Re: Code of Conduct: Is it time?

"Regina Obe" <lr(at)pcorp(dot)us> writes:
> How would you feel about the original thread that started this.
> https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
> I would dismiss her as a troll and kindly say, don't tell us who we can have
> and who we can't.

Hm ... that thread makes me uncomfortable, because I can see both points
of view. I really don't care for the idea that "you should throw this
longtime contributor off your project because he espoused some not-
politically-correct views in an unrelated forum". On the other hand,
the argument that the person's actions might drive away potential
community members isn't without merit.

Also, does it really matter whether the complaint comes from someone
who's in the community already, or not? It's going to be equally
messy either way. Unless you choose to ignore the complaint simply
because a non-community-member made it, which seems to me to be a
bad idea. A lot of the argument for having a CoC seems to be to help
draw new people in, and that approach won't do that.

This might be in the category of "hard cases make bad law". Probably
an ideal outcome for the situation described there would have been for
the contributor to recognize that his actions didn't reflect well on
the community, and to *voluntarily* stop doing that. Or at least,
stop posting divisive views from an account explicitly claiming a
close relationship to the opal community. But should the community
have tried to force him to stop? Dunno, but I doubt it would have
ended well if they had.

Moving on from the substance of the complaint, neither side of that
argument gets any points from me for being civil about how they went
about discussing it. The complainant seems to have started out with
a public call for removal from the project, which is about as good
a way as I can think of for ensuring that the discussion will not
be pleasant or productive. (Maybe there were some private contacts
beforehand, but I don't see any evidence of that; not that I had the
patience to read the entire thread.) And the responses were not on
any higher level; which is unsurprising maybe, but they certainly did
nothing to defuse the situation.

In my admittedly-limited experience with dealing with such problems,
it's a lot easier to achieve positive results if you can discuss
issues in private, before people's positions harden.

In short, I wouldn't characterize that complainant as "a troll" for
the substance of her complaint, but maybe so for the way in which
she went about making it. If we're to have a CoC, I'd really like
it (and any associated enforcement mechanism) to be designed to
discourage this sort of let's-begin-with-public-attacks approach to
problem resolution. How we get to that exactly, I don't know.

regards, tom lane