Has it occurred to you that's actually exactly why they exist? :)
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.
There are people who will attempt to exploit any system.
... I understand that's the theory, but in practice, I've never seen it working that way.
I don't see how having the CoC affects any of this. If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them. If someone behaves so poorly that you decide you need to remove them, the community (the small portion of people who give a f) should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.
It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say (without pointing to a document you put in your repo when you were bored), 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... 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.
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.
Of course it does. If the community/project leaders are not aligned with your ideology, it's better to find one with alignment than to attempt to corner them with a written set of rules.
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.
None of these things happen in real life.
You are so focused on the strawman of problematic people being mustache-twirling villains trying to disrupt spaces they dislike, that you're discounting the actual purpose of CoCs, which is to make it clear who your space is for.
Code of conduct is not about that. It's about how to behave. My community is not that special that you need a user manual on how to behave, you should have learned it by age 10, latest.
Technology Z meetup / user group is a space for people who are interested in Technology Z. Repository Y is a space for people who are interested in Repository Y.
If someone needs a CoC to figure that out, bad luck.
You want to start discussion about War X, vilify everyone just by being born in that country, please do it outside my repo / user group. Plenty of spaces you can do it and there, you'll be welcome to do so. Want to talk about evil black / white / DEI / right wing people, please also leave my group out of it.
Behavior is who people are. It's the 'content of their character' that MLK spoke of.
> My community is not that special that you need a user manual on how to behave, you should have learned it by age 10, latest.
And yet different communities have vastly different concepts of acceptable behavior. CoCs let people know whether their behavior is acceptable in a community.
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.
Hard disagree... I've never seen one have this effect. IMO you don't need a CoC to suddenly understand what should already be common sense i.e. don't be a dick. Either they were already going to act that way, or they weren't.
How do you think you would see it?
Under normal circumstances, what it would look like from the outside is just...someone not causing friction, because there is a code of conduct. Or someone causing friction, because there isn't one.
The former looks identical to someone who would never have caused trouble in the first place, and the latter looks, if not identical, at least very similar to someone who would have caused trouble, no matter what.
And the people who wouldn't cause friction are already behaving so they don't need one.
Another commenter (cannot find their name now but I saved the text) said exactly what my experience has been:
> A written code of conduct can legitimize petty disputes based on interpretations of the text, even if the issue itself is something easily addressable like using the word “master” in a programming context. It can become a tool for manipulation (pushing someone out for “CoC violation” vs simply correcting the wording).
> And the people who wouldn't cause friction are already behaving so they don't need one.
Both correct. By definition, in fact.
CoCs are for the people in the middle of those. Who do, in fact, exist.
It's about setting a shared understanding of norms.
It's about whether the kinds of jokes allowed among members are "as raunchy as you please", "polite jokes only," or "none".
It's about whether you're expected to work out differences in private chats, address them in public, or bring them to a moderator.
It's about whether your comments on a code review started by another member have to be addressed by the committer before the review can go forward.
Any time you think the way you do things in the open source project (or any other kind of community) you contribute to or run is The Natural, Obvious Way Everyone Does Things, you're probably wrong, and some other people or projects do things exactly the opposite way and think that's just as natural and obvious.
Whether or not anything needs to be written down afterwards seems like it would be a separate thing.
> 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.
This is very much so for small communities who don't have the infrastructure to litigate issues in a legalistic manner... but, even in areas like public law, the rules don't really matter, it's the perceived authority and impartiality of the courts that keep a legal system up and running. (think of any controversial Supreme Court decision -- do people really care what the law actually says and whether the legal reasoning is sound... or do they just speculate about the political leanings of the judges?)
Since most people writing up CoCs aren't good lawyers or experts in drafting (and finding loopholes in) rules... having a smaller "attack surface" actually makes a lot of sense.
That said, if the community is large or important enough that it already retains some legal advisors, then maybe yeah, make the rules more specific or something.
> ...a zealot about their cause. Deflecting and uncompromising, very unagreeable. They would be the last persons to know how to make a community comfy.
... And typically with a giant chip on their shoulder. The real world's a little bit more complicated than the spherical cows that the near-religious faith in it requires.
And of course it wasn't meant as an instruction manual for how to run a society. It was quite explicitly a message that you are not judged by who you are. That is it, there is no ideology, there is no grand idea. That is media garbage that filled your head with a phantom.
And honestly, that did a much better job than most COC I read.
What has worked in communities I have been active in is to have continuously conversations, in combination with a no-blame culture that provide social safety for people to bring up issues and also room for people to improve without feeling personally attacked (which is the opposite of social safety).
You can't write a CoC that will prevent bad behavior from bad actors in charge, so it's worthless at best and a weapon for the unscrupulous at worst. What matters is who enforces standards of behavior, and if those people are decent and honest, no written code is necessary.
And beyond a certain size formalizing that makes sense. Not as a tool for punishment or to point to, but so everybody can be on the same page and you know if someone acts out of line they do so despite better knowledge.
If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there?
If it would contain stuff you're within bounds of anyways, then it's entirely unneeded. :)
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.
Maybe he don't want to exclude people who are outside of the CoC norms, but can still be valuable contributors.
Its the agreement to argue about a topic that is struck when you make rules.
Not seeing this is how..niholists proliferats with variohs plicit ordering liks might is right
What I like about the simplicity of our CoC is that anyone can read it in a few seconds, and we can point it out to people without seeming bureaucratic or annoying.
Happy to share with others. Complicated CoC documents I've seen at other groups don't seem to do anything besides giving the organisers a feeling of power/that they're doing something. Simplicity might be key here.
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.
I used to organize meetups and I visited meetups organized by others who had code of conduct, and I just never understood what they were hoping to achieve with that.
If someone behaves poorly, you can point at a document all you want, but it doesn’t help you deal that the problematic individual. A document that you put in a markdown file is not enforceable.
And we didn’t even talk about how it is being misused. People would point to these documents to silence and shut out people they don’t like and at the same time tolerate poor behavior that are clearly in violation of code of conduct by people they do like or whose politics or opinions they share.
It is all just a charade to help you pretend that you are impartial.