Re: Promoting the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines?

[Tonton]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2018 17:37:32 -0500
Alex Griffin <address@hidden> wrote:

> > An interesting element here is that many of the
> > harrassers don't seem to understand that they are harrassing.  
> 
> I'm so glad you brought this up, because it seems equally plausible to me
> that the other party could be reacting  overly sensitively.
> 
> This is precisely why it is a bad idea to set up an authority for people to
> appeal to. In many cases it's not clear which party is the unreasonable
> one, and it must be worked through with dialogue.
> 
> If people don't have to work things out among themselves, and disputes are
> instead handled by a committee of project maintainers, contributors lose
> the opportunity to better understand each other. Oh, and that committee of
> maintainers have all agreed according to the Contributor Covenant that they
> have a responsibility to punish abusers, so they might find it difficult to
> avoid being biased towards punishing the accused.

It seems to me you are making punishment way bigger than it actually is.
Great big lumps of shit has to hit someones fan before punishment is talked
about. The harshest I've seen here has been once when a core maintainer asked
a community member to take a break and rethink; in this case the person
being asked to take a break was claiming to be a victim (the whole thing
seemed to me a lot of grey scale and misunderstandings). Most of what I see
and participate in are friendly, inclusive dialogues - including the ones
where we work through grievances and misunderstandings.

Now, for issues that are of a difficult character it makes sense to not have
an open dialogue with all parties involved. There are many reasons for this
and I encourage everyone interested to read up on trauma, anxiety, depression
and other similar psycho-social issues, especially from the point of view of
those affected. The process should not be a one sided - the decision makers
should talk, and in these cases all parties should be reached out to for an
explanation. But I don't know if this is the current Guix process.

> 
> Software projects should focus on software. They are not equipped to
> administer justice.
> 

I think software projects should focus on building software, and to do that
you need someone to build it. Programming is an incredibly social activity -
even for me, here I sit alone and mostly work on stuff that only I will ever
see or use. So we focus on building an inclusive awesome community, because
that is one of the best ways to get awesome software. To build a community we
need to build a culture. To build a culture you need to have some way of
creating glue - cohesiveness. Either you auto-disassociate anyone not "tough
enough" or you use something like a CoC and someone enforcing it (or you find
other ways of reaching these goals; but AFAIK the two above are the main ones
used in FLOSS today).

Remember the CoC is only true for some communities/cultures, it does not
influence your legal entity outside of your interactions with the community
(unless the issues are severe enough to have broken an actual law where one
of the parties are).