3 Feb
2025
3 Feb
'25
12:46 p.m.
Hi everyone,
The CoC that we have now has been publicly created in the community, and
has gone through our approval process. I'm (very) open to accept that it's
not perfect, and I'm not against applying changes at all, but abandoning it
in favor of a different one is drastic, and, from what I'm reading here,
would have little chance to result in something for which there will be
more consensus than for what we have already in place.
Although Jonas did suggest the CoC would be a topic for discussion in the
Summit, it was not offered up by anyone as an agenda item during the event
itself in a room full of members. I did discuss it with a couple of
individuals over the weekend, and possibly others have done the same, but
nothing of consequence from that was brought up in a more public setting
(like this mailinglist, or as part of a larger group discussion). To me,
these are indications that there is little motivation to dramatically
change things.
Can we, pragmatically, adjust the CoC with changes to address Jonas'
concern about having explicit lists directly usable by moderators to base
their actions on, with an explicit side-note (clearly stated in the CoC)
that these lists are not ment to be exhaustive (and possibly even document
the motivation of having documented lists that may be considered 'partial'
in the first place, based on the motivation that Jonas provided)?
I fully expect the above to not be considered a good solution by many
people from every side involved in the discussion. Perhaps that makes it
one of the better compromises that is achievable today.
Kind regards,
Guus
On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 5:26 PM Jonas Schäfer <jonas(a)wielicki.name> wrote:
Hi Dave,
First of all, if any of this has been discussed further at summit, I would
love a summary to be posted to the mailing list. For now, I am replying as
if
no such thing has happened. Please forgive my ignorance if I'm missing any
progress that was made there.
Replies inline.
On Mittwoch, 29. Januar 2025 09:45:48 MEZ Dave Cridland wrote:
So I think there's a chicken-egg problem here. A Conduct Team needs
volunteers, and volunteers need to want to do the job. The reason I
initially
raised this thread was because I felt that the CoC wasn't suitable to use
in
operators@, for instance. We then resorted to making room access more
privileged (by requiring XEP-0157-based vouching), which has its
downsides,
but made moderation load bearable.
What I am trying to say is: I'm certain that if we have a CoC which is
good
(enforcable, actionable, acceptable), we might find volunteers for a
proper
Conduct Team, at least for remote "work".
in
-
I'm going to use this as a hookpoint to reply to this and the explicit
LGBT
mention that was made in the other thread.
Speaking as a moderator, having a very explicit, even though never
exhaustive,
list of -isms to enforce against helps a friggin lot.
Every moderator action is a burden. You will face backtalk from the people
you
enforce against, and potentially even from people who haven't even been
directly involved in an incident. Every bit of room for interpretation
which
is removed from the CoC helps us moderators to take action and keep the
rooms
nice.
I suggest we take one good CoC (contributor covenant, JoinJabber, or GNOME
or
whatever) and ratify it. The procedures laid out by the GNOME folks also
make
sense to me, maybe we should adopt these, too.
The CoC won't be a static document. It will have to evolve to adapt to
real
world situations. But I would very much like us to start with something
which
already has a lot of evolution behind it instead of going through
(presumably)
the same issues and mistakes other organizations already had to face.
I think the pitfall is severely reduced by the "safety over comfort" part
of
it. If it involves more than comfort being impacted, or if it's not
anyomre
about safety, then the behavior is not exempted.
All over all... Yes, there are pitfalls and things which don't seem
intuitive.
Yet, other organizations have adopted CoCs in the past with these and it
seems
to have mostly worked. Perfection is never going to be achieved.
kind regards,
Jonas
On Wed, 29 Jan 2025 at 05:11, MSavoritias
<email(a)msavoritias.me> wrote:
> Dave Cridland kirjoitti 28.1.2025 klo 23.23:
>
> On Tue, 28 Jan 2025 at 21:06, Arc Riley <arcriley(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 26, 2024 at 4:01 AM JC Brand <lists(a)opkode.com> wrote:
>>> FWIW, I don't think coming up with ever more fine-grained
categorization
>>> of what constitutes marginalized
persons and putting that in the CoC
is
>>> the
>>> right way to go.
>>>
>>> One can always come up with more categories of marginalized people,
and
>>> trying to enumerate all of them in a
CoC is IMO impractical, while
>>> mentioning only some of them can create the impression that some
>>> categories
>>> of people are "more equal" than others.
>>
>> It isn't always about practical enforcement, it is a statement of
values.
>>
>> As a member who belongs to at least three of the typically listed
groups,
>> including LGBT, and I have been
assaulted for this, I rarely read the
>> lists
>> but it makes me feel safer in new groups.
>
> Thanks for writing this, it really does help.
>
> I have to admit, I deliberately avoided using the term "LGBT" anywhere,
> for fear of ending up ina debate of what other letters were missing.
>
> But what do you think is missing from:
>
> You are welcome at XSF Activities. Ensure that you are also welcoming
of
> others. We want everyone to feel welcome no
matter what the colour of
> their
> skin, where they live, or where their ancestors came from. We want to
> welcome people from all cultures, and religions, and of all sizes and
> shapes. We want people to be welcome no matter their sexual identity or
> orientation. We want you to feel welcome no matter your level of
> experience
> or ability. And we want you to help us make everyone else feel
welcomed,
> too.
>
>
> As you mentioned elsewhere we are missing the Conduct team to be taken
> seriously (a Conduct team that has demonstrated it will protect people
and
that the
community trusts to uphold said values). That aside:
To my mind, that's the key here. XEP-0458 can trivially be updated to
include additional examples of both good and bad conduct, but if it's not
being enforced even to the extent of having a Conduct Team in place, let
alone an active one, then the entire thing is moot (that is, a discussion
point rather than an action point). Some
points that are missing are listed in the code of conduct in the
contributor covenant that jonas' posted.
https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/1/code_of_conduct/
for example age or caste.
Can you give me some text that covers those, in a similar style?
another good example is https://lgbtq.technology/coc.html
some points that are not mentioned in the current CoC are:
- pronouns
What exactly would you say here?
- harassment.
Harassment is right there in the list in 2.5.
> - No debating the rights and lived experiences of marginalized people the
community.
I'm not entirely sure what this means. That could easily be my ignorance for the most part, I am not marginalized. But
assuming it means what I
think it means, it doesn't sound respectful, friendly, or supportive, and
certainly not welcoming.
I suppose MSavoritias can explain that better than me. What I think it
means
is that if a marginalized person (such as Arc or JC Brand in the other
part of
the thread) recounts their lived experiences, you take that at face value
and
do not debate the actuality or relevance of it.
-
Deliberate misgendering or use of “dead” or rejected names
I would hope this is overly specific - that is, it can't possibly be seen
as respectful or friendly or supportive. And for what it's worth, we've had
multiple members change their names
As I am one of these, I'd like to make it clear that I do not want to
compare
the feelings I get when someone uses my "maiden" name vs. the feelings a
trans
person has when someone uses their dead name.
(I'm spelling this out explicitly, because I am not aware of a name change
beyond my own which happened due to marriage.)
> as some examples. a more complete also CoC
can be found in the
JoinJabber
Project
https://joinjabber.org/about/community/codeofconduct/
there is also a list at the bottom of the JoinJabber CoC that links to
other CoCs that informed it.
Also gnome has a code of conduct here https://conduct.gnome.org/
that says among others
The GNOME community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over
privileged people’s comfort, for example in situations involving:
- “Reverse”-isms, including “reverse racism,” “reverse sexism,” and
“cisphobia”
- Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,”
“go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
- Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive
behavior or assumptions
- Communicating boundaries or criticizing oppressive behavior in a
“tone” you don’t find congenial
Here be tygers - there's a risk, here, that the kinds of criticism that
certain people raised in the first round of this turns into a valid one -
that is, that bad behaviour can be justified if it's done "for a good
reason".
That kind of pitfall was what prompted me to write section 2.2, actually.