Why is this kind of thing so common at conferences? What mechanism encourages it in that kind of environment?
I Violated a Code of Conduct
631–640 of 971 posts
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. I think we should generalize more, beyond codes of conduct: If you are building an adjudication process for resolving non-criminal personal conflicts (whether that be a Code of Conduct, an HR department, a Title IX proceeding, a professional organization, or something else), you should take a look at Anglo-derived common law and the safeguards against abuse that have been evolved over the centuries. That…
Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else, presumptive of their right to associate. Sorry, I disagree: people can decide they don't want to associate with you or me for reasons we don't find justifiable. I can throw a party and not invite you simply for writing this comment; I can start a project and not allow you to contribute. You can relat…
> Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else, presumptive of their right to associate
If you "start a project and not allow [me] to contribute" then you're by definition starting a much more traditional, hierarchical, authoritarian community, with the forms of dispute resolution you would expect there. Now that's okay, but it means that you should probably be upfront about it from the onset. And it also means you should expect pushback and accusations (probably accurate ones) of bait and switch if you change directions midway. They will say "that doesn't sound very egalitarian to me" and they will probably be correct. It shouldn't be a problem if you don't want to court that segment, or power your community through their contributions. But if you do want to court that segment, then I think they will want you to play by their rules.
I also think this is why the idea of Anglo common law was brought up. It is a form of dispute resolution which is pretty amenable to egalitarian, decentralized dispute resolution. What I like about Anglo common law is that it minimizes the need for a fair authority figure in favor of a fair autonomous process operable by a majority of equal peers:
> Does it allow anonymous accusations?
> Is the accused allowed to know the charges against them, before a finding of guilt is rendered?
> Is there a presumption of innocence?
> Is the accused allowed to have a trusted third party - one who knows the rules of the game - to advocate on their behalf?
> Who, exactly, is responsible for deciding matters of fact vs matters of "law"?
> Is there an appeals process to fix possibly incorrect decisions?
All of these concerns must be addressed to create such a system. And I think that a lot of prospective contributors (such as myself) do not want to be part of a community unless it is run by such a system. I also think that such contributors will be particularly incensed about contributing to such communities that say they are run by such systems but which are actually oligarchies. In that case, I would feel like I had originally contributed to the community as an equal, but I am instead now just a cog helping build someone else's dream. This will not just discourage me from contributing to the community, but it will make me regret ever doing so in the first place, and resent the community's leaders for lying to me.
So going back to your original example, I think you are well within your rights to start a project and not allow me to contribute. But if you do that, I think you have to be honest about what kind of community you are really building. It is one thing to say you wish to build a community through benevolent dictatorship. It is another to say you wish to build a community through distributed consensus. It's not really a two-way door. Switching directions midway can cause collateral damage with an extremely high blast radius.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. I think we should generalize more, beyond codes of conduct: If you are building an adjudication process for resolving non-criminal personal conflicts (whether that be a Code of Conduct, an HR department, a Title IX proceeding, a professional organization, or something else), you should take a look at Anglo-derived common law and the safeguards against abuse that have been evolved over the centuries. That…
Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else, presumptive of their right to associate. Sorry, I disagree: people can decide they don't want to associate with you or me for reasons we don't find justifiable. I can throw a party and not invite you simply for writing this comment; I can start a project and not allow you to contribute. You can relat…
Individuals might have the right to disassociate, but organizations have more power then individuals, and concentrate power in the hands of a small number of people, and thus should have some democratic checks on that power. Elections are one form of democratic check on power, but a randomized selection of peers works as a statistically sampled approximation, which is why the concept of a jury exists.
Any organization without democratic checks to redistribute power to its constituents is generally seeking to hold hierarchical power over those constituents and others, and should be distrusted.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, a CoC and a committee to enforce it are now table stakes for an open source project. Part of the reason, I believe, is because companies refuse to commit resources to open source without some assurance that the project will employ best practices to prevent discrimination, harassment, and a hostile work environment, lest the company find itself liable for such. (There's also the "good corporate citizen"…
> And corporate resources dominate open source -- without them we go back to dorm-room side projects of questionable maintenance. I imagine the transition from "side project" to "I might as well be working for a MegaCorp with all of this HR-esque CoC nonsense" would be most unpleasant. How many project founders bow out at that point?
Yeah, that transition from a hobby project to a big payout/nice salary/more usage/more resources must really sting. (Obviously it's a big change but I don't think most would consider it a net negative.)
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why don't contributors openly reject this stupid system (not the rules themselves, which sound fine) and unseat these self-proclaimed procurators is beyond me. Because some people actually do act like jerks, and we want to be able to tell those people to either stop acting like jerks or go away. > CoCs were doomed to this from the beginning. Rather, Codes of Conduct are more difficult than you think. The article it…
Why do you need a Code of Conduct to prevent people acting like jerks? If someone acts like a jerk tell them to stop, and if they don't, take action. IMO you don't need it enshrined in a dodgy pseudo-contract. That's a recipe for more problems than it solves.
> Why do you need a Code of Conduct to prevent people acting like jerks? If someone acts like a jerk tell them to stop, and if they don't, take action.
There are lots of reasons.
Ideally forces you to think ahead of time what kind of conduct you are OK with or not OK with, so you don't have to decide at the moment when someone you actually have a relationship with does something.
Ideally you think ahead of time how you would respond if someone did one of those things.
Ideally you think about a process for people to follow that balances several contrasting goals: Namely, to avoid doxxing or blaming the victim, but also to prevent the system from being used against innocent people (which it seems what happened here).
Ideally people who are prone to act like jerks decide not to act like jerks at all: Either they behave themselves, or they don't join your community.
If you don't do a Code of Conduct, and just "tell the jerk to stop, and if not take action", then it's a crap shoot whether you overreact (as happened here) or underreact (as has happened in many cases). If you deploy a Code of Conduct properly, there's at least a better chance that you'll respond constructively.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN users are not monolith. Probably most of us aren't in the Bay Area, many are not even from the USA. Many people here wouldn't give a single fuck about some twitter mob because they live in countries where people are more tolerant of opposite views (and finding out your acquaintance votes other party will get him friendly jab, not excommunication).
> and finding out your acquaintance votes other party will get him friendly jab, not excommunication I've long argued that the US should have lots of parties, and adopt pluralistic voting, but then I stopped when it seemed to me that countries that already have this system don't have demonstrably better political outcomes. But your comment pushes me back to the other side of the argument now. It occurs to me that if…
Sweden and Switzerland seem pretty great IMO. I think the trick is proportional voting instead of first past the post.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#637This is one of those posts where the title is going to trigger a lot of unproductive subthreads, but the piece itself seems pretty balanced and thoughtful (and links to Valerie Aurora's excellent code-of-conduct training deck). The thing HN likes to do best with any story is to generalize it and find sweeping conclusions. Here, I think the story is pretty much just: people screw up, and if your project has a code of…
This happens to be a case where the adsurdity of using CoC to silence criticism is quite clear, as no “minority” is involved (right?). If the exact same thing happened but the criticized party played the minority card, or someone played it for them — in this case the criticized party don’t even care, I dare say it would immediately become much more controversial. Heck, I once shared such a story and got labeled, with…
How does this instance suddenly being thrown into gender and pronoun political correctness ?
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And corporate resources dominate open source -- without them we go back to dorm-room side projects of questionable maintenance. I imagine the transition from "side project" to "I might as well be working for a MegaCorp with all of this HR-esque CoC nonsense" would be most unpleasant. How many project founders bow out at that point?
Yeah, that transition from a hobby project to a big payout/nice salary/more usage/more resources must really sting. (Obviously it's a big change but I don't think most would consider it a net negative.)
> big payout/nice salary/more usage/more resources
if you get the actual payout and your project doesn't just get AWS-ified. :)
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love this argument, just because it completely flips reality on its head. The intolerance that is being discussed is that of the Progressive US Left, who cannot tolerate any dissention from the current state of "politically correct" (here I use it's original definition). What you are describing is the reaction to it. It's a masterstroke of political reasoning, when you find a way to define your own shortfalls as st…
You're talking like the leader of the right in the USA was tolerant of any different viewpoint than his own viewpoint around him. He's publicly rejected and shit on people very publicly that were his allies/staff for years the moment they have a dissenting opinion. Come on, not a left or right thing.
You're talking like the current president of the USA came out of nowhere, and was not at all a public expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo.
The president doesn't need to accept dissent from his staff. Just hypothetically, if Obama's health secretary said that being transgender was largely a mental illness, or his head of domestic policy said that we need to close the southern border, does he need to tolerate that? Just to be very clear - those are completely hypothetical - I am not sure what actual "dissent" caused Trump to fire his various staff members, but it is unrelated.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you need a Code of Conduct to prevent people acting like jerks? If someone acts like a jerk tell them to stop, and if they don't, take action. IMO you don't need it enshrined in a dodgy pseudo-contract. That's a recipe for more problems than it solves.
To pencil out even further what my sibling comment mentioned; you want to be able to say "you repeatedly did x and this is explicitly against our Code of Conduct that you said you'd read before your first contribution" instead of "you're being a jerk and as such we will be refusing any contributions from you going forward". The second example is completely arbitrary, and is up to the whims of the core team - whomever…
The effect is the same though?
It’s not as if a code of conduct ever contains anything that sane people don’t already know.
And like some other commenter said, it basically boils down to “don’t be an asshole”.