[cariaso]

He's quite sincere, and there are others of us who agree. Codes of conduct are a flavor of the month, and they don't achieve anything. I don't need to pre-announce that I will not accept patches from murderers or pedophiles, I can simply do it. The same is true for the types of offenses typical of a code of conduct.

Perhaps it is generational, and the new guard will eventually win this battle one funeral at a time. But as a politically liberal curmudgeon, 'codes of conduct' feel like the beta release of 'safe spaces'.

please go back to Pokemon Go-ing on my lawn... quietly. Daddy has to focus on writing code.

[sanswork]

>Codes of conduct are a flavor of the month, and they don't achieve anything

In other words you've never felt harassed. That's a good thing but it doesn't mean your situation is all encompassing.

>The same is true for the types of offenses typical of a code of conduct.

Also a good thing. How many times have you rejected a patch because someone was harassing another member of your community?

[dredmorbius]

I support codes of conduct, for multiple reasons stated and not in this thread.

I do not support putting words into someone else's mouth, particularly on socially explosive (hence the discussion in the first place) or ideologically driven issues.

Asking if someone's ever been harassed is one thing. Stating point blank that they haven't, crosses a line. Your interlocutor knows their personal history. You don't. Don't presume. It's a cheap shot, often derailing.

[sanswork]

You're right.

[mixedCase]

He says "Codes of conduct" don't work and your response is this?:

>In other words you've never felt harassed.

Do you fail to see the problem here?

>Also a good thing. How many times have you rejected a patch because someone was harassing another member of your community?

Does one need a written down, politically charged, potentially divisive document in legalese to say "I don't want to share my toys with the class bully"?

[sanswork]

He said codes of conduct don't achieve anything. The only way to believe that is to have never felt harassed. So no I don't see the problem.

>Does one need a written down, politically charged, potentially divisive document in legalese to say "I don't want to share my toys with the class bully"?

Apparently yes given the number of abusive people that have been active members of a lot of communities which now have codes of conduct.

[cariaso]

> The only way to believe that is to have never felt harassed.

Try believing that I could have been harassed, but feel that a code of conduct would not have prevented nor resolved the problem.

[sanswork]

I've tried and I can't. Could you please share what happened to help me understand?

[cariaso]

I suspect this discussion has now ceased to be useful to anyone. I'm more or less certain that you are now 'white knight' and 'question trolling'. I find it equally frustrating that you are 'concerned' about 'feeling' harassed, not 'being' harassed. I'm suspect you view me through a similarly narrow filter.

But hey, https://xkcd.com/386/

I did not say anything about 'what happened', I was speaking of 'belief' which was part of your sentence.

I'm not claiming I've been harassed, nor am I denying it. I find the term a bit vague, as it runs a spectrum from minor trolling which I think we've nearly all experienced (and perhaps committed), to real world doxing and stalking and physical violence. So let's pick something much more concrete.

Rape. Since even that has a somewhat ill defined colloquial use, I'll specifically restrict to a narrow and somewhat historic subset: The act of a man forcing coitus upon a woman.

There is recent precedent for this in the Tor community. I don't know enough of the specifics of that to claim my hypotheticals reflect any of the reality of that case, but I think it's a useful way to make this seem less abstract.

I don't believe that the Tor project had a specific 'code of conduct'. Despite that, they seem to have been able to report appelbaum's behavior as inappropriate, and remove him from the project. This suggests a CoC is not a requirement -- it is not necessary. Does anyone claim a CoC would have prevented those events from happening? -- it is not sufficient.

Let's imagine that there was a CoC. I don't think any of the CoCs I've seen specifically mention rape (nor murder or pedophilia - my original examples). I find it hard to believe that there was (or even could be) a woman who was ready to contribute to Tor, but due to previous experience with rape, and the lack of it being mentioned in the CoC, decided this was not an environment where she was welcome.

trigger warnings, safe spaces, and codes of conduct have all become strangely familiar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCU_(film) , but bland ways of marking some tribal identity. But they do not seem to actually achieve any of their stated goals.

I've previously been involved in organizing one tech conference, where a single member of the admin board felt it was urgent that we nail this down, and it became a time consuming and long recurring part of our calendar, which to my mind achieved little beyond bike shedding. None of us are strongly opposed to the core idea. We do want a healthy vibrant community. But if that's all we wanted, we'd have joined some other social forum, be it a book club, a sports team, or whatever suits you. Instead we joined a code base, a conference or some other technology focused community, and advancing that specific goal is actually priority #1. To the extent a community helps us to advance that goal, wonderful. But to the extent that certain members of that community actively hurt progress, we're glad to see them excluded. Sometimes we decide that exclusion is necessary due to social practices like criminal activity ( Hans Reiser ) sometimes it's due to some (race/sex/other)-ism which is taboo. But one of the great things about the way we do online collaboration ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_... ) is that I've gotten to meet and collaborate with a lot of people who are WAY outside my usual social bubble. And it's allowed me to build a tolerance and respect for people who I would otherwise have probably dismissed too early. Satanic polytheist -- have you seen his filesystem API? Blind transexual with a diaper fetish - built that 9 dimensional rubics cube app in 4k of assembly. CoCs set a dangerous precedent of deciding in advance who's one of us, and who is not, based on things other than tech skills. I've got enough of that in my corporate and real world life. This is the internet. 99.9% of the time the absolute worst that can happen is that you get your feelings hurt. To prematurely constrain it to prevent that, is a medicine more dangerous than the disease.

[RaleyField]

People police themselves better if they know what is expected behavior and there aren't any gray areas.

Otherwise you have owner arguing with contributor drama trying to explain implied etiquette. Of course unless the transgression was severe the owner is forced to be lenient for fear of appearing overly authoritarian (which would drive away some contributors), but they can't be entirely forgiving because the transgression might drive away some other (or same) people. CoC removes this bargaining.

[flukus]

>I don't need to pre-announce that I will not accept patches from murderers or pedophiles, I can simply do it.

The question is, why would you care? What the person does in their personal life is outside the scope of the project.