Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

Cutting slack is essentially turning the other cheek to otherwise unwelcome behaviour, for whatever reason that might be.

I don't believe it's healthy at all to cut slack for some people and not others. On the contrary, it's incredibly healthy to give everyone the exact same assumption of positive intent up until it's proven otherwise.

Those making significant contributions should be doing their best to set the example, to show what the high standard is, and if you let them off the hook you're not holding them to account. You're putting them above the guidelines and essentially enabling them.

This doesn't mean that everyone should be criticised equally, but nobody should be above receiving constructive feedback on their communication just because they've contributed a lot of work.

And on that level, it also stands to reason that feedback has to be delivered compassionately and appropriately, and it works a lot better if that's done in the context of a trusting relationship or through people who are skilled in engaging in such conversations.

A newcomer to the community who criticises everybody else is not communicating kindly or compassionately. The assumption of positive intent may suggest that they're not familiar with the guidelines, so the constructive feedback would be to present those guidelines and point out where the newcomer may have fallen short.

Hard work, but communities are hard work.

I also encourage HN readers to examine the link KirinDave provided, as he himself suggests, as well as the documents actually linked to. It rather revelatory how at odds the hyperbole directed at Mr. Ts'o is with what was actually said by him. Is permitting people with biases so extreme to write CoCs what we really want?

It may well be my lack of imagination, but I'm having trouble imagining an outcome based approach that still allowed progress on projects to continue.

Also, if such an approach could be articulated, would it be incompatible with this code of conduct?

This seems to be implying that "child abuse and statutory rape" should not be counted as rape and that rape "at the hands of their intimate partner" or where "the perpetrator did not threaten to harm or kill the victim" are not "real" rape.

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I think it nicely and concisely encapsulates a few critical parts of online conversation: that it's a two-way street and to be productive requires responders to also really think about what is being said, and that we should all take a certain level of humility as a baseline because we lack a lot of the non-verbal cues that face to face discussion has. A big one (and a definitional part of the whole "global community" thing) is that it can be hard to tell on the Internet if someone is a native speaker or not. Particularly for English, since that gets a significant level of formal education through much of the world and is also a significant focus of machine translation with probably one of the larger learning sets due to being an early target. IRL people can quickly tell if there is some sort of language barrier and adjust accordingly, but in online discussions it can be a lot harder to not project too many expectations onto people on the other side of the screen. And of course even native speakers can just plain be tired, or have had a bad day, things which again non-verbal cues could suggest but takes conscious effort with just words. Finally, people outside of a specialization can have valuable ideas to convey but lack the terminology to express it the way someone specialized would. One could say they're not "native speakers" of that sub-dialect of English even if they're native English speakers.

So it really helps as a baseline to try to figure out what people are really aiming for even if they lack the precise words to convey it. I've found it's a suggestion that has made me contemplate and rewrite responses even if I still forget sometimes.

One fair corollary however: this is all as long as there is reason to assume good faith. That's the default assumption, but it's not a right either, it is in fact possible for someone to demonstrate bad faith. In that case suppression or expulsion should be swift despite any cries of "censorship", because resource exhaustion attacks are also a major threat in online discussion. Less so in more specialized areas like mailing lists then general forums, but even there it can happen via rules lawyering and the like.