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GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

phoronix.com

251–260 of 387 posts

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i would also recommend you research who came up with and popularized the CoC that everyone uses, and what comments this person had about what would happen when popular projects adopt it. I wont tell you, as I dont want to be accused of putting words in anyones mouth, this will probably be downvoted, but go look it up yourself if you care. In general i'd say, it doesnt matter who brings information, only what the info…

After a brief Google search, I think you're referring to Coraline Ada Ehmke, but I can't find anything problematic about her, what she's said, or her goals — unless you're referring to the fact that she's transgender and cares about social justice. Is that why you're being deliberately vague? Would you mind elaborating instead of vagueposting? What are your specific concerns? What is "extremely objectively poor" abou…

Not the OP, but from what I remember they would seek out every possible opportunity in every single possible open source community they could find and propose the CoC that they wrote. 0 contributions to the projects, with the exception of demanding that people implement incredibly verbose CoC's in their projects under the guise of "protecting the minorities contributing to the projects".

Most infamous instance is probably this one, in the Opal repo: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

As well as this thread in the Ruby issue tracker that devolves into pure chaos with Ada refusing to actually participate in any of the valid points others bring up: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004

And I'm sure there's many other instances if you look around a bit.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there's a committee that largely operates in the dark. Instead, the committee should be limited to gathering the information and, if any action is to be taken, it should ultimately be decided by a "jury of one's peers"--eg a group of non-committee members of the project selected at random. You'd probably have the project leadership operate in some capacity as a "judge". I mean... there's a reason…

there was a time, not too long ago, when it was very obvious to everyone that the Internet and the real world were not the same thing, and it was plain as day that the inherent disparities that exist between cyberspace and meatspace (e.g., on the Internet, nobody can tell what sex/race/sexual orientation/religion/etc. you are, unless you go out of your way to tell them) should necessitate different social norms.

Frankly, that was always a fallacy.

Who you are in "real life" very much affects who you are, and what you are capable of, and how you are impacted by what you experience on-line. Anonymity works in very limited circumstances. It quickly becomes pathological over the long-term.

Sure, social norms need to adapt to the circumstances and the context, but the fundamentals of kindness, respect, integrity, and the need for communities to police themselves on some level, don't really go away.

These are long-term work projects where folks are either employed or are volunteering and donating considerable amounts of time and energy. If you want that to be successful, in the long term and for increasingly many people, you need a mechanism to deal with people behaving badly, or people not understanding one another. It's ridiculous to think this is all necessary when all you want to do is write some code, but it's also ridiculous to think you should have to worry about harassment, bullying, or worse when all you want to do is write some code.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#253
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from a part of the US where "guys" is used as a gender neutral collective noun. My mom and grandma would call out "guys, dinner is ready!" to the whole family to call us to the table for example. So it's definitely whiplash inducing for the same group of people preaching inclusion and tolerance, and how we need to accept regional and racial dialects in the workplace, to then turn around and implement slackbots th…

When non-native English speakers are taught English, they are taught that "Hey guys" is gender neutral. So you'll meet lots of non-native English speakers who will be completely shocked at that it's not. I have so much fun joking with some of my women friends that they're sexist because they're using "guys" instead of "folks". To me, it's one of those things where someone is always going to be awkward and say "that d…

> When non-native English speakers are taught English, they are taught that "Hey guys" is gender neutral.

I'm a native English speaker in the US, in my late 50s, and I was taught that "guys" used in that way was gender neutral in grade school.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#254
post #87

Possibly a big mistake to make this post, but I've written my own code of conduct template, which I use on my projects (mostly since snyk, github and similar scanners rank you down if you don't have it). https://github.com/ltworf/international_code_of_conduct/blob...

That's both ambitious and a little daring.

One place where I disagree is in the "skill discrimination" section. If you look up the definition of the word "discrimination", you'd see that it probably means something different (in common use) than what you intend.

I'd be fine with agreeing that volunteers are not obligated to put energy in to low quality / low energy contributions, but saying explanations aren't required is unhelpful. "It's low quality code" is plenty of explanation. What you've written suggests that contributions can be rejected because of previous instances of low quality / low effort, without explanation, and that does nothing to further a project. A technical, if short, explanation is always a good idea.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a brief Google search, I think you're referring to Coraline Ada Ehmke, but I can't find anything problematic about her, what she's said, or her goals — unless you're referring to the fact that she's transgender and cares about social justice. Is that why you're being deliberately vague? Would you mind elaborating instead of vagueposting? What are your specific concerns? What is "extremely objectively poor" abou…

> but I can't find anything problematic about her, They were literally _FIRED_ from Github because of a "problem" with a female coworker, allegedly. Github was like the "wokest" startup at that time, with diversity officers and what not before everybody else, after the sex harassment scandal... One can be oppressed because of their characteristic while still being oppressive toward others. edit: changed the wording.

> They were literally _FIRED_ from Github because they abused a female coworker.

Oh okay, I didn't find that on Wikipedia (it just says she was fired but doesn't say why) and didn't see any headlines on it in my search. That is bad, and worthy of firing, although I'm not sure exactly how it relates to what the GP was saying about nefarious plans for the CoC or whatever.

> One can be oppressed because of their characteristic while still being oppressive toward others.

Very much so. It's like people who were abused revisiting that abuse on others.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this thread feels like stepping into bizarro land. I see a lot of people equating the presence of a CoC with some kind of 1984-newspeak future. This reminds me of the complaints about seatbelts. Yeah, every once in a while, a seatbelt makes a crash worse. Requiring seatbelts takes away the sense of freedom you have in a car. That sort of thing. Sometimes, a CoC will be abused to harass people. Step back and look…

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The idea of latent meanings encoded into CoCs is unfamiliar to me, and I don’t find this line of reasoning credible.

Words are imperfect, and there are multiple ways to interpret CoCs. But CoCs provide additional transparency, relative to the secret, unwritten rules people use without CoCs.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#257
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CoC might be just fine. GCC's looks nice -- basically "act professionally". But , there are people out there who jump at the opportunity to take offense on someone else's behalf. The female analog to "guys" seems to be "gals", but nobody uses that anymore, preferring "girls". The word "girls" is a word of automatic offense taking to some, even if everyone involved in the conversation is cool with it. I've seen the…

Again: details would be nice. People do indeed take offense on others' behalves (and probably should do so less often), but that's more of a human nature thing; it's not evidence that CoCs actually make that phenomenon worse. > Then add in the desire to drop life changing punishments to such mild things. Say the wrong thing and get fired. See Python and the stupid dongle joke. That didn't need a video, that needed a…

It's nuanced. There are good and bad CoC's: be nice here vs. we are the thought police on your entire internet history.

A problem people have with them is they are being weaponized by people attracted to enforcing their concepts of thoughtcrime.

I don't see anything particularly interesting in the GCC one. It's just saying it's not a free for all like some places are ok with.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a brief Google search, I think you're referring to Coraline Ada Ehmke, but I can't find anything problematic about her, what she's said, or her goals — unless you're referring to the fact that she's transgender and cares about social justice. Is that why you're being deliberately vague? Would you mind elaborating instead of vagueposting? What are your specific concerns? What is "extremely objectively poor" abou…

Not the OP, but from what I remember they would seek out every possible opportunity in every single possible open source community they could find and propose the CoC that they wrote. 0 contributions to the projects, with the exception of demanding that people implement incredibly verbose CoC's in their projects under the guise of "protecting the minorities contributing to the projects". Most infamous instance is pro…

That is pretty invasive behavior, I won't lie. However, if [this](https://blade.ruby-lang.org/ruby-core/72916) is the tenor of the "valid points" brought up against her CoC, I'm... not impressed. It's just standard conservative whining. The language you use towards other people does matter, actually, to the kind of culture and environment you build, and wanting to have guidelines around that doesn't make you "perpetually offended." And sometimes people's opinions outside a project do actually matter, it's not accusing people of a "thoughtcrime", its pointing out that cultural and political opinions aren't just team sports or games of pretend, they have real consequences for other people, and tell you about the character of the person who holds them. Who wants to work with someone who thinks they're completely delusional freaks?

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#259

The only effect of a Code of Conduct I have ever personally witnessed was that people were being bullied for greeting others. The greeting they used was "hey guys", and instead of recognizing that language is fluid and different to different people they tried to impose their linguistic views on others. The people who encouraged this behavior were people on the Code of Conduct committee and at the top of the project's…

Can you provide more details? I’ve been working on open source projects for about a decade now, including years of professional work, and I have never seen or heard someone chastised for using “guys” informally. This includes in communities with established, formal codes of conduct. It strikes me as something that most people wouldn’t even notice , unless the speaker was intentionally using it in a way that implies g…

The dbt slack community has a bot that says

> Hi! Reminder: “guys” is an inherently gendered term. Great alternatives include “everyone”, “folks”, “team”, "friends" or “y’all”. Thank you for helping us build a more inclusive community!

The only thing that really bothers me personally about this is the mistaken idea that language can be "inherently" anything. The meaning of a term varies based on usage, it is not inherent.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#260
post #217

One of the landmarks of civilization is that people who utterly hate each other can still work together for a common good. This, my dad taught me as a kid and I cherish it as a core principle. I like civilization, after all. Being hateful, insulting, or otherwise offensive is not a big deal if we can still work along. These stupid "codes of conduct" make civilization impossible. Worse, they force the language to be b…

It seems to me there are two basic types of people - those that think: > Being hateful, insulting, or otherwise offensive is not a big deal if we can still work along. and those that think: > I can't work along somebody who is hateful, insulting, or otherwise offensive. I'm not sure either group is completely right, but it seems that being nicer would solve this whole problem...

It seems that mediation would be a good thing. Yet we never hear about that, even in "progressive" workplaces that are all about Diversity, Inclusion, Equity & all the other keywords.

It's remarkable - your supervisor behaves in an increasingly unhinged manner towards you, and you go look for informal conflict resolution and none is to be had. Yes, there is a code of conduct, there is the diversitylady, but no way of putting a conflict to bed, just the CoC committee that we are asked to trust.

Pfui!

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