Heavy Codes of Conduct Are Unnecessary for Open Source Projects

They are also explicitly the type of views that CoCs are designed to protect contributors from, hence why DHH and ESR would be opposed to CoCs in general.

I don't know about ESR, but DHH has acted in ways that make it difficult to believe he is making a good-faith, unbiased argument on CoCs, which means I'm not obligated to reciprocate and treat his argument fairly. (DHH oversaw a list at 37Signals making racist fun of customer names, and overruled his employees who complained, eventually leading to a mass walkout.)

To put it in Bayesian terms, the prior that he's making a bad faith argument is higher than any random person, and should be treated as such.

> animals as pets

This seems to say they are perfectly fine with pets: https://www.peta.org/about-peta/why-peta/pets/

> guide dogs

Seems to imply they are not against service animals in general: https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/monkeys-arent-pets-...

Not trying to defend anyone, just looking for objective evidence.

I suggest the examples work even better with the context you add - you do not have to agree with the ethics or like them!

On the "funding terrorism" insinuation...

Did PETA publish an ethical statement about: - Protecting university infrastructure - Obeying authorities - Agreeing with negative media coverage about them

I sincerely doubt it.

Their misdeed in your view is donating $45k for a guy's legal defense, who was the spokesman of the ALF, not PETA. By that logic, any government funded public defender is the taxpayer condoning murder, robbery, etc. We can both agree objectively that isn't true - guilt by association is the fallacy there; funding a legal defense is separate from the act requiring the legal defense.

I would argue you have this talking point because of a concerted media effort to brand things as "Eco-Terrorism" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Scare - and that is a coordinated effort to change the focus.

BUT, let's assume PETA are exactly as you say.

Scenario 1: they publish no standpoint, pretending to be a local book club who have simply enjoyed the prose of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation.

Scenario 2: as above, but they publish their ethical standpoint upfront and it is easy to access.

After you have gone a few times, one day a chap stands up, say he's the Lorax; has been a member for years; is head of the Once-ler Action Committee demands everyone hijacks a plane to fly it into the nearest highrise, because he's for the trees; buildings use timber and the North American Squirrel is suffering.

In which scenario are you more surprised? In which scenario were you given the most choice about how you can interact with the group; apply your own standards of behavior or what to expect? In which scenario are you better equipped to object ("we care about the wellbeing of squirrels, but your case is driven by a flimsy ideological argument that has little to do with the shared values!") In which scenario are you more likely to seek external help from an authority; because it is trivial to identify the extremism is out of place?

This is my point - having no stated ethics or CoC is objectively worse when radical/extremist viewpoints creep in due to malicious actors; vs at least publishing a basic standard.

These people (who push for CoCs so heavily) in my experience tend to hypocritically attack and censor opinions they don’t like, while not understanding why people won’t "accept them for who they are".

They are desperate to be the center of attention and love to play the victim.

It’s like the bullied becomes the bully sort of thing. They spend more time arguing over weaponized CoCs and ideological SJW politics instead of writing code. It doesn’t help that many of them self-admittedly suffer from mental health problems.

On a completely unrelated note, you very, very rarely find real fascists in open source software projects.

And for even less favorable characters it seemed that it was just powerplay by some actors that wouldn't convince their own mother that they are the most untoxic of them all.

I think you mean, "if someone is behaving poorly, the coc did not deter them".

The people who it did deter aren't behaving poorly.

1) point both involved and uninvolved people to the code of conduct when you end up taking action.

2) avoid disparity of enforcement within your team

3) funnel disagreements (from both teammates or community members) by focusing them on the rule, rather than on a general debate on how should the community should be managed.

If people commit a lot of energy to a community/project then for many "I didn't like this behavior, end of discussion" won't cut it.

I'm sorry, but that's just not true.

You're treating humanity as if it's divided into two distinct sections: Those Who Behave Well, and Those Who Behave Poorly.

In reality, different humans have different ranges of ways they prefer to act, and most are quite amenable to reasonable, clearly-stated codes of conduct for interaction in a particular space.

There is a small subset of people who are either deliberately antisocial for the sake of it (trolls/griefers/etc), and another subset that are genuinely just assholes who will, if given the leeway to do so, cause endless problems in a community.

But there are many, many more who would cause friction with others in such a community without a code of conduct not because they actively want to, but because their unstated assumptions about how people should interact clash with the unstated assumptions of other people there. Having the code of conduct lets everyone coming in in good faith align their expectations and avoid these unnecessary conflicts. They're like a Session 0 in a TTRPG in that sense.

> should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.

It's not a matter of the action being transparent, it's the motivations. Sometimes, it's not clear to community members why the action was taken, if there's no CoC or rules. "They're being an asshole" is a lot more subjective than "They were breaking the rules"

> It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say, without pointing to a document you just put in your repo, that: "John Doe was behaving poorly, and I don't want to deal with him, I banned him, you don't need to like it, but it's my decision". Just my 2c.

Sure, this might work for a small community or group, but the fiasco with Nix seems to suggest this isn't the case at a certain size. Some people apparently want accountability and transparency from their moderators.

> Just my 2c... I don't want to add more procedures to my open source projects or voluntary organizing. I'm doing it because I like it, not because I want to pretend I'm at a townhall meeting.

Great! That's fine! Not every community needs such things. Some do.

What I want to say here, is that a good code of conduct deals with the stuff that is open to interpretation and defines it. So if our punk-bandmate throws the singers gear on a pile we don't have to argue about different definitions of how we expect others gear to be treated.

So it is needed precisely because everybody thinks they are just acting normal and within bounds, even when the majority thinks they are not.

1. If you can't make it, let the host know the day before or morning of the event.

2. If you're playing at a venue, try to buy food or drinks from the venue. Don't bring lots of stuff from the outside.

3. Be kind and respect other people. Don't damage their games or act mean towards other players.

We're not super strict, but people have been perma-banned for sexually suggestive remarks or being assholes. I think we've had 3 or 4 really bad cases total. Most people get temporarily kicked out for violating rule #1 a lot.

It has been my experience that there are both members of groups typically regarded as marginalised who have been harrassed, and also members of groups typically regarded as marginalised who harass others. There are surely more variations of this too.

My most recent experience of this was a member of a group typically regarded as marginalised harassing one of my colleagues — who is also a member of a group typically regarded as marginalised, but perhaps less so if you subscribe to the legitimacy of intersectionality — at a software development conference with an established CoC.

The incident was reported, and the repercussions for the harasser amounted to exactly nil.

> So if that community doesn't have a CoC, and those members talk to the moderators, and the moderators take action... is that coercion too?

No.

> Is that the moderators or those members pushing their political views on the community?

That really depends on the circumstance.

> Should the moderators just not do anything?

Moderators should take action on CoC violations as proportionately, fairly, and impartially as they can.

> I'm going to push past this extraordinarily bad faith framing.

It is extraordinarily tiring and depressing that anything proffered that contradicts the orthodoxy of the culture that most readily endorses the establishment of CoCs is immediately dismissed as an argument in "bad faith".

Perhaps, but I think it may make the moderator more likely to side with the abuser if they are able to point to a specific part of the CoC that is allegedly being violated, even if that requires colorful interpretation.

Also it would be very off-topic for a programming language forum.

A good moderator will shut that nonsense down immediately, but a good moderator wouldn't need a CoC to do it. All the CoC does is give the troublemaker a tool to start playing rules lawyer, in the hope that the moderator will get tired of it and give in.

Some people think the answer is to have a CoC that's too simple for rules lawyering, like a one line "Be excellent to each other." But even that can be twisted, so it would be better as a project motto than as an official CoC.