's no longer about Opal, it's about the entire internet. If a CoC is made, and it reinforces the current liberal view point of censoring people for "thoughtcrime", then in 50 years, when LGBT people, or blacks, or jews, or asians, or any minority is being hunted or discriminated against once again, they will not be able to speak out. We cannot breed an atmosphere of self-censorship and a fear of committing thoughtcrime. This is NOT a private Opal issue anymore. I hope you all realize that. This involves the entire internet now, and the decisions of a few will have a lasting effect throughout the rest of internet history. I feel it's important for LGBT people, minorities of any color or class or creed, for non-minorities to embrace the crude, cruel and hurtful reality of the world, instead of trying to censor it. One day, you may need to speak. |
@SweetLordy , you are putting on this community's shoulders a burden that they didn't asked for neither deserve to. It's not up to them to carry on this fight. I don't see why these guys actions and decisions should be put on a global perspective, I don't see anyone "out there" coming here to help them solve their problems - au contraire, all I'm seeing is they coming here to give these guys a lot of headaches. For nothing. Promoting anything (no matter how rightful it is) at the expenses of others is not cool. This project's people deserves a better treatment, and we, outlanders, should know better. |
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That said, please understand I'm not making statements against you, your beliefs or your gender. I think you are pretty right - I just don't agree that this is the place to do that. We are guests here. We should know better. |
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Well, Lisias, if it doesn't end up being an internet-wide issue, then it doesn't. But this is FOR SURE very popular, and getting attention outside of even just Github. I still feel that whatever decision ends up being made will be important on a global scale though, even if this battle isn't the "tipping point" in the "war" or whatever you'd call this. |
Actually, that's not entirely true. One need not look too far into history to see horrific human rights violations committed under the auspices of "science" (Tuskagee Syphilis experiments being one example). The entire eugenics movement was based on some really bad "science" to justify the extermination of entire groups of people. Including people suffering from mental illness. In fact, it was those with learning disabilities, mental retardation, and mental illness who were the very first people targeted for state-enforced euthanasia in 1930's Germany. So we do need a balance of both "feelings" and "fact." The key word is "balance." We need to always ask questions and remember that agendas—which start out as feelings—do drive what is accepted as "fact." The most important question that too few people ask is the "grail question": Cui bono? (Latin for "who is benefiting?"). But I do get what you're saying and I agree with you. I would also like to reach out to you and let you know that I really like your posts because you are an empath. The world has too many people that are missing an empathy chip. You've added some really good things to the conversation, and I sincerely hope I am not the only person who read your posts and recognizes the value in them. As an aside, one of my mentors is a pretty brilliant guy (who is in the functional programming community) and he suffers from mental illness too and a lot of other people are put off by him. I however, am not. I accept him the way he is. I have weighed the good, the bad, and the ugly and found his mentorship as well as his personal friendship to far outweigh any of the "bumps" and "bruises" his lack of social skills due to mental illness. Many corporate types won't work with him. But I can, I will, and I do. He has enriched my life enormously (he was the one who turned me on to F#). He is a core member of my own cash-starved LLC that is trying to bootstrap a project. I would not trade him for another Haskell mentor for all the rubies in Madagascar. I would be honored to have you as a friend and a coding buddy as well. So feel free to reach out :) . I'm only a junior level developer and a polyglot (lack of job opportunities for me as a marginalized person not protected or defended by SWJ's kinda forces that so I can freelance my way into keeping my utilities on, food on the table, and a leaky roof over my head). My email is: jacquelinehoman7@gmail.com |
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@Cephel :
No, you're not the only one who noticed that. As soon as I saw things escalate to a bloody feeding frenzy, my bullshit detection siren started going off big time. At risk of sounding shrill, I will go out on a limb and admit that the thought has crossed my mind that this may have been orchestrated with specific intent to deliberately destroy the Opal project without any consideration for the degree of harm and sabotage that would be inflicted on the entire rest of the OSS community as a result. I have seen other OSS projects sabotaged and destroyed by SJW's. Gittip, which was a project in the Python community, is a prime example of that: and sadly, it was one if its biggest financial beneficiaries that was the chief SJW that led the attack and totally publicly smeared and trashed that project's maintainer. So now, no one uses Gittip—which was supposed to help marginalized people who are truly poor and disadvantaged who are trying to break into IT and get a toehold onto the IT jobs ladder, who DO need economic support to be able to join the field. As a result of that brouhaha, the intended beneficiaries of that project cannot benefit from it and it was precisely supposed to be for helping us. (Thanks a lot for nothing, SWJ's!) I really don't want to see a replay of that for the Opal community, which is part of the larger Ruby community of which I am a member. In fact, I don't want to see a replay of it anywhere in the open source community at all. |
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So are you all telling me that even our industry having an extreme bias towards some gender/race stereotype, are you all willing to weight the voice of who is speaking solely by a metric where the dominant stereotype has clear advantage by the very reason we have the bias (please note how much 'code' we've read so far, almost no other form of contribution is even mentioned)? Don't you acknowledge the lack of diversity of our industry or you just don't care? |
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"Our Industry". Who's industry? I don't view the ability to create amazing things with programming code to be exclusive to anyone. I can program, you can program, anyone who wants to learn to program can learn to program. The OTHER people involved? The social aspect? It's not my place to tell them how to live or act, nor is it yours. Haven't you read the Hacker Manifesto? |
Yet, some specific demographics do a lot more than others. Strange, huh?
So discussing social issues in open source isn't allowed, then?
I have, and it is bulshit. |
This will change naturally as computers become more and more mainstream, and cheaper as well. Because that's absolutely absurd, and if there IS a conspiracy, it's directly from the government or some sort of religious authority. If you seek such powerful rules in your favor, then you desire that same power. This "demographics" problem must be changed at the child-education level. Not with dystopian rules like the ones currently being proposed.
You can discuss whatever you desire. However, can you handle the opposite? Can you handle someone talking about a social issue that opposes yours? Obviously not.
It is immature because a kid wrote it, but if you don't understand it, then that's probably because you're not a hacker. |
I don't think there's a conspiracy. I think there's a self feedback loop, like the one shown here. It's like saying everyone can make money, but it is naturally much easier to make money if you already have money. And suddenly, the poor stays poor and the rich stays rich, with exceptions of course. And when someone says there is inequity, they're told "everyone can make money".
We're talking right now. I don't want people to be forced to not speak. As I said before, I have a lot of conservative friends as well. I just want to be sure their opinion won't backlash minority groups, like is happening here. And I stated: I don't even really agree Elia should really be removed from the project. But the discussion took another path a long time ago, I'd say in the few first posts in the other issue.
Oh, I'm so not a hacker. Specially because I love code so much I think everyone should be allowed and incentivized to do it, not only a selected group of privileged people. And no one is special just because learned to code early (which I did). |
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Let us consider Scientology. To a Scientologist, the teachings of Scientology form the very core of their identity and their day to day life. Now there are people in this world, shocking as it may sound, who have the audacity to declare that Scientologists are delusional. Some even advocate persecution of innocent Scientologists, accusing them of being part of some scam. Even whispers of child abuse. Thankfully, as we value inclusion above all else, we harshly expel anyone who spouts such bigotry or even gives tacit approval to such disgusting claims. |
We have a diversity problem because SWJ's claiming to promote diversity don't want to include the voices of the most disprivileged and marginalized and instead want to control the whole convo—which serves no interest other than the protection of their own socio-economic class privileges. We have a diversity problem because the mass line is used to cover up the class line. It has not escaped my notice that the only voices of underrepresented persons in tech that ever get a platform are those who enjoy middle/upper class privilege. A woman who is young, lucky to be employed and affluent and who is a pro-prostitution promoter gets paid to speak on "diversity issues" at Alterconf—but not the poor older lady who couldn't even afford her first computer until age 45 who is facing far more barriers to employment (due to ageism, classism, and sexism) who suffered lifelong poverty and marginalization because of being a human trafficking survivor that is involved in the anti-trafficking efforts does NOT get that same opportunity, or any help from the SWJ's.
No one here denied that the lack of opportunity for many groups is a problem. I don't think that's a fair question. Nor do I think it is fair that to jump to the conclusion that no one else cares. I obviously DO care. Which is why I challenged the SWJ's upthread to actually extend a material, economic helping hand up to poor marginalized folks trying to break into IT and to stop invisiblizing truly poor and disadvantaged members of underrepresented/invisibilized groups—like poor human trafficking survivors who struggled in lifelong crushing poverty due to being rendered unemployable because of being deeply stigmatized for being the victims of a human rights crime. |
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@AmbientMalice understands that s/he can speak his/her mind. This person also recognizes that because they're comparing transgender people to scientologists, that this would offend me on a personal level. For this reason, I no longer like or respect AmbientMalice. But that offensive view is just one aspect of their personality, and although I disagree personally, if they had good code and still respected me enough to not just bash or mock me for being transgender upon every meeting, I could work with this person. This is what a Code of Conflict is for. If someone is being purposely rude or mean to someone, I should be able to seek relief. On the other hand, AmbientMalice's career should not be in jeopardy just because AmbientMalice is an asshole, or even a bad person. |
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Locking |
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I have locked this issue not to stop the conversation, but to direct it to somewhere more appropriate. Over the last few days, a number of people in this conversation have taken the issue in hand and shown that discrimination against other individuals in our industry is, quite frankly, alarming. The tech/development/computer industry has a long and troubled history of discrimination against various groups of individuals which, judging by some of the comments in this and other threads, shows no sign of improving anytime soon. To the people who contributed comments and messages looking to improve our community: thank you. This whole matter could have been sorted in a peaceful manner; instead the problems in our community are not just present inside Opal, they are still present within the whole developer community. I encourage every individual who has taken part in this conversation to review our recently committed Code of Conduct. That is the standard this project will be run against, however I am open to making further improvements. Please help continue this discussion at http://metaruby.com/c/ruby-forum/community-issues Thank you, Adam. |
and others
The discussion from @meh on #941 say that new contributors will be "welcome and treated with respect."
A code of conduct is a common practice to foster a kind, inclusive, cooperative, and harassment-free community. Adopting a code of conduct would demonstrate that new contributors will be welcomed and respected.
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