Re: Update CoC adapted from upstream 2.1 (instead of 1.4)

[Liliana Marie Prikler]

Hi simon,

I know I'm late to the party, but given how vocal I was in that other
CoC thread and the positive feedback I received from other contributors
for speaking out, I do think I have a valuable opinion here.

Am Freitag, dem 25.02.2022 um 01:05 +0100 schrieb zimoun:
> Hi,
> 
> The current Guix CoC is adapted from v1.4 [1] and this upstream version
> contains:
> 
>         regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, sex
>         characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of
>         experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality,
>         personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and
>         orientation.
> 
> [...]
> Any opposition to use this upstream v1.4 list instead of the current
> one?  Other said, add ’sex characteristics’ to the list.
> 
> So, since we are at it, let give a look at the most recent version v2.1
> [3]. :-) I propose to adopt their extended list:
> 
>         regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible
>         disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity 
>         and expression, level of experience, education,
>         socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance,
>         race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and
>         orientation.
> 
> Any opposition?
Putting the contentious topic of sex characteristics away for a second
(I'll return to it later, promise), this list clarifies disability by
categorizing it into both visible and invisible and also adds caste and
color.  Now to a privileged person who has not been discriminated on
any of the grounds listed among these, caste might sound vaguely
similar to socio-economic status, and within the US and Europe we talk
a lot of how race is defined along the lines of skin color.  Hunting
down Github, there seems to be some evidence, that these were added in
a "cosmetic adjustments"-style commit [5], but as that caused a bunch
of issues, version 2.1 was released explicitly to add these two. 
Before that, visible and invisible disability was expanded in 2.0 with
the goal of being more inclusive.  I do think that these cover more
ground than previously and should definitely be added if we want to
version-bump.

On the topic of sex characteristics, while the term is somewhat badly
chosen thanks biology being super-not-political, I do think the
addition would be significantly less problematic than simply adding
"sex".  It is nowadays understood that these characteristics don't
define "sex", whatever that might be, and only the name has remained
because naming is hard.  As a nice side-effect, adding it would give us
two reasons to ban Taylan; first for discriminating against trans
people based on their sex characteristics and second based on their
gender identity or expression.

> The version 2.1 also adds «Enforcement guidelines».  I propose to
> keep the current «Further details of specific enforcement policies
> may be posted separately.»  While the guidelines might be a good
> thing.  I do not have an opinion.  WDYT?
I agree that the guidelines themselves don't sound bad, but given the
maintainer to audience ratio, I understand that Guix would want to go
its own way in this regard.  As far as public apologies are concerned,
however, I don't think these elicit a proper amount of self-criticism
in most cases – we all know the kind of actors who will publicly
apologize only to continue with (pardon my French) shitty behaviour,
rinse and repeat.

Apart from the mentioned changes, we do already have some of the
changes related to the CoC's presentation, e.g. leading with the
positive environment rather than the behaviour we do not want.  I think
we do share some values with most others who adopt a CoC, so in my
personal opinion, it'd be beneficial to adopt as many things from
upstream as we reasonably can.

Cheers

> 1: <
> https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of-conduct/>
> 2:
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-05/msg00146.html>
> 3:
> <https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/1/code_of_conduct/>
> 4: <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/54077>
5:
https://github.com/EthicalSource/contributor_covenant/commit/4d97cd07359047a69da042f2549dbcbaef2a015f

PS: I know this has been withdrawn, but I'd propose to reconsider given
that most of the derailment appears to be caused (directly in this
thread or indirectly) by a certain someone who has opened another
thread requesting a CoC change.