[Development] QUIP 12: Code of Conduct

[Volker Krause]

On Thursday, 25 October 2018 09:11:42 CEST Simon Hausmann wrote:
> Am 25.10.18 um 08:31 schrieb Shawn Rutledge:
> 
> >
> >
> >> On 24 Oct 2018, at 17:09, Jason H <jhihn at gmx.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> In case it needs to be said-
> >> I am AGAINST racism, sexism, bigotry, and all the other exclusionary
> >> things. But I am also against people judging other people's code for
> >> factors that have nothing to do with the code itself. I find that adding
> >> a value judgement of conduct to code to be intolerant. We had the
> >> ideal.
 I am FOR inclusion. I want everyone to feel welcome here.
> >> Everyone.> 
> > I agree.  It seems to be about fixing something that isn’t broken, or as
> > in that story in the Bible where the people came to a consensus that
> > every other country around them had a king, so they should have a king
> > too.  Nothing good came out of it in any cases where we have seen this
> > kind of illogic applied.  “Most other big corporations have a deep
> > hierarchy of management, with too much power concentrated at the top, and
> > we want to be a big corporation, so we need to replicate that.”  “The
> > other lemmings are running away so maybe we’d better follow.”  It’s not
> > the open source way, which seemed to be working well enough already.
>
> >
> >
> > If you give power to a committee of 3 people, they will probably abuse it
> > eventually, misjudge, cause bitterness, create factions, and some
> > developers will end up walking away.  Seems predictable, doesn’t it?
>
> >
> 
> 
> You claim that this is about fixing something that isn't broken. Your 
> statement that a committee will predictably and eventually abuse their 
> powers and misjudge is, I feel, a
> 
> statement that is spreading fear, doubt and uncertainty, without any 
> evidence within the scope of this community.
> 
> 
> On the other hand I am aware of at least one concrete case where the 
> behavior of a reviewer has caused a contributor (with a track record of 
> accepted patches, btw) to
> 
> turn away from the project and even resulted in an email of complaint 
> sent to the community manager. The lack of tools, written understanding 
> and common agreement
> 
> on what is good behavior resulted in that nothing happened at all and 
> the contributor in question has stayed away from the project since then.
> 
> 
> I do think that this is the exception, but it is crucial that we have 
> the right tools and mechanisms in place when unlikely exceptions happen, 
> in order to deal with them
> 
> instead of ignoring them. After having seen this with my own eyes, I am 
> convinced of that.
> 
> 
> Whether it is a code of conduct or kindness guidelines - anything like 
> that is something that I welcome as an improvement.
> 
> 
> Simon

+1

We do have a Code of Conduct at KDE for about 10 years now, and this hasn't 
led to abuse of power, suppression of free speech, racism against white people 
or whatever other nonsense people seem to attribute to CoCs nowadays.

On the contrary, it gave us a solid foundation to act against the (very few, 
fortunately) cases of abusive behavior to protect our contributors. As Simon I 
have seen the damage such behavior can do, and therefore would also welcome 
tools/rules to be in place to deal with such situations.

Regards,
Volker
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