Nearly every point in this list assumes the issues people are addressing with code of conducts boil down to over-sensitive, reductivist prima-donnas. It is essential an extended denial that there is ever a real problem.
That might be, but the article doesn't even try to make that argument. Instead it makes a caricature of people who think there is sometimes a problem, and furthermore think that making expectations explicit rather than implicit is a good and helpful step.
The article is lazy, cynical, and reflects shallow thinking.
>Nearly every point in this list assumes the issues people are addressing with code of conducts boil down to over-sensitive, reductivist prima-donnas.
Yes. That's why I think they've nailed it. This is, much more often that not, the case.
People have been capable of coexisting in social situations without an explicit CoC for millenia. And they have been doing just that on the internet since its inception. Heck, they're doing it in most non-US Western countries without many issues...
> People have been capable of coexisting in social situations without an explicit CoC for millenia.
People have been excluding minorities and disadvantaged groups for those same millennia. Your argument is almost verbatim that of antivaxxers who argue "people were fine before vaccines!" while ignoring all the evidence that people weren't.
A code of context exists only to deal with people who are causing problems. Everyone else scans it once and then goes on ignoring it because they never run into problems.
The only people who should have a problem with a code of conduct are those who don't want to contribute to the culture as everyone else is.
Can you point to where this is happening more than the after mentioned over-sensitive, reductivist prima-donnas issues? ( I mean in the context of our industry )
Do you believe that our industry employs black people (a demographic, which, at least in the US, have been fairly clearly historically discriminated against, until the passage of legal codes of conduct) at a rate commensurate with their relative skill and interest compared to non-black people?
You'd think a look at employment rates of science and engineering graduates, as seen in your third link, would help, but because of affirmative action that data's kind of spoiled.
OK, sure, but in the absence of affirmative action, are black high schoolers going into science and engineering programs at rates commensurate with their aptitude and interest compared with non-black high schoolers?
Obviously we're a bit off-topic from codes of conduct at the moment. But the specific claim I was responding to was that minorities and disadvantaged groups are not being excluded from CS today in the same way as they have been marginalized from society for millennia. You can draw a fairly straightforward line of causality from imperialism and slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow to, e.g., why fewer black kids in elementary school learned programming in the '90s via their parents' UNIX account from the local university and reading their parents' textbooks (which is how I originally got into CS as a child, and I've heard similar stories from several of my peers).
Why then are overproportional so many Asians in IT? They are most often similarly coming from an immigrant background and had no "parents with a UNIX account".
> The article is lazy, cynical, and reflects shallow thinking.
Agreed. It also attempts to blame the victims of various forms of discrimination, harassment, etc. on the Internet for the distraction that their complaints cause in the community. He should stop to consider that maybe the people doing the discriminating, harassing, etc. are the real problem.
You might also streamline a community by adopting a zero tolerance policy towards discrimination, etc. That way, people are deterred from misbehaving, and you rapidly eliminate the people who cause the problems, all while supporting people who have historically been marginalized.
I can't speak for everyone, but the communities I'm involved in are far too technical and busy doing technical things to give a shit about anyone's gender, sexuality, skin tone, or culture. (Religion isn't even on our radar.)
Can you provide insight into something of a technical nature?
Then how will you notice if some of the people doing technical things are specifically giving more insight or more benefit of the doubt based on gender, sexuality, skin tone, culture, or religion?
If you are not paying attention, you're open to abuse. Hopefully there is no abuse; most people are good at heart. But you have no way of knowing. This strikes me as an un-technical way to approach problems, especially if you know that there are problems in other projects.
> Then how will you notice if some of the people doing technical things are specifically giving more insight or more benefit of the doubt based on gender, sexuality, skin tone, culture, or religion?
We don't care. Or, to be completely intellectually honest, at least I don't. I'm interest in the output and the ideas that are shared. The input is none of my business. I judge people for their relevant behavior, not their state.
Sorry, I guess I was a bit unclear. You don't care, sure. But someone working in the project with you might decide to exercise bias, for lots of reasons. (Maybe they grew up indoctrinated into bias, and it's hard to shake. I grew up in the Southern US, I get that.) Do you know that you will notice? If you're only paying attention to output and ideas, does it matter to you if the output and ideas are only coming from certain people?
You might decide, of course, that if you're getting enough output or ideas, you don't need all the new contributors you might get, and if you only get those that get past people's biases, that's enough. I would be unhappy about that, personally, but it's clearly possible to make a thriving open-source project with such a philosophy.
In my experience, the top contributors tend to have open minds. In practice, I have not run into much bigotry with the people I associate with, except for the occasional newcomer who is quickly asked to leave.
Fair. I read it as an individual extremely burnt out by politicization, which I relate to. Taking the various problems for granted, I definitely get a "here we go again" feeling when I see another identity-focused scandal show up on my feed.
On the one hand, it's depressing how common these issues are on a wide scale and I want to see them put to rest. On the other hand, I've done a lot of work to cultivate an intelligent, balanced social/professional group specifically so I wouldn't have to worry about these issues in my daily life.
I started out on board with using the internet as a medium for advocacy. Now, after a couple years of the scandal-shame-"apology" cycle, I'm cynical and frustrated. There's always some idiot treating people around them like garbage. There's always somebody with a story about their mistreatment. There's always some org making empty changes to appease public outrage. I've done what I can locally and virtually and (go figure) it did little to fix a society-wide issue. The constant barrage of victimization and victimhood wears us all out and it's no longer a purely social topic. Music, movies, industries, churches, countries, there's mildly-inappropriate-to-horrific stuff happening everywhere and the conversation never stops. At some point it does start feeling like you can't talk about anything online without having to pay lip-service to the crimes of strangers world wide. It's become harder and harder to connect and the threshold for "unforgivable mistake" has gotten lower and lower.
So it just doesn't feel worth the energy to engage anymore. The world isn't a better place because of this particular conversation we're forcibly engaged in all the time. People are generally incredibly bitter or entirely apathetic, either doing the right thing or committed to their crumminess. Rarely does the virtual mob even take anyone down and at least half the time when they do it's some nobody making a typical human mistake that could be easily addressed with normal 1-1 interaction. Meanwhile the companies that peddle this stuff get rich on our collective disgust and 99% of the jagoffs in the world keep doing their thing until the outrage lotto picks their number. That's our tactic for social improvement. It's a joke.
Anyway, I'm saying I get where this individual is coming from. I suspect the site is as much an angry rant as a serious idea (there's nothing groundbreaking about people behaving themselves: most of us do it most of the time, and I think that's the point). But a lot of these Codes of Conduct feel like a flimsy response to the toxic way we talk about these problems and not a response to the problems themselves. nCoC seems to be the flip-side of that coin, It says "we have problems, we don't know how to discuss them productively, so let's focus on the work we share and forge relationships that way."
In most settings, that's the one good approach we can all reliably execute. My two cents.
He is not angry, he is tired. He is tired of propaganda, misrepresentation, vicious attacks on social platforms, and the endless rage that is coming from that community.
Our virtual workplace (GitHub) is a social code sharing platform for people who want to make this world better by contributing their hard work to the community, that is humanity.
Imagine that after working free, doing your best to improve this society with your contribution, there is a vicious troll coming in and asking you to deny access to one of you contributors because he disagrees on his personal twitter account.
Would want to contribute code after that? You have to realized that if all of these people are intimidated to maintain online presence and contribute code we are not going to have this rich open source ecosystem.
Another angle for the problem:
When you are unhappy about something the productive successful people go and fix it. The less productive people are raging about it. In this context if you are unhappy about his tweet you go and message him on twitter and start a civil conversation. You don't go to his workplace and trying to discredit him with lies and false information. This is usually done by extremists (pretty common practice in my country, neonazis do that all the time).
Until now, I was part of the silent group that does not fight back, but that came to an end with the opal story. It is our (the political centre) responsibility to not let this society slide to extremism by any mean. If we don't do that, we gonna end up with a divided society that is less humane and open than it was before.
Also related is this thread from yesterday, where 'meh' stood up to an angry mob and refused to kick out a core committer for his unrelated political views.
Damn, this github issue is such a tragedy... If you like politics, please engage in politic groups or parties. But everything is NOT about politics. Only the worst fascist regimes think so as they try to mold every parts of society to their own beliefs.
I guess it's the downside of the geek culture being fashionable and not an underground culture anymore. People that love talking more than coding start polluting discussion group to get some sort of recognition for something different than plain hard work...
EDIT : i read it again. Do people advocating for the firing of the contributor who posted on twitter realize what the long term consequence is, provided people choose a technology based on politics ? You'll have "gay friendly" technology, and "conservative" technology. You'll have "christian" technology and "muslim" technology (because, hey, saying Jesus is the son of god on twitter hurts muslim's feelings).
You'll have "meat lovers" programming languages. And "pro guns" Operating Systems.
Is that the technological world you want to live in ?? Don't you think computer science and interoperability is difficult enough so that we don't bring in those kind of considerations ?
I "run" an forum that is an offshoot of a very popular professional software development blog. The original forum was closed by the blog author and my site replaced it. This forum has rules but they're pretty minor (no doxxing, etc) and users cannot be filtered away, only posts can be removed.
Having run this forum for over a decade, I have a lot of insight into running an anonymous free form nearly censorship free place on the Internet.
1. There are many mentally disturbed people on the Internet. So point #1 of the article, "We are all adults. Capable of having adult discussions." is already off the mark. And even perfectly normal people tend to be worse human beings online (The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory). And these are people, like you and me, who earn their living making software.
2. "We accept everyones contributions." Yes, but bytes being free creates a situation where some contributions will overshadow other everyone else's contributions. 1 person can literally post 10,000x more than anyone else. And they will, see point #1. This creates an unbalanced situation that is very hard to resolve.
In my opinion, if you want to be inclusive it's pretty damn hard without any rules, moderation, censorship, limited access, etc.
This is all definitely true. What happens, though, when the "mentally disturbed people" -- or even just some completely sane people who happen to have a political/cultural agenda foremost in their minds, rather than the good of the project or organization -- work their way into control of the rules, moderation, censorship, and limited access?
This is not just possible but highly likely, given that moderation is an unpleasant and time-consuming job and anyone who volunteers is quite likely to get it. And once the power to deploy these rules is in the hands of the people who were supposed to be restrained by these rules, things tend to get very dark, very quickly.
Everyone always thinks moderators are evil. They have "the power" and you do not. It's basic human nature. The reality, of course, is that it's a thankless but necessary job that can't please everyone. Most give up after being constantly harassed and accused of having an agenda. Moderation decisions are imperfect because there are plenty of competing interests and there is often no obvious right answer.
Conspiracy theories abound these days and it's mostly ridiculous.
No, I don't think moderators are evil; that's absurd. Moderators are people. Some are good and some are bad. But the nature of the job of a volunteer moderator is that it's going to be hard to get anyone to do it who isn't, as you say, going to give up and quit because of all the crap they have to put up with in exchange for no pay. Who's going to be left? The egotists, the fanatics, and the folks who see it as a useful tool to "change the world."
It's hard to picture a solution. Perhaps if moderation was an actual job; that would at least weed out some of the folks who are unstable or are just in it for internet points.
I run an event with a CoC. However I do see the other side of the argument:
- the common CoCs from http://confcodeofconduct.com/ are vague: they're defined by what is 'offensive' - choosing to be offended is very much a personal matter and it can be hard to guess what will offend others. 'Dongle' jokes? I've seen female speakers make a 40 min presentation on regular expressions filled with rude words, that, if they weren't female, would have caused a shitstorm.
- CoCs being inconsistently enforced - a major hard-left conf organiser regularly retweets a well known online troll who constantly says things that violate their code of conduct, but since the trolls target a particular race and gender it's considered 'edgy' or 'ironic'.
- The CoCs mix things people consider innate (gender, sexuality) with ideas (spirituality) and what many medical professional would consider lifestyles choices (obesity). These are not worthy of the same degrees of protection. I don't think fat people should feel bad, but I don't think saying someone is fat is the same thing as saying they'll go to hell because they're gay.
- CoCs conflict with each other: spiritual views conflict with each other (I think God isn't real, someone else thinks that it is and disbelievers will go to hell, spiritual views conflict with sexuality (Christianity and gay marriage). Either party could feel offended. OK fine, lets not discuss religion or sexuality. Kind of feels sad to limit discussion.
There have got to be more constructive ways of making the same point. Throwing up specious strawman arguments as a mock "FAQ" kind of undermines point 1: "We are all adults. Capable of having adult discussions."
Edit: it's going to bother me all weekend if I don't add that I find the viewpoint expressed in this link, i.e. "people who are concerned about reaching out to members of non-majority groups and making them feel welcome in a technical community are idiots worthy of ridicule," to be absolutely appalling. It's very different than the view that people should be judged purely on their technical contribution.
No coincidence that this was written, apparently, by a youngish white male. This sounds like an effort to impose a code of conduct that only restricts the sort of conduct that frequently bothers him (being accused of having violated social norms that he does not find important--probably because they do not benefit him), while consciously deciding not to address the challenges that face other people online.
He's free to run a community in that way, but I won't be joining it.
I was amused that he defended himself by pointing out that he helps design software for a gay community. Okay, but does that really make you a minority in any way? Regardless of whether privilege is an issue in this discussion, the logic doesn't really flow here.
Intersectionality would come into play if he was arguing that he was a member of multiple minority groups. Here he was arguing that he was a contributor (not necessarily a member!) of a single group, distinct from the previously discussed ones. It's entirely possible he's a member of multiple groups, my point was just that his argument didn't reference that and it was therefore illogical.
I'm... actually not clear on what you're saying. Are you being sarcastic or serious? I can't read your tone and I could imagine realistic scenarios where you're saying one thing or the other.
My bad - I was being sarcastic about the first comment, not sarcastic about the second (and agreeing with you).
To more fully explain what I meant by my first response, I was frustrated by his lack of awareness of the ways intersectionality impacts how different people interact with each other online. Codes of Conduct become increasingly important as one recognizes that intersectionalities of oppression can create extremely toxic situations for some minority groups and not others, depending on the context of the group. So, basically what you were saying in your second comment.
You sound pretty knowledgable about intersectionality. Do you have any material on it? I'm only familiar with it from one blog post, so I wouldn't mind learning some more. It sounds like there are more nuances to it than I first understood.
Not in the least. This proposal clearly reflects the belief that complaints about discrimination, etc. are "the problem" in communities, not the actual conduct giving rise to the complaints. Thus, it punishes the former while allowing the latter to continue unimpeded.
If this isn't the point, as you say, then what exactly is the point?
Edit: Or maybe the point is this: Whatever the author is trying to discuss in these communities, it is so important that one can't spare the time to address problematic social behavior. If so, I think the author either underestimates the importance of some of the social ills that plague online communities, or his work in these communities is far more urgent than I had realized.
"We are all adults. Capable of having adult discussions."
How I wish this was true, but it's not. That's why we have code of conducts: because creepers don't realize that it's not okay to hit on every women they see, because bros don't realize gay isn't a synonym for bad, because gamergaters don't realize women can video games and so on. The sad truth is, there is a portion of our society that does not act in a mature and adult way, and they hurt others as a result.
As someone who plays life on easy mode[1] like I imagine most commenters here, it's hard to remember that most people play life on hard mode. Code of conducts are aimed at making hard mode a little better: hopefully by reminding people where the boundaries are, and for correcting problems when those boundaries are crossed. Are codes of conduct a perfect solution? No. But the response to lack of perfection shouldn't be to give up: it should be to try harder. Centuries of civilization has show us that ignoring problems don't make things better. We have to fight the good fight and force the world to be a better place.
>because gamergaters don't realize women can video games and so on
I'm going to try and not be vindictive, but I assume you think #NotYourShield is nothing but sockpuppet accounts and doesn't have any support from GG supporters and that Liz, a prominent female supporter of GG who was doxxed and threatened by anti-GGers, was not supported by GG? I spent 2-3 months browsing the tag and found it to be a far more diverse group of people than the primarily white, upper-middle class, SanFran group of SJW people who oppose the Twitter movement.
>because bros don't realize gay isn't a synonym for bad
Linguistics says you're wrong. You can dislike that the word has multiple meanings and that one refers to a demographic of people, but I know of nobody who makes the connection between the two definitions. Hell - most of my homosexual friends of mine have absolutely no issue with the usage of the word in the contexts people tend to use it negatively in, and I've asked them. Only the extremely PC-types give a shit.
>because creepers don't realize that it's not okay to hit on every women they see
I like how a flirtatious/promiscuous woman is a "slut" and the chosen term for a flirtatious/promiscuous man is "creeper". It makes defending the "creeper" put one in some sort of negative moral standing. Which is a way to pull emotional/political biases into the argument.
Humans enjoy sex. Society tends to shame people with multiple partners. Single people, therefore, tend to flirt with other single people. Maybe one of them wants to join them for sex. The more you flirt with other single people - the more likely you are to receive a positive response from one of them. Therefore, if your goal is sex, you flirt with as many single people as possible.
Congratulations - you've just discovered human motives backed by human nature. Do you share these vindications against sluts? Or does it only apply to creepers?
Lastly - members of these same minority groups are sick of people like you being offended on their behalf [0] [1] [2]. This isn't an uncommon sentiment either. Being offended on their behalf is treating them as less than you. As if they cannot make up their own minds to be offended or not. As if they are too weak to speak up and need you to do it for them. Sometimes they just don't care [3].
> If you feel this way simply because we do not have a code of conduct, it is hard for anyone to relate to you.
Huh, really? Anyone? Not even me? Wow! I didn't know I was unable to relate to people.
The entire premise here seems to be based on the assumption that if the world ought to work a certain way, it necessarily does, and if certain things don't seem like they should be problems, they aren't. That's a popular hacker culture anti-pattern, and applied to technical decisions, it's what brought us things like C and Linux. (I'll note that C and Linux are on the "good list".)
Except the Linux Kernel technically does have a code of conduct, it's just called the Code of Conflict, and while it basically states they'll deal with problems on a case-by-case basis, it does explicitly give people a way to air their grievances and attempt to have problems addressed.
Additionally, while C itself doesn't have a specific code of conduct, the International Standards Organization (which C belongs to and is governed by) has a code of conduct and code of ethics.
What exactly is bad about a code of conduct? Yes, they can get overly complex, and aren't always perfect, but 99% of the time, a formalized code of conduct is just a way of saying don't be a dick, and if you're a dick, here's how we're going to deal with it.
In the Opal situation, the fear was that the code of conduct would be used as a weapon against people expressing unrelated political opinions outside of the context of the project itself.
This is not an unreasonable fear, given that the people who are demanding the CoC explicitly said they wanted to do this.
> Whatever do you, do not make a scene, as that will burden the entire community with your issue... Remember, this is not the time or place to start these kind of discussions.
Cool. I'll make sure not to make a big issue out of being sexually harassed online... online.
The recent instances of people demanding resignation of a technical person from an open source project because somebody dislikes his personal views is a form of coercion to uniformity, political thought-policing.
In line with this theme, the NCoC site says:
Q: How can I contribute to your project or community when I see someone said something on a different site or community which directly makes me feel awful?
A: We are not in the business of policing people’s personal lives. Hopefully they also don’t give a shit about that when they are here. Part of not discriminating people, is not discriminating people. This is not world court. Sometimes people have different views. Just because they express this elsewhere, doesn’t mean we give a shit.
Yeah. I saw have seen some talented people get fired over the years, including at my current company.
I have heard all sorts of offensive comments throughout the years from all sorts of sexualities and nationalities. The only people who ever get fired for them are white (or white-passing) males.
Most projects already have formal or informal rules set in place for discussion, project management, issue tracking.
A code of conduct would be redundant as such. More often than not, it seems to mostly be a veiled appeasement. The Linux kernel's "Code of Conflict" is a blatant and hilarious example of this.
Long time needed project, recent developments on Github where people try to turn a version management system for code hosting and working into a political platform have to be stopped. #politicsfree
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
else! in fact, we won’t bring it up, or ask. We simply don’t give a shit.
3. nothing else fucking matters!
This reminds me a lot of the WTFPL...
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, December 2004
Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <sam@hocevar.net>
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
I believe it would simplify conversations about negative behavior. Point to the CoC and say that it is an agreement to avoid acting in certain ways, please don't act in those ways.
I don't think it is a cure all or anything, but it at least provides an opportunity to avoid counter productive arguments, and at worst is still incrementally less arbitrary than banning/shunning difficult people outside of a CoC.
Earnestly, I don't think there is anyone that doesn't know how to be nice. There might be people that aren't nice or don't want to be nice but let's not confuse that with actual ignorance.
I sometimes find codes of conduct a little "grandstandy" if you will, but I prefer that state of affairs to this. This just feels like re-entrenchment.
I agree with the spirit of this, but "we are all adults" is a bit overly-specific. There are people that are not yet adults that contribute to open source too. Maybe "we are all rational?"
Not having a CoC is like not having an employee handbook.
In theory, we're all nice people, and nice people don't need laws or handbooks to tell them what to do or who to behave.
But we're not all nice people. And when bad things happen, you need to have something written down that you can point to and say: "Hey, you violated this thing you said you agreed to." CoCs are not preventative measures (they don't proactively reduce bad behavior), they're more helpful for throwing out community members when they do something bad.
The main problem I have with arguments like this is that it's made for the ideal world.
Yes, people should act like adults in OSS.
Yes, people shouldn't be judged for who they are.
Yes, we shouldn't have to say these things.
But in reality, people don't act like adults in OSS, people are still judged for things that should be completely irrelevant. We need to spell these things out because apparently there are still people in the world who need to be told that they should treat others the way they want to be treated.
I don't really have a stake here but I just have to point out that this is very ironic. For one thing, the author claims it's a good idea to keep things private and not make a scene. However, they went ahead and created a website with a big white-list and black-list for projects that they either do or do not like. How is that not making a scene?
That might be, but the article doesn't even try to make that argument. Instead it makes a caricature of people who think there is sometimes a problem, and furthermore think that making expectations explicit rather than implicit is a good and helpful step.
The article is lazy, cynical, and reflects shallow thinking.