Codes of conduct boil down to requiring members of the community to treat each other with basic decency, and defining a process for showing them the door when they fail to do so.
This is not a controversial concept in the real world. You'll be fired from your job if you treat your co-workers badly, you'll be ejected from the pub if you harass the other clients.
Sure, but there'll be a process. You'll have a right to a hearing, the right to your own union representative, and a right to appeal to a tribunal or similar. And the HR people themselves will have oversight. HR don't get handed a license to just fire anyone they want to.
> You'll be ejected from the pub if you harass the other clients
Pubs are not an institution to emulate. A project like FreeBSD should hold itself to a higher standard.
indeed.
and if the HR folks fire so many people that the damage the organization's ability to compete, they'll be out of work sooner or later. no such feedback mechanism is in place for conduct enforcement committees in open projects.
If only it were that easy.
I've seen codes of conduct for technical projects where they said things like "MUST be inclusive of trans, gay, etc.", along with political / ideological statements. And the kicker was a phrase saying "these ideologies are not open for discussion".
Why a software project needs an ideological statement, I have no idea. But it hits all of my red flags that the purpose of the code of conduct is not to treat each other with basic decency, but instead to push a particular ideology.
> you'll be ejected from the pub if you harass the other clients.
What about simple questions?
Q: Hi, I noticed you're a Democrat / Republican / whatever. I think I may disagree with your opinion.
A: THE SIGN SAYS NO QUESTIONING IDEOLOGICAL PURITY. GET OUT.
Uh... no. That way lies totalitarianism.
And yes, treating other people with basic decency is actually a tricky thing that needs to be spelled out for some people. A lot of people actually - you gave some great examples, whether you meant to or not.
Any selection of relative values is ideological; and every project is, inherently, based on an agreement to pursue some set of values. And the choice for those values to not include social inclusiveness is as much an ideological choice as the decision that the values should include inclusiveness (or that they should include exclusiveness, which is a third possible ideological choice.)
e.g.
> ... an ideological choice as the decision that the values should include inclusiveness
I explained why this is not just unnecessary, but also why it's wrong on a much more fundamental level.
When I get patches from people, I don't care what's under their clothes. I don't care what their political opinions are. I don't care what religion (or not) they belong to. I evaluate the patch based on it's engineering merits. I give them a review of the engineering work that they did, without reference to any of the above mentioned issues.
It's absolutely inclusive, in a way that perhaps you don't understand. It doesn't pervert the project by demanding that members adhere to a particular ideology.
I find naive attempts at "inclusiveness" to be repugnant. They are a back-door way of leveraging such "niceties" into taking over the group, and establishing an ideology-driven totalitarian dictatorship with Orwellian overtones.
And no, I'm not exaggerating here. Look at any number of groups which started out as goal oriented, and devolved into fights over ideological correctness. Very soon, the arguments over ideology overwhelm the group, and everyone who gets things done... leaves. What's left is the ideology-driven politicians, who then find out that they're in their an echo chamber. They turn on each other, and the group dies a flaming death.
See Atheism+ for a good example of this in recent years.
There is also the opposite, people who are busy communicating, who generate lots of noise and never do anything.
So yes, merit should be defined as getting useful things done with rough consensus and not as brilliant code that then split the community.
Being socially dysfunctional (as opposed to being malicious, which is a different problem) is often linked to an inability to pick up the social cues and clues that most people take for granted. A document which clearly explains and gives examples of unwelcome behaviour should help in these cases - assuming people actually read it!
Example: Wikipedia. The talk pages on that site, especially on politically charged topics, are detailed examples in how one can behave in a destructive fashion and drive off talent without ever dipping into base namecalling.
The question is "who judges" ?
A meritocracy is generally an engineering meritocracy. People who get things done, get more merit. And it's easy to judge who gets things done. No one cares if the contributor is black, blind, gay, trans, politically left or right. They're doing engineering. All other topics are off topic for the engineering project.
In contrast, "inclusiveness" is a vague concept. It's hard to judge "inclusiveness". So when the judging happens, it tends to be subjective, and driven by politics, ideology, or emotion.
This subject came up on the FreeRADIUS list last year. I made similar points here:
http://lists.freeradius.org/pipermail/freeradius-users/2016-...
I am actively opposed to most "codes of conduct", for reasons stated in the link.
From the main web site http://freeradius.org/list/
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All mailing lists have a strict code of conduct:
The only permitted topic on the list is technical discussion related to FreeRADIUS.
Off topic messages will result in a warning. Continued misbehavior will result in the person being unsubscribed from the list, and permanently banned.
This code of conduct was defined after many years of experience running the list. It is simple to explain, and simple to enforce. Unlike other codes of conduct, it does not require people to be "inclusive" or "accepting" of certain topics. It requires people to be blind to non-technical topics, as those subjects are explicitly off-topic.
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Such a "code of conduct" is easy to explain, easy to enforce, and easy to judge. No politics, ideology, or emotion get in the way of people doing engineering.