Re: Code of Conduct plan - Mailing list pgsql-general

On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 2:06 PM, Sven R. Kunze <srkunze@mail.de> wrote:
> 1) CoC might result in developers leaving projects
> http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-May/122922.html

This guy left LLVM for several reasons. The pertinent reason for us
was that he had to agree to a code of conduct in order to attend
conferences, which he found to be unacceptable. He did not have to
agree that the idea of a code of conduct was a good one, though. It
would have been perfectly possible for him to be opposed in principle
to the idea of a CoC, while also formally agreeing to it and attending
those conferences. I gather that his objections were around questions
of unintended consequences, the role of a certain authority to assess
violations of the CoC, and so on (I surmise that he was not actually
opposed to or constrained by any of the specific rules around content
in technical presentations and so on).

I for one accept that these may have been reasonable concerns, even
though I don't really agree, since the LLVM CoC seems quite
reasonable. Anybody that participates in an open source community soon
learns that their opinion on almost any matter may not be the one that
prevails. There are often differences of opinion on -hackers that seem
to fundamentally be down to a difference in values. We still manage to
make it work, somehow.

> 2) CoC might result in not so equal peers and friends, might result in a
> committee which feels above their peers, and might promote conceit and
> denunciation.

I think that having a code of conduct is better than not having one,
and I think that the one that we came up with is appropriate and
proportionate. We could speculate all day about specific unintended
consequences that may or may not follow. That doesn't seem very
constructive, though. Besides, the time for that has passed.

> In related discussions, people recurringly ask not to establish a secondary
> judicial system but to use the already existing ones.

I don't follow. Practically any organized group has rules around
conduct, with varying degrees of formality, means of enforcement, etc.
Naturally, the rules across disparate groups vary widely for all kinds
of reasons. Formalizing and being more transparent about how this
works seems like the opposite of paternalism to me.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan