[Development] QUIP 12: Code of Conduct

[Konstantin Shegunov]

I  think you're over-engineering the whole thing and you don't drive the
point of such a document home. My best suggestion is to simplify (heavily)
the process and the phrasing.

Firstly and most importantly drop the heavy and redundant wording, e.g. "
... pledge to making participation in our project and our community a
harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, ..."
"everyone" is already all those things. Unless your point was to write a
constitution, just state what you mean simply, plainly and succinctly.
Helps in reading, understanding and proceeding to implement. On that note
hardly will I be convinced that a new (or seasoned) contributor waste the
time to read through something that's longer than half a page instead of
diving into the heart of the matter, which is to write code, improve docs
or w/e.

Addendum: There's too much vague phrasing. When I was reading through the
text I read things of the sort:
"Showing empathy towards other community members"
and
"Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a
professional setting"
and what I thought was "What's that nonsense?! empathy?!". What is wrong
with stating it directly - "Don't be mean, respect others."?
Here's what Tero wrote on the boards (shortened the tips about language,
which shrunk it by about 5%-10%) as a guideline for moderators:

*The short moderation and banning guideline for the Qt Forum*
> First, the Qt Community is in general a friendly place. When you applied
> or were called to be a moderator, several other moderators read a good
> section of your posts, and agreed that you are very friendly towards to
> community in addition to being knowledgeable in Qt. Thank you, and keep up
> the friendly attitude!



Always assume that the person asking has a real valid problem. Trolls and
> ranters are very rare here, so it's best to assume that a person sounding
> aggressive is just having a bad day, or that english is their third or
> second language. The language barrier may cause the question to sound
> strange.

 [...]

In general the following types of posts will be deleted
> obvious spam
> 'support' phone numbers
> obviously non-Qt services and sites
> backlink spam (spam with links to a completely non-Qt site, with the
> intention of raising search engine rankings)
> swearing
> completely off topic posting
> posting the same question in multiple subforums (remember to post a note
> on the one you leave up)
> Banning is in place when:
> The user posts harmful spam
> Abusive behaviour, swearing and being offensive
>

It's reasonable, short enough, easy to comprehend and apply.

Secondly, that whole committee thing is somewhat of a stretch in my mind.
It's going to be much more practical to have one contact person to "shuffle
the paper" and consider complaints/issues, answering questions about and
for the community, helping newer persons to get on with the program and so
on. Election can be by majority voting ran for a reasonable time period
(say 1 week) from a pool of proposed candidates. Alternatively, as the
community is somewhat dispersed over different media - forums, mailing
lists, IRC and so on a person for each of the channels mentioned can be
elected. On that note the proposed CoC doesn't take into account that
specific, for one we mostly police ourselves in the forum, and I imagine
people have an operator on IRC, but it's not clear how the committee is
supposed to operate on the different channels, are they to be omnipresent?

Thirdly, and I'll stop with my ramblings, there will always be grating
between people that work on something together for extended periods, no
matter if it's a huge C++ library or some triviality. If you try to stop
all of it, what my feeling of the proposed document is, brace yourselves,
you're going to fail miserably. I'd rather suggest handling the extreme
cases only and leave people blow off steam once in a while. Disruptions to
good order are more often than not correctable by a simple private notice.
Or to quote Sze-Howe Koh:

There are 2 ways to ensure that things don't get done in an open project:
>
>    1. Spend so much time molly-coddling everyone such that there is
>    little time left to do actual work
>    2. Drive so many (potential) contributors away such that there are few
>    people left to do actual work
>
> Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes is the sweet spot where
> people are neither molly-coddled nor driven away, and maximal work gets
> done. That is the spot a project wants to reach.


PS
I don't know why that (half-)political argument about women, hiring,
google, and whatnot, spun off but I see no relevance to the document, nor
did I read anything remotely related to it in the text. So let's drop it,
shall we?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/attachments/20181025/0c8bcc02/attachment.html>