[ruby-core:73013] Re: [Ruby trunk - Misc #12004] Code of Conduct

[Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com>]

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On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 11:45 AM, <fred_h@bootstrap.me.uk> wrote:

> Issue #12004 has been updated by Fred Heath.
>
> I sincerely hope the community consider the following before deciding:
>
> 1. Is there any evidence to suggest that we (or any other software
> community) need a CoC ?
>

Yes. The very use of “SJWs” (as an insult) by some people on this thread
makes it very clear that there are people in the Ruby community who Don’t
Get It. (Others have asked for examples in the mailing lists that people
aren’t participating in the community because we don’t have some sort of
CoC. If people stay away because of bad examples by others…there is an
absence of evidence of their absence, but they are absent nonetheless.) (To
be very clear: the moment you use the term SJW as a negative term for
people who are insisting on fair, civil, and equal treatment, you have
aligned yourself with the worst harassers and doxxers of Gamer Gate and
4chan.)


> 2. Do we need a CoC created by people who have a track record of harassing
> and trying to exclude people who have different opinions? (examples at
> http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/6214)
>

I would argue that this referenced blog post is the best example that the
PHP community needs a CoC. No, Coraline’s approach was not the best
approach (and is problematic for the same reasons I find morality clauses
problematic in teacher contracts, for example), but the question raised
*is* in fact a good one. (To pull the question to the side a bit, there are
people who feel that Brendan Eich was treated unfairly as the CEO of
Mozilla because of his views on marriage equality. He *was* supposedly
representing a very diverse organization that already had positions in
favour of marriage equality. Therefore, it was completely legitimate to ask
whether he should be in charge of such an organization given that he had
opposing views to the stated organization views.)


> 3. In most projects where this CoC has been introduced, it has caused
> division, hate, fear and exclusivity, PHP being the latest example. Far
> from "a healthy debate".
>

Not to put too fine a point on it, but in general the people who are
against CoCs are those who are assumed to be “in the club” by default and
do not have to worry about being offended by sexist, racist, or other -ist
jokes “made in fun”. This is certainly true of Mr Jones, and why his blog
post about the PHP controversy is a good example for why PHP needs a proper
CoC. (And folks, think twice before citing ESR. He’s the open source Donald
Trump, the living Internet comments section.)

4. How many people will be marginalised and excluded by the introduction of
> this CoC vs how many people are marginalised and excluded by it's
> ommittance. In other words, has anyone ever said "I feel fearful /
> uncomfortable contributing to Ruby because it doesn't have a CoC" ?
>
> I love Ruby and I find its community to be a very warm, safe and welcoming
> one. Please help keep it that way by keeping authoritarian, self-promoting,
> sinister social engineering out of it. Thank you.
>

With your last question, you are asking to prove something which is often
more evident by its absence, but is not generally noticed by people who are
not marginalized by the nature of their gender and/or skin colour. Someone
who is marginalized won’t necessarily tell you that they won’t contribute,
they will just simply *not contribute* and *move on*—and we are the poorer
for their absence.

With respect to your comment “…find its community to be a very warm, safe,
and welcoming one.” This has not always been the case. For certain subsets
of the Ruby community, it has only gotten better *because* of the adoption
of CoCs by conferences and projects. The first RubyConf I went to in 2004
had no women in attendance. There were more in 2005 and more in 2006. The
number of women attending Ruby Conferences rose, but in 2009 there were six
women at a conference when a speaker chose to use inadvisable images and
language in a talk. Only in the aftermath of that (which was, IMO, deeply
embarrassing to the Ruby community inasmuch as there was a lot of defence
of this speaker’s talk) did Ruby conferences get serious about adopting
strong codes of conduct and enforcing them did the number of female
attendees substantially increase at Ruby conferences.

With respect to the Contributor Covenant suggested by Coraline, I do not
think that this is the best choice for Ruby, but think that something like
the TODO Open Code of Conduct (http://todogroup.org/opencodeofconduct/)
would be better. There are organizations behind the development of Ruby,
and a very clear *community*. I use the Contributor Covenant on the repos
that I manage, but that is because *I* am managing them.

Yes, Ruby needs some sort of Code of Conduct—not because we, the users and
contributors of Ruby, are necessarily misbehaving. No, it needs it because
we want to signal to people that have been traditionally marginalized that
we, the users and contributors of Ruby, do not believe this to be a good
thing and will work to prevent it. We will make errors. We will not always
succeed. But we *should* make an effort to make Ruby *actively* welcoming
to the people who have traditionally been marginalized.

(And, because I know this will show up much later than Shyouhei Urabe’s
comment: if Matz started acting Not Nice, would it not possibly be time to
move Ruby beyond him? I know that none of us who have met him can really
imagine this from Matz.)

-a
-- 
Austin Ziegler • halostatue@gmail.com • austin@halostatue.ca
http://www.halostatue.ca/ • http://twitter.com/halostatue

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