[Tomte]

My problem with Codes of Conduct is mostly how to write them.

The Swing dancing scene had a big scandal this year, and everywhere CoCs are popping up.

But do you really need to write down that an adult (quite old, in that case) dance teacher is not allowed to sleep with just-teenage dance students? Or that racist remarks are not welcome?

No, so you adopt very broad language. Usually something like "harassing", "making uncomfortable" etc.

If your community needs those two sentences to police such behaviour, you've got a much bigger problem.

I simply don't believe that you can convince anybody to take action because some very broadly written CoC authorizes them to do so. They either see that the behaviour is a problem, and are willing to act, or they will just start to debate whether the CoC's specific wording is really covering the behaviour in question.

Then again, I have zero practical experience with policing a community.

Damn! Missed midnight. :-)

[geofft]

I mean, we do, evidently, have a much bigger problem in the open-source community. It would be nice if we didn't, but there's no easy way around it.

So there are really two options: one, hope the community stops existing or stops having influence (unlikely), or two, accept that, yes, we do need to spell out every little detail about behavior as if people don't know appropriate behavior on their own.

Nobody advocating detailed codes of conduct particularly likes the fact that they are necessary. But how you feel about the situation that led up to them doesn't really affect whether they are in fact necessary.

[VLM]

There is no community, just a mob, if there are no shared values WRT behavior. On the other side there is no justice system if the system is defined based on one persons feelings while ignoring the survival or existence or basic human rights of the other participants. Two sides of the same coin of lack of a community. You can't just sweep up a mob, an almost randomly selected jury, call it a community, and assume it'll work like an actual community. You'll just get anarchy, some will provide intimidation, some will provide legalistic supremacist totalitarianism, most will watch the drama from the sidelines and shake their heads and hope neither side rises to power.

[lillian-lemmer]

So your answer is not to have enforceable routes for women to be safe and respected because nobody can write specifically enough?

I run an organization (hypatia.software [Hypatia Software Organization]) where the Code of Conduct is enforced and it is effective.

[Tomte]

No, my answer is to have a community where you ban those people without discussing the semantics of some sentence.

In the end, it's probably equivalent to your answer. Because when the people in your organization feel someone is harassing people and you decide to kick him out, you're probably simply describing his behaviour and referencing your CoC, but not doing some detailed analysis how and why he did so.

[lillian-lemmer]

Yeah, it's just that it is sad that it is practically required to be spelled out. But even bigger yet, is that we have to find ways to enforce it and its purpose.

[vertex-four]

As somebody who has experience moderating groups without explicit rules - the result of this in a group of more than a dozen people is inevitably that some of them will feel that (a) the banning is unfair, no matter how egregious the behaviour, and (b) there should be a set of written rules for the leaders/moderators to follow, so that people understand clearly what is expected of them. You really can't win.

Personally, I tend to steer on the side of a broadly defined CoC backed up with a very clear dispute resolution policy (there's plenty of examples of both of these - Debian has a pretty decent set for large projects). In a functioning community, reaching for this should only be required very rarely, so they shouldn't affect anyone most of the time - and they quite obviously don't in the case of open-source projects, or we'd hear about actual cases where people have been kicked out of projects for very little a lot more than we do.

[fche]

Can you give some references to problems that existed in your organization before the CoC, and to what extent the CoC procedures have demonstrably helped?