Drew DeVault
A question that is of interest today is "should a code of conduct apply outside of its borders?" In other words, can a project hold someone accountable for their behavior outside of that project's spaces? The short answer is "yes". The long answer is "we live in a society". 🧵 15 comments
Drew DeVault
A community which tolerates assholes will invoke this resistance in the targets of their abuse and will invite similarly-minded assholes to join up. This sucks. The job of conduct enforcement is to prevent this outcome. The purpose of a code of conduct is to signal that the community has assigned a person or persons to this job, and to communicate what kind of behavior the community associates with assholes, [...]
Drew DeVault
[...] so that people who want to avoid those behaviors feel safe in the community, and so there's a process in place for dealing with people who display those behaviors.
Drew DeVault
A code of conduct is a set of plain-English guidelines which describe the norms of conduct and the practices of enforcing those norms, and its purpose is to set expectations for the community. The ultimate enforcement of good conduct in practice is a function of the sensibilities of those trusted by the community with its enforcement, by design.
Drew DeVault
A code of conduct is written in natural language, not a programming language. It is not a set of scripted steps which are faithfully executed by computerized versions of the people responsible for its enforcement. It does not have vulnerabilities and cannot be exploited like a computer program can.
Drew DeVault
So, if the conduct enforcement team reasonably believes someone is an asshole, even if the evidence is on social media or some personal blog or simply credible hearsay from a trusted third-party, then it's reasonable for them to take steps to prevent assholes and/or assholeish behavior from affecting the communities they are responsible for. EOF
bensonk
@drewdevault I really like this thread and these concepts. As someone who ran (fairly successfully) a community game server for the game Rust, which is notoriously toxic, and managed to keep things civil, a few categories come to mind: - people who want to cause harm and should be banned immediately
Managor
@drewdevault So in essence nobody should ever work with you or Lyude because you guys are assholes. 
Yaksh Bariya
@drewdevault > should a code of conduct apply outside of its borders? Generally should not be done unless in extreme cases when the CoC breacher has no regrets for doing what they did and is still being a d*ck. People do change over time. If an earlier breach somewhere else made them a better person today, it should not be enforced
Carlos O'Donell
@drewdevault Agreed. "In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them." https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/CoC/Conduct
Isaac Freund
@drewdevault Yeah, totally agree. I thought I might as well codify this sentiment about the scope of a CoC in river's brand new CoC: https://codeberg.org/river/river/commit/14e941bae16b1ca478c32198c131c4297157f888 (Yes, I had been quite lazy about adding a CoC until being prodded into action this morning)
Walther
@drewdevault one of the favorite blog posts i've read, and one that i keep sharing fairly often https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
Lien Rag
No we don't. Not "a" society. (except of course if you restrict your "we" to mean "the people who live in the same society as you do") |
Gregory's Server
If someone is demonstrably an asshole, people will not want to work with them. It does not matter if they are being an asshole in your living room, or your workplace, or in the local newspaper, or if you just hear from a friend that they were an asshole to someone you know. Resistance towards being around assholes is a human behavior that transcends anything we've written down in CONDUCT.md files.