Re: Code of Conduct: Is it time?

> ISTM that if we develop a code of conduct, it would need to be designed to insulate the community and individuals within it from becoming targets of legal action. "Mike said I was bad at postgres, it hurt my consulting and I want to sue Joe for replying-all and upping the hit-count on google... "

> --Scott

I've given some more thought to this and come up with a draft Contributor Code of Conduct. My strategy is that rather than focusing on things like Harassment that we can't all agree on the definition of.

Focus on more absolutes that if you violate are harassment or cause psychological stress. It is also clear, that we need to protect people in our community from looters, I would say we need to protect our own even more so than we need to make new people feel welcome.

So here's my draft Contributor Code of Conduct (CCC) to try to achieve that.

Like the open source technical community as a whole, our community is made up of a mixture of professionals and volunteers with vast differences of opinions and

styles of communication.

Our community is made up of people from many cultures and walks of life who have come together

with the common goals of making a great piece of software and helping others use this software.

We value contributions from everybody. By contributions we mean code, documentation, project outreach in form of setting up conferences or working groups,

package maintenance, answering and asking questions in our forums which further our mission, and providing bug reports.

If you have contributed to our project, then we consider you a member

of our extended family and value your opinions and concerns very highly.

We value the opinions of members who have contributed most more than we value the opinions of others.

This is because major contributors have already proved their desire to further our mission, and for newcomers,

their intention has not yet been established.

We want everyone entering our community willing to help out to feel welcomed.

To maintain and encourage a welcoming environment we ask all people interacting with our community to follow these guidelines when in our

public spaces. By public spaces we mean mailing lists, IRC channels, Code repositories, and reporting bug reports

GUIDELINES

1) When in discussions keep focused on the topic being discussed.

2) Say helpful things, and if you feel you have nothing to say that furthers the discussion, say nothing.

By helpful we mean for example:

If someone asks a question, even if it's one that you think has an obvious answer, either provide an example or a link to the section of the manual that covers it.

If you feel a person does not provide enough information for someone to help, point them to this link: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Guide_to_reporting_problems

3) Do not switch the topic to yourself unless the topic happens to be about you.

For example if someone is asking a question about replication, and the words master and slave come up in discussion,

do not talk about the great master/slave sex you had last night.

4) Do not ask questions that are unrelated to the mission of our project.

USE OF TRIGGER TERMS

We have long standing terms like Master/Slave that may trigger some past trauma for some people.

While we do consider people's feelings, we weigh that against the effort of changing long understood terminology and the psychological trauma

such changes would cause for the larger majority of people who are not as sensitive to the usage.

As such we entertain change requests for naming of new features more than we do of renaming old features.

HANDLING ISSUES

We understand that through no fault of anybody, a person may make a comment they consider harmless that others find very offensive or makes another feel small. As project maintainers

we will monitor these and gently call people out on them even if they are a member of our maintainer group.

By gentle call out, we mean something like "I think what X was trying to say was that you need to do this" or point them to this document and the specific bullet point you feel they violated.

We expect of everyone in our spaces to try their best to do the same in a kind and gentle manner. If you feel it's just a minor offense and the person didn't mean harm by it,

simply ignore it unless the pattern of talk continues. If the person continues or they say something you feel is very offensive or degrading to another,

tell a project maintainer preferably off-list and we will talk with the person to affect a change in their behavior or kick them out if we determine behavior change is not possible.

If anyone makes you feel uncomfortable please notify the project maintainer group at ... with the specific occurrence and evidence that made you feel this way.

We do not tolerate those we feel are trying to derail our project by injecting

discussions that have little to do with the mission of our project.

If you have contributed nothing to our project and you make demands for change, we will try to tell you that kindly

and request you to change or leave.

We promise as project maintainers to apply the same standards on ourselves as we apply to others.

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