Re: Code of Conduct plan

On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 10:37 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)bowt(dot)ie> wrote:

> It is of course possible that a member of the committee could act in
> bad faith for any number of reasons. You can say the same thing about
> any position of leadership or authority within the community, though.
> That hasn't really been much of a problem in my experience, and I see
> no reason for particular concern about it here.
>

I thought the same thing as a member of the Django community. It adopted a
CoC that I vocally warned was dangerous and far more likely to be abused
than provide any benefit. I was shocked when the very first time it was
ever invoked it was by one of the founders of the project (whom I
previously personally respected) and it was absolutely used in the manner
that I had feared which was to shut someone up whose opinion he did not
like rather than any legitimate concern. Unfortunately this is not such an
unusual circumstance as one might hope in these projects or conferences. It
is impossible to separate the concept of political correctness from these
CoCs I find and they are much more dangerous things than they appear. We
should tread with extreme cautious about adopting such a thing.

-- Ben Scherrey