I just want to reiterate what I've said a few times before. I'm leaving the
points about why I think a Code of Conduct, in general, is a bad idea until
the end, in hopes that others will at least read my other points. I don't
think there is anything "new" in what I'm saying below either - I'm pretty
sure it's all been proposed or said at one time or another by at least one
other person.
1.) I think everyone already knows how to be an adult. The fact that
sometimes we don't act in a civil manner isn't because we don't have
something telling us what civil behavior entails. Putting it in writing
might make us feel good, but it isn't going to change how anyone behaves.
Putting it in writing is necessary only if you intended to have a way to
enforce it - which requires some form of punitive measures for those that
don't, as well as a way to determine if someone violated them.
2.) Instead of focusing on what is and is not proper behavior, and how to
punish someone that doesn't follow the rules, we should focus on how we can
help out one or more individual that feels they were harmed in some way by
one or more other individual. The only initial restriction on whether we
help them out is if they are both involved in the PHP community. This means
we don't have to define what is and isn't considered "harm" nor do we have
to define where such actions must take place. This is what many of us are
talking about in reference to conflict mediation. The best thing about this
approach is it's the COMMUNITY supporting the rest of the COMMUNITY. If I
feel Paul Jones' political views are causing me emotional harm, then I can
reach out to the mediation team to help us resolve that. That's it. Doesn't
matter where he was espousing his views, and it doesn't matter that they
had nothing to do with PHP. It also doesn't require that anyone besides the
conflict mediation team, Paul, and myself be involved. The team will
obviously be able to suggest that a particular conflict might be better
handled via other means as well.
3.) Finally, I think a Code of Conduct that includes punitive measures is a
bad idea. I won't go into details on why, as we've gone over them in
detail, but I'll sum it up as follows: a Code of Conduct that gives a small
group of people the ability to punish others is open to abuse. I'm not
saying that anyone proposing such a code of conduct has evil intentions, or
even that anyone on this list would purposely act in an evil way if a
member of the committee. In fact, the reason I feel such Codes of Conduct
is dangerous is that someone acting in what they feel IS a noble way can
easily do the opposite.
On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 11:56 AM Derick Rethans <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Jan 2016, Florian Anderiasch wrote:
>
> > On 22.01.2016 15:29, Pierre Joye wrote:
> > >
> > > Freshly adopted:
> > >
> > > http://rubyonrails.org/conduct/
> > > https://golang.org/conduct
> > >
> >
> > Ruby (the language) is discussing the adoption of a Code of Conduct
> > right now, and several people in that thread issue what I think are
> > similar concerns about the wording in the covenant one:
> >
> > https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004
> >
> > AFAICT Rails adopted exactly that one, not sure about slight changes.
> >
> > FWIW, I like the Go one a lot better.
>
> I do too. I think there is a lot we can borrow from that. I'll probably
> use the weekend to draft the first bit of my suggested process: THe
> values document. Expect things from other "codes" to come back into it.
>
> cheers,
> Derick
>
> --
> PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>
> --
-- Chase
[email protected]