I’ve been trying to express myself in a particular way in order to get my points across and try to explain my perspective, my motivation and my experiences somehow, albeit unsuccessfully. It’s really hard to speak for myself and present a perspective that most are unfamiliar with, so please bear with me on this one and excuse the long read (approx. 10 minutes).
No, my point was precisely the opposite: if Haiku was taken over by “war criminals,” a CoC would not stop them from wreaking havoc.
Oops, syntax error. What I wanted to say was that CoCs aren’t just meant to prevent bad people from taking over the project.
If renaming the document (without changing its contents) would not change anything, is there any reason to rename it?
You know, there’s much more to it than that, but when people are even afraid of the goddanged word in the first place, how can I even get across to the second argument? Their only more common characteristic, that I’d get to later, is that they are not vague. Nobody’s answering on how people suddenly will gain the ability to go full Mad Max and take over the project, but just really keep on pressing on that.
If we are all okay with the current policy document, and this change would bring a name change to the document (which we could completely ignore altogether, “why follow everyone else” down to the letters?) that nobody has a problem with (which is what I assumed because of immediate negative response that completely ignores the current existence of a document that I’m just saying should be updated), then I think that it’s safe for me to assume that everyone’s writing around the sentence “I have a problem with specific infractions being named”. Your argumentation is valid and I’d love to talk about it further, but when you have people just raising from their graves and dropping by just to avoid contributing anything meaningful. I honestly regret even opening a thread here, because this could have been much more productive if it took place in a mailing list or an IRC.
Again, we have already stated multiple times on this thread: people have done things like this before and we have banned them, so yes, we have been and already police discourse in this manner.
Yeah, I noticed, got a bit up to speed, and am, in all seriousness, very glad to know that there’s a track record that allows me and others to show trust (which was my original concern, see: “Will I be protected?”).
However, my lack of depth as far as the history is concerned could also show to highlight my point. I don’t automatically assume that every person who does something bad necessarily had bad intentions and that nothing can be resolved through speech, or that we should act in a punitive, authoritative manner. A person could innocuously make those jokes, they could cross the boundaries and they could raise hell out of something that they see as nothing. That could seriously happen, we all had different upbringings and come from vastly different cultural, economic and sociopolitical backgrounds! The things that you’d say to your partner, to your mother, your extended family and your colleagues don’t align!
It is stated that Haiku is a welcoming community, a fact that goes on to be proven by the simple fact that the mailing list assists each person who screams “I want to help!” and gives them direction on an individual level. But what is our level of relationship here? Are we all just serious-looking professionals, or would we all go out on a beer together?
… This is not a matter of “Are you racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic” etc., because there’s also other, significantly less extreme behavior that can turn out to cross boundaries when somebody has the wrong picture about what’s going on here. I’d think that those things come together with the phrase “Be friendly” and that should be clearly established for the reasons that I’ll get into later on.
Now, I’m not trying to initiate existential crises or say that we should all take a deep breath and do some introspection. It was a bit hard for me to understand variables like the ones I just mentioned. Why do we have to let people in on policies (e.g. “How does someone become a core developer?” and the level we communicate on.), rather than documenting them and just not treat them as open secrets?
Now, the reason that I brought up a “Code of Conduct” and its necessity is that this is how projects tend to (additionally) deal with the stuff that I just brought up. I don’t advocate for censorship. On the contrary, I’m very passionate about what I’ve seen being described as “the Haiku way” (or philosophy), in the sense of this being a fully meritocratic environment that’s governed by communication, where people are judged based on their skills and abilities. This project has taught me important skills and given me opportunities, and, having thought this through a bit more, I think that we are all on the same side in the sense that we are looking to specifically preserve it (see: “Don’t fix what’s not broken”).
I just strongly suggest that the way we operate and communicate should be documented and advertised. This place is like no other. “Open source” tends to be monocultural, male, and StackOverflow’s (which is one of the largest developer communities out there) own survey proved that the biggest problem on there was and the current circumstances don’t give you the opportunity to stay on the sidelines and not advocate for yourself all the time. It’s a hostile environment, generally speaking, and people really just don’t tend to get it.
But as I tried to (rather poorly) explain earlier, how can I just point to friends that fall under the categories of ‘queer’, ‘immigrant’, ‘Black’, etc. (some of which have been put off from open-source development completely) that “Hey! There’s this place that’s just right for you right here, and it isn’t a mirage!”. How can I tell them that they’re going to be safe? Seeing it in writing matters. I’m not talking about isolated incidents. I have tried to get people involved before. I can’t just appeal to 2 cases that are essentially taboos without anything else.
I don’t really care about names, wording stuff the right way so that people don’t immediately react negatively in a baseless manner (which is what I was afraid of in the beginning) and other stuff like that. I just wanted to talk about this in a vocabulary that’s familiar to everyone and that worked in a counterproductive manner-- after all, this idea of mine originally arose from the conversations regarding the documentation. I think that if we changed literally nothing apart from the fact that we aren’t actively capitalizing on our relatively positive, productive and healthy climate, the project would definitely benefit from it.
If people believe that doing what others did would not necessarily make things better in this case (rightfully or not), then we really need to figure this out as part of our community outreach, marketing and documentation efforts.
