Re: Code of Conduct plan

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> On 06/03/2018 11:29 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> We are now asking for a final round of community comments.

> Thanks for all the efforts on this. It is nice to see us explicitly
> moving toward modernizing our community policies and creating an openly
> inclusive community. There are a couple of notes I have about this:

> I think we need language that explicitly states that this is about
> participation within postgresql.org only. It is not postgresql.org's
> mission or purpose to police actions outside of their domain.

Actually, it's intentional that we are not saying that. The idea is
that any interaction between PG community members is subject to the CoC,
whether it takes place in postgresql.org infrastructure or not, so long as
there is not another CoC that takes precedence (such as a conference's
CoC). The reason for this is an unfortunate situation that took place in
the FreeBSD community awhile back [1], wherein one community member was
abusing another via Twitter, and their existing CoC failed to cover that
because it had been explicitly written to cover only community-run forums.
So we're trying to learn from that mistake, and make sure that if such a
situation ever came up here, the CoC committee would have authority to
act.

IIRC, the earliest drafts did have language about like what you suggest
here, but we took it out after the FreeBSD case was pointed out.

> There is no language that protects different political or social views.
> In today's climate it is important especially as we are a worldwide
> project. Something simple like the following should be enough:
> "Examples of personal characteristics include, but are not limited to
> age, race, national origin or ancestry, religion, political affiliation,
> social class, gender, or sexual orientation."

We've gone back and forth on how long the "examples of personal
characteristics" list ought to be; it was longer before, and some folks
didn't like that. (For onlookers who don't feel like checking the current
draft, JD has added "political affiliation" and "social class" to the
present text. The May 2016 draft had seventeen entries and was
undoubtedly way too far in the other direction.) In the end, since it's
just examples anyway, I'm inclined to keep it short. We can and will
tweak the text in future if actual problems arise and somebody argues
that their hurtful conduct wasn't proscribed.

In the end, whether reasonable things happen is going to depend on
the reasonableness of the CoC committee members. That's part of the
reason that we've set it up so that that committee is distinct from,
but answerable to, the core team. Core will take action if the CoC
committee is seen to be getting out of hand --- though I think that
that's very unlikely to happen.

regards, tom lane

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CA59563A-A97B-4FFC-A414-9888392F541B@justatheory.com
(The linked-to discussion unfortunately seems to be 404 now, so I'm
relying on David's summary.)