How do we keep Code of Conduct up to date without upstreaming our modifications to it

[tobie]

Following EthicalSource/contributor_covenant#733 (comment) and our conversation about this topic in today's CPC meeting (openjs-foundation/cross-project-council#500), CPC members expressed a desire to continue the conversation about the impact of this decision on the ability for the CPC to keep the code of conduct up to date without upstreaming modifications.

[ljharb]

Additionally, do we want to depend on a CoC that doesn’t have enough resources available to maintain it / can we offer maintainers to alleviate that problem?

[tobie]

do we want to depend on a CoC that doesn’t have enough resources available to maintain it

So I think that’s a bit of an unfair framing and I’m sorry if the additional context I tried to provide during our call gave you this impression.

First of all, I think the PR we provided would have had more chances of being approved if it had been first discussed in an issue and then broken down into various smaller edits. So I think there was a failing on our side there.

Secondly, I agree with you that more resources are always welcomed, and it might be a good idea to find out if there are way for the foundation or individual members to help, here.

Thirdly, it’s also very possible that what some of us would like in terms of maintenance style (e.g.: a highly dynamic project that’s often updated) doesn’t match how the maintainer sees that project or thinks about it in terms of the project’s maturity.

[ljharb]

I certainly did not intend to convey any failing on the part of the CoC’s maintainers; there’s nothing wrong with the reality that resources are always finite.

However, if we pursue offering help, and the subset of that that’s accepted still doesn’t create the support we need, then it still might be worth re-evaluating things.

[MylesBorins]

I don't think we need to treat the CoC any different than any upstream dependency that we rely on. Floating patches is easy enough, and re-floating said patches while updating is something that git is designed to do. Perhaps there will be conflicts, but conflicts in plain text are easy enough to fix. As such I think we should do the following

• Maintain a single copy of the Code of Conduct in a repo (either CPC repo or an admin / business repo)
• Apply changes that we can agree to.
  • Specific changes we cannot agree to for entire organization could potentially land in projects as additional policy e.g. the node.js membership expectations
• Attempt to upstream those changes as appropriate
• When changes land to the upstream CoC we review and update ours accordingly. If we don't agree with those changes we may want to consider our CoC as a hard fork (which is not an issue and afaict totally in the spirit of the Contributor Covenant)

[ljharb]

I agree, but floating patches in-repo isn’t something that’s often done in the JS ecosystem outside of node core :-) typically a separate fork is maintained instead (as you also suggested) - if that’s what we want to do, that certainly is feasible.

[MylesBorins]

@ljharb I think that depends on whether or not you are vendoring dependencies... I really don't personally see a need for a repo that is only for the Code of Conduct for this reason. I do see a potential benefit from a discoverability stand point... but I'd prefer to discuss that on it's own merits.

[brianwarner]

If the goal is discoverability, how would you feel about the following?

• Putting the text in a .github repo, so that it is mirrored into PRs and issues opened in all openjs-foundation repos
• Adding documentation linking to the CoC
• I can create a subdomain redirect to it (i.e., https://code-of-conduct.openjsf.org)

[brianwarner]

Another suggestion for the list, since it seems community health files (e.g. openjs-foundation/.github/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) are not explicitly mirrored into directories:

• Add a file to each repo called FOUNDATION_CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md that contains a link to the CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in .github

(Note that we wouldn't want to call it CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md because that will override the default.)

[jorydotcom]

transferring this issue to /code-of-conduct repo per CPC meeting on 12 May