Adopt a Code of Conduct

[strugee]

We should have a Code of Conduct that protects people in the pump.io community from discrimination. The TODO Group's Open Code of Conduct seems particularly good to me, if no one has any other suggestions.

I should mention that I haven't seen anything at all to think that we'd need this, but I'm a firm believer that all free software communities should have Codes of Conduct, just in case. I'd be happy to prepare a PR.

CC @evanp

[jart]

The TODO Group's Open Code of Conduct says that excluding contributors on the basis of merit is "discrimination." I'm not making this up. That makes it fundamentally incompatible with open source values, e.g. meritocracy.

I'd like to propose an alternative code of conduct, which is politically neutral. It's called the FTFLCOC: https://gist.github.com/jart/f274d8dc156811a46b22 Please consider adopting it.

[strugee]

@jart I disagree, because the way that you handle the situation matters. Obviously we're not going to take crappy code. But we can either point out ways for the contributor to improve, or we can pull a Linus (I'd link you to the original archive, but it seems broken currently). This is why "discrimination based on merit" is important.

[jart]

Linus profanely flaming people for their inadequacies has little to do with discrimination based on merit. The people Linus flames have a tremendous amount of merit. So Linus' actions would be considered problematic due to the profane flaming, which is covered by other aspects of a code of conduct.

It's a nice thing to help a man lacking in merit improve himself. Most people will be polite, and at the very least point him to books he can read if he has no skills whatsoever. If you think projects should be obliged to politely do that, rather than screaming at them and banning them, well, I think you've got a perfectly reasonable point of view.

However I'd like to hear your honest opinion on something. What about the people who have absolutely zero interest in acquiring the technical skills necessary to contribute to an open source project, yet still want to participate? Should a CoC guarantee any warm body the right to participate in a software project, so long as he/she follows the CoC?

You may wonder, why would someone participate in an open source project project if he/she isn't writing code? What else is there left to do? Well, there's always moderating the community and shaping project policies. So I ask you this, as one engineer to another: do you really want the people who aren't engineers to be the ones in charge of those things?

I personally don't want to be quietly writing code while the lawyers and politicians run the show, and tell me what I can and can't say. I firmly believe that the people who do the work should be the ones in charge.

[cwebber]

@jart, it hasn't been my experience that a Code of Conduct means that people who are "doing the work" aren't in charge. It's also not incompatible with a "BDFL" type position or etc, or whatever governance structure we chose. (Though, I will note that I don't consider coding to be the only important task.)

However, though I'm a big code of conduct supporter, though I do agree that the challenges against "merit" driven development in communities are sometimes misaligned, since as you said, people who do the work are the ones that make free software projects happen (Stefano Zacchiroli has phrased this as "do-ocracy"). So maybe another Code of Conduct should be chosen.

I think the Contributor Covenant looks pretty good: http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code_of_conduct.txt It's also used by some projects I like.

What do people think?

[skellat]

So we're painting the bike rack mauve then?

[akuckartz]

As an observer I wonder why this discussion is taking place. I personally am not very interested in it.

[strugee]

Linus profanely flaming people for their inadequacies has little to do with discrimination based on merit. The people Linus flames have a tremendous amount of merit. So Linus' actions would be considered problematic due to the profane flaming, which is covered by other aspects of a code of conduct.

In the case I linked to, yes (which makes me realize I probably should've picked a different case), but Linus has been known to flame less experienced developers, too.

However I'd like to hear your honest opinion on something. What about the people who have absolutely zero interest in acquiring the technical skills necessary to contribute to an open source project, yet still want to participate? Should a CoC guarantee any warm body the right to participate in a software project, so long as he/she follows the CoC?

No, I'd consider that a help vampire

So I ask you this, as one engineer to another: do you really want the people who aren't engineers to be the ones in charge of those things?

I think it depends a lot on the community. For this one, since it's so small, I'd say no. But in (for example) GNOME, I'd say yeah - leadership should be representative of all kinds of people, and that means UX people, QA people, artists, etc. in addition to programmers.

I personally don't want to be quietly writing code while the lawyers and politicians run the show, and tell me what I can and can't say. I firmly believe that the people who do the work should be the ones in charge.

Yes. I'm with you here. I think we're talking across each other - you're saying that you shouldn't be in a leadership position without having merit (which I agree with), whereas I'm saying that you shouldn't exclude someone who doesn't know what they're doing but is genuinely trying to help.

My impression is that we both actually 100% agree with each other. That being said, since we've had to have this entire conversation about it, it's obvious that the TODO Group's CoC is too ambiguous - let's pick a new one :)

[strugee]

@cwebber sounds great.

Edit: although there seems to be some stuff missing - in particular I'd like to see language in the examples section explicitly naming misgendering as not okay. I'll probably submit patches for that.

[strugee]

@akuckartz because the participants in this thread would rather have a smaller but safer community rather than a larger but more dangerous (for marginalized people) community - or in other words, they value individual safety over technical contributions. A Code of Conduct sends an explicit message to participants, which is necessary because the norm in free software is currently the reverse (valuing technical contributions over individual safety).

[akuckartz]

the norm in free software is currently the reverse (valuing technical contributions over individual safety).

I doubt there exists any empirical evidence for a prevalence of threats to such "individual safety".

[cwebber]

So, we're seeing a bit of communication here from people who are outside of the community, and as for all the talk of founders should rule and implementers should have a say, @strugee is an implementer, and the founder we're really waiting on in this conversation is @evanp. So please, outside participants, let us have that conversation.

[arotter]

I just hope you all got every single one of your public social network accounts sanitized. Would be a shame if someone found anything problematic in them, right?

→ opal/opal#941

[h4rm0n1c]

That's a winner of an idea: comb through the timelines and accounts of anyone who pushes the various Codes of Conduct out there.

After all, if the CoC people are allowed to do it to those they target for punishment under the CoC, those who oppose this nonsense should be allowed to do that too, right?

Should be easy to find blatant hypocrisy (such as treating straight white men like shit because "progressive stack, lol") and use that as evidence to disqualify their "suggestion" as being ideologically motivated.
(It's never a suggestion, the progressive revolutionaries are here to seize the means of production, fall in line or suffer the consequences of doxxing, pressuring of your boss with false claims, etc...)

Now, if you're getting mad reading this, remember, I've not gone outside of the boundaries of what is allowed by the CoC (for those in charge...), what I've just described is EXACTLY what has happened under CoCs with other projects, witchhunts like the one I've satirically suggested above. (I just flipped the abusers to victims to try and get people to see the hypocrisy here.)

These codes of conduct are nothing more than a foothold for ideologues and social politicians, they say "we won't abuse the power this gives us, we promise", the same way politicians make promises.

I, for one, don't believe these promises, as a bystander I've seen it be abused as a tool to punish for "thoughtcrime", for disagreeing.

I'd argue that personal power agendas and social politics have no merit in open source projects, they serve no purpose other than to engage in that annoying cancerous tribalism that goes with ideological infection.

After all, merit rules supreme in open source, all we have to do is show that any suggested code of conduct has NO merit under the logic stated above and therefore, fundamentally incompatible with any given open source project.

Since Open Source is all about merit, I'd make you aware of the existence of the Code Of Merit instead, but I'm not going to link or "suggest" it, since merit speaks for itself.

Orwell wrote "Freedom is Slavery"

Well, the socjus people added a new one: "Revenge is Equality"

[mstewartgallus]

@strugee The open code of conduct is not open: https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/issues/103

[ghost]

Perhaps consider a Code of Merit instead. Much better than a "Code" of Conduct.

EDIT: I see that @h4rm0n1c has also suggested this.

[jart]

Wow the Code of Merit is really cool! Thanks for sharing. I just read it and it seems very much in tune with the authentic hacker values that software engineers have tacitly understood for decades. They're time-tested and have existed since the days of Bell Labs, BSD, GNU, and Usenet in the 70's and 80's.

I think formalizing old school open source hacker values is a good thing. Why? Because our values are the best. Seriously. We have good reason to be proud of ourselves as engineers. We invented the first international, colorblind, post-monetary, and meritocratic society in all of human history. No other culture has ever come close to achieving even one of those things. But hackers on the Internet did it all at once. Because that's just what happens when software engineers who do the work are the ones in charge.

That's why I don't take the political agitators very seriously. Or the engineers who are genuinely fooled into advocating against their own interests. What gives outsiders the right to condemn our culture? They tell us that we need to change our culture on their terms. It's because cockroaches hate the light. If they were actually wise, they would be learning from us instead.

[vibhavp]

Whether "reverse-racism" or "reverse-sexism" is real or not is a politically charged debate. To push for a code of conduct which doesn't recognize it is tantamount to pure agenda pushing.

Plus, most CoCs do not attempt to properly define how or when project member/maintainer is representing the project, which can (and has) times lead to members being booted from the project just because some of their political affiliations aren't in-line with what the CoC says. Let's treat individuals as individuals, and adopting a individualistic/politically neutral CoC like the Code of Merit is one way of that.

[graspee]

"Whether "reverse-racism" or "reverse-sexism" is real or not is a politically charged debate. To push for a code of conduct which doesn't recognize it is tantamount to pure agenda pushing."

Some things are so stupid it would be wearying to dignify them with consideration. There is no "reverse racism/sexism": there is sexism, racism or not.

[strugee]

Locking this issue because there's some obvious trolling. (For the record, I haven't deleted any tweets. Go ahead and archive all the non-existent material you want.)

As @cwebber said, this is a decision for the people in the project, in particular Evan, to make - not people who have nothing to do with the project besides having commented on this issue.

[evanp]

Hi. We're adopting this code of conduct. @strugee please do the PR.

[evanp]

Oh, and I totally appreciate the deep concern for the health of the pump.io community.

[larjona]

As per https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/wiki/Meeting-2016-02-19 , we are adopting the "Contributor Covenant" code of conduct: http://contributor-covenant.org/