There really is only ever one thing to say in a situation like this, and it is "Yes, I refuse to participate any further in this farce; good day!" and then hang up. Personally I would not have been so polite :)
CoC committees are breeding grounds for idiots who think you can legislate for common sense and basic decency; and in my book that is a bridge that's worth burning every time.
I really hope the author finds some peace in all this, nobody deserves to be treated they way they have. And I hope that others who have found - and will in future find - themselves in this same situation, will have the courage to stand up to this kind of bullying by refusing to engage.
That's essentially a Kafka trap [1].
I have not seen the term "SJW" used so many times in proximity to Orwell and 1984 references before; well, at least not outside of a gamergate board
A-Train's Law applies: You don't fuck with the money. You never fuck with the money.
But here's the thing; if one of my devs made a gaffe at a conference, they'd have the full weight of myself and the company defending them, they definitely would not find themselves alone facing some kangaroo court that answers only to itself :)
In general, they're well meant. And in my experience issues arise not so much from the conference organizers but some attendee taking offence over something in a way that most would consider hypersensitive. And the organizers feeling they have to take their side even if they personally disagree.
Maybe you are right. But this seems very surprising, the company instinct would likely be to cut loses and have that person fired to avoid further bad publicity.
How was that saying "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"?
Maybe FSF should have rebranded as Liberty not "Libre" software.
I imagine the transition from "side project" to "I might as well be working for a MegaCorp with all of this HR-esque CoC nonsense" would be most unpleasant. How many project founders bow out at that point?
if you get the actual payout and your project doesn't just get AWS-ified. :)
Have you tried doing that? How do you like being hounded out of your job, and probably your profession, by a braying mob?
Edit: I also find it bitterly ironic that the Progressive Bay Area-centric Hacker News is now saying how bad all of this is, after being the complicit champions of it.
I've long argued that the US should have lots of parties, and adopt pluralistic voting, but then I stopped when it seemed to me that countries that already have this system don't have demonstrably better political outcomes. But your comment pushes me back to the other side of the argument now. It occurs to me that if we didn't have only 2 sides, practically, maybe policy discussions wouldn't be so damnably acrimonious and win-lose.
For now yeah but the tides are changing everywhere. Europe (and the US) fought facism, so we had a period of time where politics where mostly shades of purple/blue/red. Now facism is on the rise again, and we're seeing that across Europe, from Spain with Vox to Sweden with "Sweden Democrats". With the rise of these parties, you're seeing more and more of excommunication, as being tolerant of intolerance will only lead to more intolerance, not tolerance.
Edit: I should add, it's amusing while it doesn't affect me, but the ramifications are horrifying.
The president doesn't need to accept dissent from his staff. Just hypothetically, if Obama's health secretary said that being transgender was largely a mental illness, or his head of domestic policy said that we need to close the southern border, does he need to tolerate that? Just to be very clear - those are completely hypothetical - I am not sure what actual "dissent" caused Trump to fire his various staff members, but it is unrelated.
I keep saying: the paradox of tolerance applies recursively. To preserve tolerance, the intolerant must be removed from the community. However, if in the process of removing the intolerant, you cause collateral damage on innocent, tolerant people, then you become the intolerant that needs to be removed.
Even the "Black Lives Matter" movement is distracted from the goal of making black lives matter with a laundry list of progressive demands like dismantling the "Western-prescribed nuclear family structure" that are tangentially related at best. (Indeed, the entire premise of contemporary intersectionality demands one surrender the possibility of delivering meaningful reform on an incremental basis, in service of forming a bloc dedicated to seizing power wholesale.)
More specifically, by exploiting and weaponizing the good nature of others. This is why they went after geek hobbies specifically: science fiction, open source, comics, cartoons, video games, and tabletop RPGs -- because geeks are sensitive and accommodating, and shouting at them how racist and sexist they are is bound to make them stop and reflect -- leaving them wide open to further attack. Had they chosen to attack pastimes rife with actual racists and sexists -- tailgate parties in rural Georgia, say -- they'd be routed, because racists and sexists don't have the fucks to give about their behavior.
As I've said elsewhere, "SJWs" aren't really geeks. They are more like mentally deranged normies who long to sit at the cool kids' table, but don't stand a chance of ever sitting there, so they take over the geeks' table, because better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
What we got was also predictable, though. If anyone can fight under any banner, if nobody owns the banner, there is no possibility to come to a compromise, to settle the differences. The proponents of a movement will pick the most benign shard as an example to defend and popularize their cause; the opponents of the movement will pick the most extremist shard as a justification to fight back. Everyone feels their survival is at stake.
It seems then we are not in disagreement over substantive matters, but over minor questions such as phrasing.
This is correct. Quite often, a group which is portrayed as hypocritical is not hypocritical at all: rather there are just many opinions within the group, and they conflict with each other. As you've said, the [group] is not monolith.
Rules, policies, laws, Hammurabi's Code - they're all just leadership decisions made in advance. The problem here is that the leadership clearly doesn't really care. They got a complaint, they "investigated," and they moved on. Classic "governance" - totally ineffective.
After years, my favorite governance approach is still the one from a college club. It read in it's entirety: "No !ssholes." It makes clear the goal, who will be enforcing, and what to expect: The goal is no !ssholes, I will be enforcing, and I will do so by calling you an !sshole. It's just social pressure - and for anything outside of the judicial or corporate systems, that's all there is anyway.
I definitely don't have the experience you do, but the regular judicial system (in most countries that aren't kafka-esque throughout history) has adversarial parties that are incentivized to find if the other party is wrong. That's very different from all the corporate, university or open source "governance" systems. Maybe they can't bear that additional cost, but it's a huge difference.
Because some people actually do act like jerks, and we want to be able to tell those people to either stop acting like jerks or go away.
> CoCs were doomed to this from the beginning.
Rather, Codes of Conduct are more difficult than you think. The article itself points to several ways in which the committee in question didn't follow their own guidelines. It also points to "Code of Conduct Best Practices" which aren't followed by the Code of Conduct in question.
> Any set of strict/influential laws should be supported by a proper set of institutions like courts, lawyers, arbitration, judging practice.
This is I think a big problem right now. Our community adopted a Code of Conduct proactively; we haven't yet had to deal with any issues. But I'm painfully aware that doing this sort of policing well takes time, skill, and training, which I don't think it's reasonable for normal community members to take.
On the one hand, I'd love to be able to (for instance) outsource all CoC engagement and enforcement to a specialized body, that could manage a whole investigation / accuser / defense / jury system for a number of different organizations.
On the other hand, there are an awful lot of decisions made that I very much disagree with. For example:
You know, that's a pretty good idea. And if there were actual laws backing it, then you already have a "working" system. Now I am starting to wonder, should CoCs even try to transcend the law, is that part of the problem, where we try to legislate for things that are in many cases subjective?
Yes? Companies do this all the time with codes of conduct and nobody really thinks twice about it.
Nobody would think it's bizarre that (hypothetically, I don't know what their actual rules are) Coca-Cola has a rule barring employees from wearing a "Pepsi > Coke" shirt to client meetings.
> where we try to legislate for things that are in many cases subjective?
We do this all the time, even in our actual legal system.
"Disturbing the Peace" is one example off the top of my head of something that's incredibly subjective that we consider the purview of the legal system.
That doesn't mean it's a good thing. Good laws (especially criminal laws) should be normative, i.e. it should be deducible for anyone which behavior is punishable. Laws not adhering to this principle are ripe for selective enforcement and have no place in a rule-of-law society.
> That doesn't mean it's a good thing.
I don't think this is a popular position, or even a necessarily logical one. There are a great deal of "I'm not touching you" type behaviors that society collectively despises and often falls under these catch-all categories.
Legal doctrine is rife with "reasonable person" standards as a result that would be impossible to codify thoroughly and properly. Obviously, the mythical "reasonable person" doesn't exist and is often a judge or jury left to subjectively decide.
For example, harassment laws sometimes rely on a "credible threat of violence" based on something that would "make a reasonable person afraid for their safety". Good luck enumerating all the possible definitions of that.
That's a bug when trying to apply a coherent standard, but it's a feature when using the document as cover for arbitrary mob action.
I hate to break it to you, but bad actors will use any available tool they can to gain power and do harm. If there's no Code of Conduct, some bad actor will take advantage of the ambiguity to do things they know make other people uncomfortable, just because they can. If there's an overly broad Code of Conduct, or one which doesn't protect the rights of the "accused" (either in how it's written or how it's enforced), then other bad actors will take advantage of it to exert power.
That's why laws have to be written "defensively", like code exposed to the open internet. You have to try to anticipate exploits by bad actors ahead of time; and fix the ones you didn't spot as they're exploited.
Of course they will. That's what makes them bad actors :)
But are the bad actors in the two scenarios (with/without Coc) the same kind of bad actors? Do they have the same set of motivations for being in the community, and the same ability to rally supporters? My perception is that the bad actors in the two scenarios are wildly different, and that they're different because Codes of Conduct tend to distort the core incentives for participation in the community.
There are lots of reasons.
Ideally forces you to think ahead of time what kind of conduct you are OK with or not OK with, so you don't have to decide at the moment when someone you actually have a relationship with does something.
Ideally you think ahead of time how you would respond if someone did one of those things.
Ideally you think about a process for people to follow that balances several contrasting goals: Namely, to avoid doxxing or blaming the victim, but also to prevent the system from being used against innocent people (which it seems what happened here).
Ideally people who are prone to act like jerks decide not to act like jerks at all: Either they behave themselves, or they don't join your community.
If you don't do a Code of Conduct, and just "tell the jerk to stop, and if not take action", then it's a crap shoot whether you overreact (as happened here) or underreact (as has happened in many cases). If you deploy a Code of Conduct properly, there's at least a better chance that you'll respond constructively.
"you repeatedly did x and this is explicitly against our Code of Conduct that you said you'd read before your first contribution"
instead of
"you're being a jerk and as such we will be refusing any contributions from you going forward".
The second example is completely arbitrary, and is up to the whims of the core team - whomever they might be. With a Code of Conduct you're (ideally) told up front what you can and cannot do. This reduces ambiguity and arbitrary decision making.
I can also tell you that a Code of Conduct isn't a change to how I personally govern the projects and communities I'm in charge of. Instead, it's about writing down what I would already remove people for anyway.
It’s not as if a code of conduct ever contains anything that sane people don’t already know.
And like some other commenter said, it basically boils down to “don’t be an asshole”.
Breaking the Code of Conduct isn't a one-and-done thing. You talk to that person, and tell them that what they said was over the line. Be that using a slur, being increasingly insulting to another community member, or something else.
I, as an administrator, basically tell them "not cool". If their reaction is "yeah, alright" then nothing more comes of it. No citations. No three-strike rules. But if someone continually defies our reprimands we have the backing of saying "you've repeatedly been told... " and "this is written in ..." meaning nothing should come as a surprise.
It's also a way for normal users to understand what might be rule-breaking behavior. I can't observe everything happening in a community, as much as I like participating in them. Instead, I have to rely on other non-admin members reporting bad behavior. Making it clear to other users what kind of behavior they can report someone for is also super helpful - and for some people induces trust.
Codifying rules is meant to prevent that from happening, even though as we see it doesn't always work that way.
Indeed. It seems like the winning move is not to play, but I guess that applies to all cyber-bullying. Avoid the offending environment (in that case, JupyterCon) and contribute to a place where discourse is appreciated.
A lot of the 1st generation open source CoCs were not hypotheticals, but "here's things we wish Richard Stallman would stop doing". As head of GNU/FSF, he had tremendous influence in shaping the culture of open source, and one result of that was that it ended up a lot more male-dominated than other areas of "tech": one figure I've seen was around 2% women in prestigious open-source projects vs. around 20% in programming as a whole.
Open source CoCs started as far as I can tell as a combination of a reaction to specific incidents and to address the general problem that women were [choosing to stay out of the community](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/09/moat/). That link talks about CoCs specifically, but note that her argument is not "and therefore they should be shamed in public" but "and therefore I'm staying out". Hence, 2% vs. 20%.
So yes, CoCs can have downsides - what happened to Jeremy here could well be one of those - but the pre-CoC open source scene had a culture that ended up with 2% women compared to 20% in programming/tech in general. I don't think it's the right solution to simply roll back the change so we're not disadvantaging people like Jeremy any more, and return to disadvantaging people like Alice and Sarah and Rachel and Yasmin.
This whole thing seems reasonable until you step onto someone’s toe and a bunch of drama emerges.
Vague rules are meaningless.
I'm confused - are you saying that any group cannot set their own rules or guidelines unless they also create their own judiciary?
Why don't contributors openly reject this stupid system (not the rules themselves, which sound fine) and unseat these self-proclaimed procurators is beyond me.