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Hi everyone, A while ago, SciPy (the library) adopted its Code of Conduct: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/dev/conduct/code_of_conduct.html We worked hard to make that document friendly, while at the same time stating clearly the kinds of behavior that would and would not be tolerated. I propose that we adopt the SciPy code of conduct for NumPy as well. It is a good way to signal to newcomers that this is a community that cares about how people are treated. And I think we should do anything in our power to make NumPy as attractive as possible! If we adopt this document as policy, we will need to select a Code of Conduct committee, to whom potential transgressions can be reported. The individuals doing this for SciPy may very well be happy to do the same for NumPy, but the community should decide whom will best serve those roles. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks! Stéfan
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On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 10:02 PM, Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
+1 Maybe a bit of context: the SciPy code of conduct had quite a lot of discussion, and importantly in the end everyone involved in the discussion was happy with (or at least not displeased by) the final document. Hence I see it as a good document to adopt also by other projects. And here's what I wrote as the intro for that CoC discussion: As you probably know, Code of Conduct (CoC) documents are becoming more common every year for open source projects, and there are a number of good reasons to adopt a CoC: 1. It gives us the opportunity to explicitly express the values and behaviors we'd like to see in our community. 2. It is designed to make everyone feel welcome (and while I think we're a welcoming community anyway, not having a CoC may look explicitly unwelcoming to some potential contributors nowadays). 3. It gives us a tool to address a set of problems if and when they occur, as well as a way for anyone to report issues or behavior that is unacceptable to them (much better than having those people potentially leave the community). 4. SciPy is not yet a fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS, however I think we'd like to be in the near future. NumFOCUS has started to require having a CoC as a prerequisite for new projects joining it. The PSF has the same requirement for any sponsorship for events/projects that it gives. Note on (4): NumPy is a sponsored project of NumFOCUS, and I've been asked several times how it can be that NumPy is sponsored but does not have a CoC. Cheers, Ralf
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My ideal version would be substantially shorter, maybe just quote the golden rule, but I am happy with the suggestion to just adapt this text. I particularly appreciate the lack of absolutism in the text, and the acknowledgement that it is possible to have a bad day even while not distracting from the overall message. -- Marten On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 6:30 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
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On July 27, 2018 17:04:23 Marten van Kerkwijk <m.h.vankerkwijk@gmail.com> wrote:
My ideal version would be substantially shorter, maybe just quote the golden rule, but I am happy with the suggestion to just adapt this text.
Agreed! There's some basic ground that needs to be covered, though, and the result of exploring that fully is, practically, what you see here. I'm not opposed to modifying the document in principle, although I reckon it would be somewhat easier, from both a maintenance and adoption perspective, to use the same. Best regards, Stéfan
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I realize this was probably brought up in the discussions about the scipy code of conduct which I have not looked at, but I’m troubled by the inclusion of “political beliefs” in the document. See e.g. https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/5 As a thought experiment, what if someone’s political beliefs imply that other contributors are not deserving of human rights? Increasingly ideas like this are coming into the mainstream worldwide and I think this is a real concern that should be considered. On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 8:25 PM Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 12:20 AM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343@gmail.com> wrote:
It was not brought up explicitly as far as I remember.
That's about moving names around. I don't see any mention of political beliefs?
There is a difference between having beliefs, and expressing those beliefs in ways that offends others. I don't see any problem with saying that we welcome anyone, irrespective of political belief. However, if someone starts expressing things that are intolerant (like someone else not deserving human rights) on any of our communication forums or in an in-person meeting, that would be a clear violation of the CoC. Which can be dealt with via the reporting and enforcement mechanism in the CoC. I don't see a problem here, but I would see a real problem with removing the "political beliefs" phrase. Cheers, Ralf
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry about that, I elided the 6. This is the correct link: https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/56
For another perspective on this issue see https://where.coraline.codes/blog/oscon/, where Coraline Ada describes her reasons for not speaking at OSCON this year due to a similar clause in the code of conduct. Cheers,
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Hi, On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 4:12 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree with Ralf. From your link: """ But the inclusion of this language, making political affiliation a protected class, leads me to believe that alt-right technologists would be as welcome at the conference as I would be. Including alt-right technologists who display on their clothing, for example, neo-Nazi insignia. Or t-shirts printed with anti-trans or anti-Black slogans. These could easily be interpreted as protected political speech. """ That's the point. If you wear a t-shirt with anti-trans or anti-Black slogans to a Scipy event covered by the code of conduct, that would qualify as 'expressing things that are intolerant', as Ralf put it. Cheers, Matthew
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:12 AM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks, that's useful context for your question. I'm personally not too attached to "political belief", but I think the discussion in that PR and in the OSCON context is very US-centric and reflective of the polarized atmosphere there. If everyone is fine with removing political beliefs then I'm fine with that, but I don't think that the argument itself (from a non-US perspective) has much merit.
There's a lot of very unrealistic examples in that post. Plus retracting a week in advance of a conference is, to put it mildly, questionable. So not sure what to think of the rest of that post. There may be good points in there, but they're obscured by the obvious flaws in thinking and choice of examples. Cheers, Ralf
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I agree with Ralf. That thread is more towards a US based separation. Actually we briefly touched upon these on the SciPy side but indeed there was no real discussion. Political beliefs (especially communism in US for a practical example) can offend some people and that's OK because being offended by itself doesn't have a merit. There will always be someone getting offended by anything. But racism, sexism etc. are not "political" stances and deserve to be united against regardless whether someone is offended or not. Actually calling these discriminating doctrines as "political beliefs" is making me quite nervous instead. On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 5:37 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
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This. Even from a US perspective, we really need to not let political division into even more apparently non-political things. As far as I can tell, the current language seems to be there to specifically avoid that. It isn't there to allow discrimination if someone tries to claim they're making a political statement. Best, Ian On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 10:58 AM Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:37 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
Probably a plurality of contributors are from the US though, so we can't exactly hand-wave away how it reads in the US...
I think there's two separate issues here: (a) whether things people express outside our forums should be considered relevant within our forums, (b) what we're communicating by calling out "political belief" as a thing that we won't exclude people over. This isn't happening in a vacuum either... if you search for "lambdaconf" you can see a ton of discussion about a programming conference that decided to invite a guy who's a high-profile leader in the pro-feudalism / pro-white-supremacism community (I can't believe I'm typing that), and then conference justified it by saying things like "we're supporting diversity of beliefs" and "this talk is purely about his technical work, let's keep politics out of it". As it turns out, the technical work in question is actually super tied to his political activism -- like in the original version of the system, his crypto key was the "king" that gave him ultimate authority, which he could delegate to "dukes", etc. (IIRC -- I'm not looking up the details, but it was something about that blatant.) Also all kinds of cult-y stuff about how contributors were special chosen ones, them against the world -- it was super creepy. But then he got VC funding, because of course he did, and went through and renamed things as a figleaf, so they could claim it was "purely technical". FWIW, my personal opinion is that I'm categorically uninterested in working with anyone like that. I don't care if they only say the ghastly things in non-numpy channels or claim that it's "merely a political disagreement", I'm still not interested.
Ralf, I love you, but this paragraph sounds like a parody from "How to suppress women's writing" or something. Coraline Ada is a prominent expert on code-of-conduct issues, and also a trans woman, so she gets death threats and other harassment constantly and "will the conference organizers protect me if someone comes after me?" is a real question she has to ask. She wrote a blog post about how O'Reilly's handling of this (not just the language, but the totality of circumstances -- the way it was added, the response to her queries, etc.) made her feel that attending would be unsafe for her, so she didn't attend. (And about how distressed she was to realize this just a week before the conference.) It seems like you're taking her post as some logical argument about CoCs in the abstract, with the withdrawal as some kind of brinksmanship, and judging it by those standards? FWIW, the Sage Sharp who's quoted at the beginning of Ada's post and initially raised the issue, is also well-known expert on CoC issues, e.g. PyCon hired them to help revamp their policies and respond to incidents this year [1]. When experts say that something is a bad idea, and when the people who a CoC is supposed to protect says it makes them feel unsafe, I feel like we should listen to that. I also thought that the points made in the Jupyter discussion thread made a lot of sense: of course it's possible for people to start harassing each other over any excuse, and a CoC can, should, and does make clear that that's not OK. But if you specifically *call out* political affiliation as a protected class, at a time when lots of the people who the CoC is trying to protect are facing governmental harassment justified as "mere political disagreement", then it really sends the wrong message. Besides, uh... isn't the whole definition of politics that it's topics where there is active debate? Not really sure why it's even in that list to start with. -n [1] https://pycon.blogspot.com/2018/04/code-of-conduct-updates-for-pycon-2018.ht... -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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So I hear all the arguments about people feeling unsafe due to some truly despicable, discriminatory behavior, and I want absolutely no parts of protecting that. However, I also recognize that we in the U.S. are in a particularly divisive atmosphere, and people of varied political persuasions want absolutely nothing to do with those who share differing views. So, as a concrete example, if someone were to show up at a NumPy developer summit with a MAGA ("Make America Great Again") hat, or talks about their support for the president in non-numpy channels, WITHOUT expressing anything discriminatory or support for such views, if "political beliefs" is not in the CoC, is this person welcome? I'm not worried about my own views, but I have friends of widely varying views, and I truly wonder if they would be welcome. With differing "political beliefs" listed as something welcomed, I feel ok for them; if this language is removed, I'm much less certain. IMO, "political beliefs" encompasses so much more things than a handful of very specific, hateful views. People can disagree about a wide array of "political beliefs" and it is important that we as a community welcome a wide array of such views. If the CoC needs to protect against the wide array of discriminatory views and behavior that make up U.S. politics right now, how about specifically calling those behaviors out as not-welcome, rather than completely ignoring the fact that 99% of "political beliefs" are perfectly welcome within the community? The CoC is about spelling out the community norms--how about just spelling out that we welcome everyone, but, in the words of Will Wheaton, "Don't be a dick"? Ryan -- Ryan May
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:34 PM, Ryan May <rmay31@gmail.com> wrote:
This is a difficult scenario. I do know lots of people who are uncomfortable with MAGA hats, and it's not because of they disagree about the details of some farm bill or whatever, it's because it's increasingly impossible to use that slogan without also expressing support for racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. -- i.e., all the other things that the CoC lists as unacceptable. So I feel like... to the extent that some political position *isn't* tied up with those things, I can't see why people would have a problem with it, or why the CoC would need to bother mentioning it. (There are all kinds of things we don't mention – "we welcome people with odd *and* even telephone numbers!") And to the extent that some political position *is* tied up with those things... it would be pretty contradictory to list it as a protected class alongside race, sex, etc. I'm not going to go track people down on facebook and try to guess how they voted or something, but if someone wore a MAGA hat to a numpy sprint then I'd be totally fine with asking them to take it off in consideration of the other participants. -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 21:26:35 -0700 Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
What if someone is wearing a religious symbol? If one is concerned about horrible beliefs or opinions, there are a good deal of them in many religious ("holy") books (*), yet CoCs are generally meant to prohibit discrimination based on religious beliefs... So the argument that CoCs should not protect political beliefs is starting to become flimsy (horrible beliefs are ok if they are part of a religious system, not otherwise?). And it's not just theoretical, because people are physically repressed, in various parts of the world, in the name of religious beliefs. Regards Antoine.
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On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
Yeah, it's difficult. But to address specifically the question of "what's the difference between listing religion and listing political affiliation": Say you're considering whether to participate in a project. Maybe you're marginalized on some axis, or have been harassed before, and before joining in you want to know how the community will respond if something happens. Of course it's impossible to know, but maybe reading the CoC can help you make some imperfect guess. Now if you see "religion" there, then what does that tell you? Maybe it means that these people are really excited about protecting oppressive religions. Or... maybe it means that they're opposed to anti-semitism, Islamophobia, etc. That would be a pretty obvious interpretation too, and makes a lot more sense in the context of the rest of the text. Of course you're not certain, and yeah, maybe someone will harass you and then claim it's because of their religion and then the community will point at the CoC and take their side. It's possible. But seeing that word isn't a huge red flag either. What about "political affiliation"? Well, if it's the US in the 1950s, obviously they're taking a brave stand against McCarthyism... but that's probably not what jumps to anyone's mind today :-). Context matters! Especially in the OSCON case, where apparently they slipped "political affiliation" into their CoC immediately after the US election in 2016, without telling anyone or giving any explanation. That's like... perfectly designed to make people nervous and suspicious about their intentions. What does this mean for NumPy's CoC? Not sure -- obviously the whole "secretly added to the CoC at the same time everyone is freaking out" part doesn't apply. I think Robert's message made some good points. -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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On Thu, 2 Aug 2018 14:58:05 -0700 Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
I think we're coming back to what other posters said. If "political opinion" sends more of a red flag than "religion", then it probably says a lot about US society. Now the question is whether the CoC should be American or global. Personally, I'm ok with an American CoC, as long as it only applies to Americans ;-) Regards Antoine.
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:35 PM Ryan May <rmay31@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree that it's worth clarifying in the text what this clause is intended to do. I think it has been misinterpreted as defining a legalistic set of protected classes along the lines of anti-discrimination laws and can be interpreted by itself outside of the context of the CoC as a whole. But it's not that. It's an aspirational statement, and a high one, at that, if we interpret it at its broadest. We will fail to meet it, in its entirety, and that's *okay* if the spirit of the CoC is being defended. I am perfectly happy to keep "political beliefs" explicit in the CoC and still boot the neo-feudalist for making the project's/conference's environment unwelcoming for a more vulnerable group of people, even if just by their presence. I *am* sensitive to how nominally well-intentioned "viewpoint diversity" efforts get hijacked by regressives looking to (re)assert their traditional power. But that problem is mostly confined to conferences who need to seek speakers and has less relevance to numpy, which largely doesn't run much except sprints. I think we can resolve that elsewhere, if not another document, then at least another clause. A CoC has to pull a kind of double duty: be friendly enough to digest for a newcomer and also be helpful to project organizers to make tough balancing decisions. We don't have to expect each sentence to pull that double duty on its own. I don't quite know what the phrasing would be (because, again, we don't run conferences), but I think we could make a statement that explicitly disclaims that we will be using "viewpoint diversity" to provide a platform for viewpoints antithetical to the CoC. None of these categorizations listed should be interpreted as get-out-of-jail-free cards for otherwise unwelcoming behavior, and I think maybe we should be explicit about that. Our diversity statement is an aspiration, not a suicide pact. Religion, neurotype, national origin, and subculture (4chan is a subculture, God help us), at minimum, are all items on that list that I have personally seen used to justify shitty behavior. Political belief is far from unique (nor the most common excuse, in my experience) in that list. But they all deserve to be on that list. I want the somewhat fringy progressive hacktivist to feel comfortable here as well as people more mainstream. -- Robert Kern
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The "political belief" was recently removed from the Jupyter CoC. One reason for this decision is that *Racism and Sexism are increasingly considered as mainstream "political beliefs"*, and we wanted to make it clear that people can still be sanctioned for e.g. sexist or racist behavior when engaging with the project (at events, on the mailing list or GitHub...) even if their racism and sexism is corresponds to a "political belief". It is still not OK for people to be excluded or discriminated against because of their political affiliation. The CoC statement reads "*This includes, but is not limited to...*". Also we* don't wish to prioritize or elevate any members of a particular political belief to the same level as any members of the examples remaining in the document*. Ultimately, the CoC committee uses their own judgement to assess reports and the appropriate response. Best, Sylvain On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 7:04 AM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
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I think a legalistic focus on the letter rather than the spirit of the code of conduct is not that helpful (and probably what makes if feel US centric - funny how court systems end up shaping countries). My preference would be to keep exactly the scipy version, so that at least for these two highly related project there is just one code of conduct. But for what it is worth, it does seem to me political views belongs on the list - certainly as likely to give problems historically as for any of the others on the list. If we do end up with a different version, I'd prefer a really short one, like just stating the golden rule (treat others as one would like to be treated oneself). -- Marten
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On 08/02/2018 09:25 AM, Ralf Gommers wrote:
+1, I've just read through all this discussion, and I favor this approach too. I overall agree with Scipy CoC and would be fine accepting it as is. I might prefer it to be shorter and less legalistic as well. One of the goals of the CoC is to attract new and diverse contributors, but we don't want to push anyone away with a scary legal document either. But CoCs are a fairly new and somewhat untested phenomenon in open source, so given that the scipy CoC seems like a good and reasonable effort. By the way, I thought these articles on CoCs were interesting [1][2], including the interviews with open-source CoC creators on their experience in [1] on pros and cons of "rule-based" CoCs. Allan [1] Tourani, Adams and Serebrenik, "Code of conduct in open source projects," 2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on SANER, Klagenfurt, 2017, pp. 24-33. https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/SANER2017.pdf [2] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-new-normal-codes-of-conduct-in-2015-...
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On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 3:35 AM, Marten van Kerkwijk < m.h.vankerkwijk@gmail.com> wrote:
Unfortunately, the golden rule is sometime used as a justification for bad behaviour -- "I don't mind it if someone calls my ideas stupid -- I can defend ideas just fine, thank you" So a more specified CoC is worthwhile. As for the issue at hand: A code of conduct is about, well, conduct -- the whole idea is that we are defining appropriate conduct, but NOT discriminating at all based on who or what you are or how you identify yourself. So is wearing a MAGA hat any different than wearing a cross, or a yarmulke, or a hijab ? Or a Bernie T-shirt? (Sorry for the US-centric examples) Note the debate in France about burkinis: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/frances-burkini-debate-about-a-b... So it's not an easy answer. In the end, though, wearing a particular item of clothing is a behavior, not an identity per se --- so saying that people of and political persuasion are welcome is not the same as saying you can express any political opinion you like publicly in this forum. But it's a really slippery slope: Some religions require the devout to wear particular items of clothing (or hair styles, or...) And there are a lot of issue with people saying: "I don't care if you are gay, just don't talk about it at work" -- but straight people get to talk about their personal lives at work -- so of course everyone should be able to. This is why (in the US anyway) there is the legal concept of a "protected class" -- it needs to be clear exactly what one can can't "discriminate" based on. If an employee is required to wear a particular item of clothing in order to adhere to their religion, then you can't ban that type of clothing -- but you can ban other types of clothing. For this issue, maybe we could get some guidance from the "Hatch Act" -- it is a law that regulates what types of political activity a US federal employee can participate in. It bans some activities even when off the job, but the part that might be relevant is what is banned while on the job. That is, as a US federal employee, you can belong to any political party you like, you can hold any political opinion you like, but you can't freely express those on the job -- i.e. "engage in political activity". Hmm -- I found this: " Hatch Act regulations define political activity as one “directed toward the success or failure of a political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group.” Interesting -- I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to promote white supremacy on the job -- though that's not a partisan political group per se (can't find the definition of partisan, either) TL;DR: I think "political beliefs" should be included, but it should be clear somehow that that doesn't mean you can express any political belief in the context of the project. Honestly, the really horrible people often can't help themselves -- they will actually *do* something inappropriate in the context of the project. And if they don't, then how d we even know what horrible ideas they may promote elsewhere? -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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On Thu, 2018-08-02 at 12:04 +0200, Sylvain Corlay wrote:
TL;DR: I don't think it matters, as for the CoC as such, it seems fine to me, lets just put it in and be done with it. I do not think we should have a long discussion (about that list), and in case it might go there, would suggest we try to find a way to refuse to have it. Maybe by letting the committee that is in the CoC decide. Actually: I am good with the people currently listed for SciPy if they will do it, or anyone else wants to jump in? I won't really follow the discussion much more (except for reading) and do not feel like I really know enough about CoCs, but my point is, that I do not care much. The CoC as suggested seems pretty uncontroversial to me (it does not draw any hard lines worth fighting over). And that is probably the only current believe I have, that I think it should not really draw those lines. Political opinion being included or not? I am not sure I care, because as I read it and you point out, it does not really matter whether or not it is included, including it would just raise awareness for a specific issue. This is not about freedom to express political believes (on numpy channels), I suppose there may be a point where even a boycott can be discriminatory and things may be tricky to assess [1], but again those cases need careful weighing (by the committee mostly), a CoC might bias this a little, but not much, and if we decide which way to bias it we might end up fighting, so lets refuse to do it outside specific cases? Freedom of expression is always limited by the protection of other individuals rights (note that I believe in the US this freedom tends to be held very high when weighing the two). But, since there is normally no reason for voicing political opinions on numpy, it seems obvious to me that it will tend to lose when weighed against the other persons rights being protected [2]. Weighing different "rights" is always tricky, but cannot be avoided or really formalized too much IMO [3,4]. Which comes to the point that I think the list is one to raise awareness for and be welcoming to specific people (either very general or minority), who have in the past (or currently) not felt welcome. And such a list always will be set in the current time/mentality. We are maybe in an odd spot where political discussion/judicial progress feels lagging behind social development (and some fronts are hardening :(), which makes things a bit trickier. Overall, all it would do is to maybe suggested that "political opinion" is currently not something that need special raised awareness. It does not mean this defines a "bias", nor that the list cannot change at some point. Either way, I do not read the list as giving any additional protection for *voicing* your opinion. In fact, I would argue the opposite may be the case. If you voice it you make the opposite (political) opinion feel less welcome, and since there is no reason for voicing a political opinion *on a numpy channel* when weighing those against each other it seems like a hard case [5]. At some points lines may have to be drawn (and drawing them once, does not set them in stone for the next time!). I do not think we draw or should draw them (much) with this statement itself, the statement says that they will be drawn if and when necessary and then it will be done so carefully. Plus it generally raises awareness and gives a bit guidelines. It seems to me that this may be the actual discussion with many of those other discussions. Not so much the wording, but over how exactly lines were drawn in practice. Sure, probably we set a bit of bias with the list, but I doubt it is enough to fight over. And hopefully we can avoid a huge discussion :) (for now looks like it). Best, Sebastian PS: I do not mind synchronizing numpy and scipy (or numpy and Jupyter or all three) as much as possible. I guess you could sum it up to, maybe I am even -0 on removal (I am not sure ;)), but anything is fine and even something like "Jupyter removed it, lets stay synchronized" seems like a fair enough argument to me. PPS: Since this is a CoC thing... if anyone finds my opinion strange/offensive, please write me, because I honestly would want to know! [1] Strangely enough, I have done this in a very mild form, by ignoring an issue (or similar) on github, because I understood their github picture as an offensive symbol. If they were seriously active/representative, I might have asked to at least change it (e.g. before being on the steering council). [2] There are difficult lines when it comes to representative persons maybe, but I do not think you can really set up hard rules for it. It might be that my perspective is a bit different because german judicial system to my knowledge tends to draw few hard lines (two courts can easily decide differently on almost identical cases). [3] We could formalize it, but that would seem to be the exact opposite of what a CoC tries to achieve. [4] In germany there was a discussion recently with some politicians suggesting that "safety" should be a fundamental right or even "super fundamental right". As far as I know judiciary thought it was a very bad idea, because the "super" would mean that you strangely and definitely prefer safety over e.g. privacy, leading to an impossibility to thoughtfully weigh things against each other (not in specific areas, but in general). [5] Yes, there may be some tough points where a person (without doing anything else) practically represents something so much that it could be offensive. First, that probably will not happen, ever, second, I do not see how anyone can hope to anticipate it. There is a reason fundamental laws/constitutions/human rights all start very general like "The dignity (of a human) is unimpeachable.".
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 11:04 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
I was opposed to having a list in the first place, because the longer such a list is, the more significant the omissions become. And indeed, the arguments I have seen for omitting "politics" are that one should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of politics, because, reasons. One could marshal the same arguments to support discrimination on the basis of religion, nationality, or culture. Such discrimination is always a temptation and historically has led to conflict; the possibility of conflict is precisely why they are put these lists. The list is a declaration that we will *not* argue about these things because such arguments are well known to be contentious and lead to bad feelings. There are many places for such contention, but I would argue that NumPy development is not one of them. Chuck
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On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 6:04 AM Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think that's quite fair; I think Nathaniel's example, at least, was relatively clear, but let me see if I can summarize concisely (it's not my strength, as these parentheticals attest, but let's give it a whirl regardless). The main purpose of diversity statements is to signal that we will make a special effort to ensure that the less powerful, more vulnerable, or simply traditionally excluded are able to participate fully, safely, and comfortably. At the same time, we are not trying to exclude the more powerful, less vulnerable, or traditionally included that are already there; they just don't need the extra effort. So diversity statements end up more or less facially neutral. Bad actors sometimes take advantage of that facial neutrality, under the guise of "viewpoint diversity" or similar claims, in bad faith, to make use of the community's platform to reinforce or reassert the traditional structures that make the community less welcoming to the less powerful, more vulnerable, and traditionally excluded individuals. Sometimes the community is well-meaning and being taken advantage of by the individual bad actor, but sometimes the community itself is exercising bad faith. Sometimes the community wants the public cover of a diversity statement in name only but continue to be unwelcoming, using the facial neutrality of the diversity statement ot undermine the diversity goals. "Political belief", like "viewpoint diversity", is one of those common weak points that are exploited by these bad actors. Those bad-faith actors and bad-faith communities are not theoretical; we have examples. By including "political belief" in that list, we look like we might possibly be one of those bad-faith communities. The less powerful, more vulnerable, and traditionally excluded individuals may rightly want more of a commitment from us that they would be truly be supported, protected, and welcomed here. <looks back> Nope, concision is definitely not my strength. But I hope I made the argument clear, at least. Now, I'm not particularly in favor of just dropping "political belief" from the CoC. I think the concerns are valid, but I think that those concerns expose a structural weakness in the CoC that is better addressed with other statements about how we deal with bad actors. "Political belief" isn't the only exploitable item in that list, and "political belief" is also an axis along which less powerful, etc. such that I think it's worth keeping on the list as a reminder. Removing the list entirely for a "we welcome everyone" message is also exploitable, as bad-faith actors will just read in whatever they feel like they need. Personally, I view the list best as not defining a legalistic set of protected classes, but rather as a helpful set of examples for community members to keep in mind as they interact with the community. This is why I don't like a simple "follow the Golden Rule" or "Don't be a dick". It gives absolutely no guidance to the reader. Everyone is a good person in their own head. Telling them to be a good person doesn't give them any tools to be better at welcoming a broader diversity in our community. They will read that and carry on with their own personal status quo with no more reflection. And this requires reflection and work. -- Robert Kern
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I think I'm going to leave it there for the time being and mute this thread until I get back from vacation. I know that's terribly rude, and you all have my abject apologies. -- Robert Kern
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On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 11:01 PM Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
<looks back> Nope, concision is definitely not my strength. But I hope I made the argument clear, at least.
No, wait. I got it: Bad actors use "diversity of political beliefs" in bad faith as cover for undermining the goals of the diversity statement. Marginalized groups want more assurance that our community (1) isn't one of those bad actors and (2) is willing and capable of resisting those bad actors when they come. There. Okay. Vacation time. -- Robert Kern
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On August 3, 2018 09:50:38 Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
That's a very useful summary; thank you. I think we can fairly easily add a sentence that encourages participation from a wide diversity of people, while making it clear that including someone in the conversation does not give them free reigns in contradiction with the rest of the guidelines. Ralf, if you agree, shall we do this for SciPy, and use the new version for NumPy too? Best regards, Stéfan
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On August 3, 2018 10:35:57 Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Although, perhaps, a better question to answer is how many people feel that the current document is deficient, and does not go far enough in stating explicitly what we want from our community interactions. It is always hard to tell the opinion of the sometimes silent majority? Best regards, Stéfan
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Hi, On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 9:35 AM, Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
I must say, I disagree. I think we're already treading close to the edge with the current document, and it's more likely we'd get closer still with virtually any addition on this line. I'm in favor of keeping the political beliefs in there, on the basis it's really not too hard to distinguish good-faith political beliefs, and the current atmosphere is so repellent to people who would not identify as progressive, that I would like them to feel they have some protection. If you will not allow me "no change" and you offered me a) paragraph by group of the not-discriminated trying to imagine something comforting to imagined extremely sensitive and progressive (name your other group here) or b) no stated defense for not-progressive persons, I'd take b). Cheers, Matthew
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 2:04 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
If someone with good wordsmithing skills could draft 1-2 sentences and send a PR to the SciPy repo, so we have something concrete to discuss/approve, that would be great. If not, I can take a stab at it early next week.
There's a much more straightforward basis one can think of. There are many countries in the world that have dictatorships or one-party rule. This includes countries that we get regular contributions from. Expressing support for, e.g., democratic elections, can land you in all sorts of trouble there. For a US conference it may be okay to take a purely US perspective, and even then the inclusion/removal of "political beliefs" can be argued (as evidenced by this thread). For a project with a global reach like NumPy it's really not very good to take into account only US/Western voices. it's really not
I think "not allow" is too strong. Your opinion matters as well, so I'm happy to have/facilitate a higher bandwidth discussion on this if you want (after Monday).
Imho Robert made a very compelling argument here, so I don't completely understand the choice. Cheers, Ralf
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I’ve created a PR, and I’ve kept the language “not too stern”. https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/9109 <https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/9109> Hameer Abbasi
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 8:59 AM, Hameer Abbasi <einstein.edison@gmail.com> wrote
I’ve created a PR, and I’ve kept the language “not too stern”. https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/9109
Thanks -- for ease of this thread, the sentence Hameer added is: "We expect that you will extend the same courtesy and open-mindedness towards other members of the SciPy community." LGTM -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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One other thought: Given Jupyter, numpy, scipy, matplotlib?, etc, are all working on a CoC -- maybe we could have NumFocus take a lead on this for the whole community? I think most (all?) of the NumFocus projects have essentially the same goals in this regard. -CHB On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 9:44 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
-- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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On 3 August 2018 at 11:20, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
I think what matters in code of conduct is community buy-in and the discussions around it, more than the document itself. By off-loading the discussion and writing process to someone else, you are missing most of the benefits of codes of conducts. This is also the reason why I think codes of conduct should be revisited regularly. My 2 cents, N
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 11:33 AM, Nelle Varoquaux <nelle.varoquaux@gmail.com> wrote: I think what matters in code of conduct is community buy-in and the
discussions around it, more than the document itself.
This is a really good point. Though I think a community could still have that discussion around whether and which CoC to adopt, rather than the bike-shedding of the document itself. And the reality is that a small sub-fraction of eh community takes part in the conversation anyway. I'm very much on the fence about whether this thread has been truly helpful, for instance, though it's certainly got me trolling the web reading about the issue -- which I probably would not have if this were simply a: "should we adopt the NumFocos CoC" thread... By off-loading the discussion and writing process to someone else, you are
missing most of the benefits of codes of conducts.
well, when reading about CoCs, it seem a large part of their benefit is not to the existing community, but rather what it projects to the rest of the world, particularly possible new contributors.
This is also the reason why I think codes of conduct should be revisited regularly.
That is a good idea, yes. I'll note that at least the Contributor Covenant is pretty vague about enforcement: """ All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. """ I'd think refining THAT part for the project may provide the benefits of discussion... -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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On August 3, 2018 20:51:00 Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
But the SciPy CoC has a whole additional document that goes into further detail on this specific issue, so let's not concern ourselves with the weaknesses of the Covenant (there are plenty), but rather on what is being proposed for adoption here: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/dev/conduct/report_handling_manua... Best regards, Stéfan
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 12:45 PM, Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Actually, I did not indent that to be highlighting a limitation in the Covenant, but rather pointing out that there is plenty to discuss, even if one does adopt an existing CoC. But at Ralf points out, that discussion has been had in the context of scipy, so I agree -- numpy should adopt scipy's CoC and be done with it. In fact, if someone still feels strongly that "political beliefs" should be removed, then it's probably better to bring that up in the context of scipy, rather than numpy -- as has been said, it is practically the same community. To the point where the scipy developers guide and the numpy developers guide are published on the same web site. -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 11:20 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
Given Jupyter, numpy, scipy, matplotlib?, etc, are all working on a CoC -- maybe we could have NumFocus take a lead on this for the whole community?
or adopt an existing one, like maybe: The Contributor Covenant <http://www.contributor-covenant.org/> was adopted by several prominent open source projects, including Atom, AngularJS, Eclipse, and even Rails. According to Github, total adoption of the Contributor Covenant is nearing an astounding ten thousand open source projects. I'm trying to figure out why numpy (Or any project, really) has either unique needs or people better qualified to write a CoC than any other project or community. So much like OSS licences -- it's much better to pick an established one than write your own. For the record, the Covenant does have a laundry list of "classes", that does not include political belief, but does mention "political" here: """ Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include: ... Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks ... """ -CHB Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 11:39 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
Nelle is right about the process and community buy-in.
The tone of the Contributor Covenant is far from good. All of this and more was extensively discussed when introducing the SciPy CoC. Can you please read the mailing list discussion on scipy-dev before suggesting a major change in direction? Also keep in mind that the SciPy and NumPy communities strongly overlap, and everyone was okay with the SciPy CoC. We're discussing one tweak to that; removing two words or adding 1-2 sentences. It is counter-productive to start from scratch. Cheers, Ralf
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 10:04 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
This all seems very sensible to me. In personal projects I use the WeAllJS CoC, because I think it does a good job of giving clear guidance on behavior and non-scary enforcement examples, while also avoiding legalism and being clear that trying to game the rules won't work. It might be a good source of inspiration here: https://github.com/WeAllJS/weallbehave/blob/latest/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 5:57 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
No. For one, from experience as a previous EuroSciPy program chair where we had a pretty similar case. Keynote speaker accepted invitation, then shortly before the event says "I cannot speak unless you introduce a CoC". There was little discussion possible. It felt like blackmail to the whole committee. Because, well, that's what it was. If existence or exact wording of a CoC is that important to you as a speaker, you should check it carefully before accepting an invitation. (and for the record, a CoC was adding the next year after there was time for a serious discussion) Also, I probably agree with all or almost all of her political views. However, starting with unrealistic hypotheticals like people with neo-Nazi insignia just ruins the credibility of the rest of the post for me. I'm not too interested in continuing this particular discussion, it won't be very productive. For the record, I don't much appreciate the parody comment. Cheers, Ralf
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Hi all! I’ve been following this thread mainly from the sidelines and thought I’d give a few of my thoughts. I like the idea that one of the rules or “protected classes” such as people of a certain race, gender, political affiliation etc. can’t use their “class status” to break any of the other rules. I believe we can make that clear in not so many words. Nathaniel’s WeAllJS CoC seems a bit too conservative, and might promote an overly uptight and formal atmosphere, cruising through some of the examples. People should be allowed to joke and express themselves, so long as it isn’t derogatory towards others. Use of the word “crazy” should be allowed if it isn’t directed towards a person/group/work, or if it expresses extremes rather than a mental condition. However, I do agree that a some people do like to insult people/groups/work out of habit and then just call it “jokes” or “shitposting”. No version of this should be allowed, even in humour. Best Regards, Hameer Abbasi
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On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 10:02 PM, Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
+1 Maybe a bit of context: the SciPy code of conduct had quite a lot of discussion, and importantly in the end everyone involved in the discussion was happy with (or at least not displeased by) the final document. Hence I see it as a good document to adopt also by other projects. And here's what I wrote as the intro for that CoC discussion: As you probably know, Code of Conduct (CoC) documents are becoming more common every year for open source projects, and there are a number of good reasons to adopt a CoC: 1. It gives us the opportunity to explicitly express the values and behaviors we'd like to see in our community. 2. It is designed to make everyone feel welcome (and while I think we're a welcoming community anyway, not having a CoC may look explicitly unwelcoming to some potential contributors nowadays). 3. It gives us a tool to address a set of problems if and when they occur, as well as a way for anyone to report issues or behavior that is unacceptable to them (much better than having those people potentially leave the community). 4. SciPy is not yet a fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS, however I think we'd like to be in the near future. NumFOCUS has started to require having a CoC as a prerequisite for new projects joining it. The PSF has the same requirement for any sponsorship for events/projects that it gives. Note on (4): NumPy is a sponsored project of NumFOCUS, and I've been asked several times how it can be that NumPy is sponsored but does not have a CoC. Cheers, Ralf
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My ideal version would be substantially shorter, maybe just quote the golden rule, but I am happy with the suggestion to just adapt this text. I particularly appreciate the lack of absolutism in the text, and the acknowledgement that it is possible to have a bad day even while not distracting from the overall message. -- Marten On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 6:30 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
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On July 27, 2018 17:04:23 Marten van Kerkwijk <m.h.vankerkwijk@gmail.com> wrote:
My ideal version would be substantially shorter, maybe just quote the golden rule, but I am happy with the suggestion to just adapt this text.
Agreed! There's some basic ground that needs to be covered, though, and the result of exploring that fully is, practically, what you see here. I'm not opposed to modifying the document in principle, although I reckon it would be somewhat easier, from both a maintenance and adoption perspective, to use the same. Best regards, Stéfan
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I realize this was probably brought up in the discussions about the scipy code of conduct which I have not looked at, but I’m troubled by the inclusion of “political beliefs” in the document. See e.g. https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/5 As a thought experiment, what if someone’s political beliefs imply that other contributors are not deserving of human rights? Increasingly ideas like this are coming into the mainstream worldwide and I think this is a real concern that should be considered. On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 8:25 PM Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 12:20 AM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343@gmail.com> wrote:
It was not brought up explicitly as far as I remember.
That's about moving names around. I don't see any mention of political beliefs?
There is a difference between having beliefs, and expressing those beliefs in ways that offends others. I don't see any problem with saying that we welcome anyone, irrespective of political belief. However, if someone starts expressing things that are intolerant (like someone else not deserving human rights) on any of our communication forums or in an in-person meeting, that would be a clear violation of the CoC. Which can be dealt with via the reporting and enforcement mechanism in the CoC. I don't see a problem here, but I would see a real problem with removing the "political beliefs" phrase. Cheers, Ralf
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry about that, I elided the 6. This is the correct link: https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/56
For another perspective on this issue see https://where.coraline.codes/blog/oscon/, where Coraline Ada describes her reasons for not speaking at OSCON this year due to a similar clause in the code of conduct. Cheers,
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Hi, On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 4:12 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree with Ralf. From your link: """ But the inclusion of this language, making political affiliation a protected class, leads me to believe that alt-right technologists would be as welcome at the conference as I would be. Including alt-right technologists who display on their clothing, for example, neo-Nazi insignia. Or t-shirts printed with anti-trans or anti-Black slogans. These could easily be interpreted as protected political speech. """ That's the point. If you wear a t-shirt with anti-trans or anti-Black slogans to a Scipy event covered by the code of conduct, that would qualify as 'expressing things that are intolerant', as Ralf put it. Cheers, Matthew
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:12 AM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks, that's useful context for your question. I'm personally not too attached to "political belief", but I think the discussion in that PR and in the OSCON context is very US-centric and reflective of the polarized atmosphere there. If everyone is fine with removing political beliefs then I'm fine with that, but I don't think that the argument itself (from a non-US perspective) has much merit.
There's a lot of very unrealistic examples in that post. Plus retracting a week in advance of a conference is, to put it mildly, questionable. So not sure what to think of the rest of that post. There may be good points in there, but they're obscured by the obvious flaws in thinking and choice of examples. Cheers, Ralf
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/81e62cb212edf2a8402c842b120d9f31.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
I agree with Ralf. That thread is more towards a US based separation. Actually we briefly touched upon these on the SciPy side but indeed there was no real discussion. Political beliefs (especially communism in US for a practical example) can offend some people and that's OK because being offended by itself doesn't have a merit. There will always be someone getting offended by anything. But racism, sexism etc. are not "political" stances and deserve to be united against regardless whether someone is offended or not. Actually calling these discriminating doctrines as "political beliefs" is making me quite nervous instead. On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 5:37 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
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This. Even from a US perspective, we really need to not let political division into even more apparently non-political things. As far as I can tell, the current language seems to be there to specifically avoid that. It isn't there to allow discrimination if someone tries to claim they're making a political statement. Best, Ian On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 10:58 AM Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:37 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
Probably a plurality of contributors are from the US though, so we can't exactly hand-wave away how it reads in the US...
I think there's two separate issues here: (a) whether things people express outside our forums should be considered relevant within our forums, (b) what we're communicating by calling out "political belief" as a thing that we won't exclude people over. This isn't happening in a vacuum either... if you search for "lambdaconf" you can see a ton of discussion about a programming conference that decided to invite a guy who's a high-profile leader in the pro-feudalism / pro-white-supremacism community (I can't believe I'm typing that), and then conference justified it by saying things like "we're supporting diversity of beliefs" and "this talk is purely about his technical work, let's keep politics out of it". As it turns out, the technical work in question is actually super tied to his political activism -- like in the original version of the system, his crypto key was the "king" that gave him ultimate authority, which he could delegate to "dukes", etc. (IIRC -- I'm not looking up the details, but it was something about that blatant.) Also all kinds of cult-y stuff about how contributors were special chosen ones, them against the world -- it was super creepy. But then he got VC funding, because of course he did, and went through and renamed things as a figleaf, so they could claim it was "purely technical". FWIW, my personal opinion is that I'm categorically uninterested in working with anyone like that. I don't care if they only say the ghastly things in non-numpy channels or claim that it's "merely a political disagreement", I'm still not interested.
Ralf, I love you, but this paragraph sounds like a parody from "How to suppress women's writing" or something. Coraline Ada is a prominent expert on code-of-conduct issues, and also a trans woman, so she gets death threats and other harassment constantly and "will the conference organizers protect me if someone comes after me?" is a real question she has to ask. She wrote a blog post about how O'Reilly's handling of this (not just the language, but the totality of circumstances -- the way it was added, the response to her queries, etc.) made her feel that attending would be unsafe for her, so she didn't attend. (And about how distressed she was to realize this just a week before the conference.) It seems like you're taking her post as some logical argument about CoCs in the abstract, with the withdrawal as some kind of brinksmanship, and judging it by those standards? FWIW, the Sage Sharp who's quoted at the beginning of Ada's post and initially raised the issue, is also well-known expert on CoC issues, e.g. PyCon hired them to help revamp their policies and respond to incidents this year [1]. When experts say that something is a bad idea, and when the people who a CoC is supposed to protect says it makes them feel unsafe, I feel like we should listen to that. I also thought that the points made in the Jupyter discussion thread made a lot of sense: of course it's possible for people to start harassing each other over any excuse, and a CoC can, should, and does make clear that that's not OK. But if you specifically *call out* political affiliation as a protected class, at a time when lots of the people who the CoC is trying to protect are facing governmental harassment justified as "mere political disagreement", then it really sends the wrong message. Besides, uh... isn't the whole definition of politics that it's topics where there is active debate? Not really sure why it's even in that list to start with. -n [1] https://pycon.blogspot.com/2018/04/code-of-conduct-updates-for-pycon-2018.ht... -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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So I hear all the arguments about people feeling unsafe due to some truly despicable, discriminatory behavior, and I want absolutely no parts of protecting that. However, I also recognize that we in the U.S. are in a particularly divisive atmosphere, and people of varied political persuasions want absolutely nothing to do with those who share differing views. So, as a concrete example, if someone were to show up at a NumPy developer summit with a MAGA ("Make America Great Again") hat, or talks about their support for the president in non-numpy channels, WITHOUT expressing anything discriminatory or support for such views, if "political beliefs" is not in the CoC, is this person welcome? I'm not worried about my own views, but I have friends of widely varying views, and I truly wonder if they would be welcome. With differing "political beliefs" listed as something welcomed, I feel ok for them; if this language is removed, I'm much less certain. IMO, "political beliefs" encompasses so much more things than a handful of very specific, hateful views. People can disagree about a wide array of "political beliefs" and it is important that we as a community welcome a wide array of such views. If the CoC needs to protect against the wide array of discriminatory views and behavior that make up U.S. politics right now, how about specifically calling those behaviors out as not-welcome, rather than completely ignoring the fact that 99% of "political beliefs" are perfectly welcome within the community? The CoC is about spelling out the community norms--how about just spelling out that we welcome everyone, but, in the words of Will Wheaton, "Don't be a dick"? Ryan -- Ryan May
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:34 PM, Ryan May <rmay31@gmail.com> wrote:
This is a difficult scenario. I do know lots of people who are uncomfortable with MAGA hats, and it's not because of they disagree about the details of some farm bill or whatever, it's because it's increasingly impossible to use that slogan without also expressing support for racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. -- i.e., all the other things that the CoC lists as unacceptable. So I feel like... to the extent that some political position *isn't* tied up with those things, I can't see why people would have a problem with it, or why the CoC would need to bother mentioning it. (There are all kinds of things we don't mention – "we welcome people with odd *and* even telephone numbers!") And to the extent that some political position *is* tied up with those things... it would be pretty contradictory to list it as a protected class alongside race, sex, etc. I'm not going to go track people down on facebook and try to guess how they voted or something, but if someone wore a MAGA hat to a numpy sprint then I'd be totally fine with asking them to take it off in consideration of the other participants. -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 21:26:35 -0700 Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
What if someone is wearing a religious symbol? If one is concerned about horrible beliefs or opinions, there are a good deal of them in many religious ("holy") books (*), yet CoCs are generally meant to prohibit discrimination based on religious beliefs... So the argument that CoCs should not protect political beliefs is starting to become flimsy (horrible beliefs are ok if they are part of a religious system, not otherwise?). And it's not just theoretical, because people are physically repressed, in various parts of the world, in the name of religious beliefs. Regards Antoine.
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On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
Yeah, it's difficult. But to address specifically the question of "what's the difference between listing religion and listing political affiliation": Say you're considering whether to participate in a project. Maybe you're marginalized on some axis, or have been harassed before, and before joining in you want to know how the community will respond if something happens. Of course it's impossible to know, but maybe reading the CoC can help you make some imperfect guess. Now if you see "religion" there, then what does that tell you? Maybe it means that these people are really excited about protecting oppressive religions. Or... maybe it means that they're opposed to anti-semitism, Islamophobia, etc. That would be a pretty obvious interpretation too, and makes a lot more sense in the context of the rest of the text. Of course you're not certain, and yeah, maybe someone will harass you and then claim it's because of their religion and then the community will point at the CoC and take their side. It's possible. But seeing that word isn't a huge red flag either. What about "political affiliation"? Well, if it's the US in the 1950s, obviously they're taking a brave stand against McCarthyism... but that's probably not what jumps to anyone's mind today :-). Context matters! Especially in the OSCON case, where apparently they slipped "political affiliation" into their CoC immediately after the US election in 2016, without telling anyone or giving any explanation. That's like... perfectly designed to make people nervous and suspicious about their intentions. What does this mean for NumPy's CoC? Not sure -- obviously the whole "secretly added to the CoC at the same time everyone is freaking out" part doesn't apply. I think Robert's message made some good points. -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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On Thu, 2 Aug 2018 14:58:05 -0700 Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
I think we're coming back to what other posters said. If "political opinion" sends more of a red flag than "religion", then it probably says a lot about US society. Now the question is whether the CoC should be American or global. Personally, I'm ok with an American CoC, as long as it only applies to Americans ;-) Regards Antoine.
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:35 PM Ryan May <rmay31@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree that it's worth clarifying in the text what this clause is intended to do. I think it has been misinterpreted as defining a legalistic set of protected classes along the lines of anti-discrimination laws and can be interpreted by itself outside of the context of the CoC as a whole. But it's not that. It's an aspirational statement, and a high one, at that, if we interpret it at its broadest. We will fail to meet it, in its entirety, and that's *okay* if the spirit of the CoC is being defended. I am perfectly happy to keep "political beliefs" explicit in the CoC and still boot the neo-feudalist for making the project's/conference's environment unwelcoming for a more vulnerable group of people, even if just by their presence. I *am* sensitive to how nominally well-intentioned "viewpoint diversity" efforts get hijacked by regressives looking to (re)assert their traditional power. But that problem is mostly confined to conferences who need to seek speakers and has less relevance to numpy, which largely doesn't run much except sprints. I think we can resolve that elsewhere, if not another document, then at least another clause. A CoC has to pull a kind of double duty: be friendly enough to digest for a newcomer and also be helpful to project organizers to make tough balancing decisions. We don't have to expect each sentence to pull that double duty on its own. I don't quite know what the phrasing would be (because, again, we don't run conferences), but I think we could make a statement that explicitly disclaims that we will be using "viewpoint diversity" to provide a platform for viewpoints antithetical to the CoC. None of these categorizations listed should be interpreted as get-out-of-jail-free cards for otherwise unwelcoming behavior, and I think maybe we should be explicit about that. Our diversity statement is an aspiration, not a suicide pact. Religion, neurotype, national origin, and subculture (4chan is a subculture, God help us), at minimum, are all items on that list that I have personally seen used to justify shitty behavior. Political belief is far from unique (nor the most common excuse, in my experience) in that list. But they all deserve to be on that list. I want the somewhat fringy progressive hacktivist to feel comfortable here as well as people more mainstream. -- Robert Kern
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The "political belief" was recently removed from the Jupyter CoC. One reason for this decision is that *Racism and Sexism are increasingly considered as mainstream "political beliefs"*, and we wanted to make it clear that people can still be sanctioned for e.g. sexist or racist behavior when engaging with the project (at events, on the mailing list or GitHub...) even if their racism and sexism is corresponds to a "political belief". It is still not OK for people to be excluded or discriminated against because of their political affiliation. The CoC statement reads "*This includes, but is not limited to...*". Also we* don't wish to prioritize or elevate any members of a particular political belief to the same level as any members of the examples remaining in the document*. Ultimately, the CoC committee uses their own judgement to assess reports and the appropriate response. Best, Sylvain On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 7:04 AM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
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I think a legalistic focus on the letter rather than the spirit of the code of conduct is not that helpful (and probably what makes if feel US centric - funny how court systems end up shaping countries). My preference would be to keep exactly the scipy version, so that at least for these two highly related project there is just one code of conduct. But for what it is worth, it does seem to me political views belongs on the list - certainly as likely to give problems historically as for any of the others on the list. If we do end up with a different version, I'd prefer a really short one, like just stating the golden rule (treat others as one would like to be treated oneself). -- Marten
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On 08/02/2018 09:25 AM, Ralf Gommers wrote:
+1, I've just read through all this discussion, and I favor this approach too. I overall agree with Scipy CoC and would be fine accepting it as is. I might prefer it to be shorter and less legalistic as well. One of the goals of the CoC is to attract new and diverse contributors, but we don't want to push anyone away with a scary legal document either. But CoCs are a fairly new and somewhat untested phenomenon in open source, so given that the scipy CoC seems like a good and reasonable effort. By the way, I thought these articles on CoCs were interesting [1][2], including the interviews with open-source CoC creators on their experience in [1] on pros and cons of "rule-based" CoCs. Allan [1] Tourani, Adams and Serebrenik, "Code of conduct in open source projects," 2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on SANER, Klagenfurt, 2017, pp. 24-33. https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/SANER2017.pdf [2] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-new-normal-codes-of-conduct-in-2015-...
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On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 3:35 AM, Marten van Kerkwijk < m.h.vankerkwijk@gmail.com> wrote:
Unfortunately, the golden rule is sometime used as a justification for bad behaviour -- "I don't mind it if someone calls my ideas stupid -- I can defend ideas just fine, thank you" So a more specified CoC is worthwhile. As for the issue at hand: A code of conduct is about, well, conduct -- the whole idea is that we are defining appropriate conduct, but NOT discriminating at all based on who or what you are or how you identify yourself. So is wearing a MAGA hat any different than wearing a cross, or a yarmulke, or a hijab ? Or a Bernie T-shirt? (Sorry for the US-centric examples) Note the debate in France about burkinis: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/frances-burkini-debate-about-a-b... So it's not an easy answer. In the end, though, wearing a particular item of clothing is a behavior, not an identity per se --- so saying that people of and political persuasion are welcome is not the same as saying you can express any political opinion you like publicly in this forum. But it's a really slippery slope: Some religions require the devout to wear particular items of clothing (or hair styles, or...) And there are a lot of issue with people saying: "I don't care if you are gay, just don't talk about it at work" -- but straight people get to talk about their personal lives at work -- so of course everyone should be able to. This is why (in the US anyway) there is the legal concept of a "protected class" -- it needs to be clear exactly what one can can't "discriminate" based on. If an employee is required to wear a particular item of clothing in order to adhere to their religion, then you can't ban that type of clothing -- but you can ban other types of clothing. For this issue, maybe we could get some guidance from the "Hatch Act" -- it is a law that regulates what types of political activity a US federal employee can participate in. It bans some activities even when off the job, but the part that might be relevant is what is banned while on the job. That is, as a US federal employee, you can belong to any political party you like, you can hold any political opinion you like, but you can't freely express those on the job -- i.e. "engage in political activity". Hmm -- I found this: " Hatch Act regulations define political activity as one “directed toward the success or failure of a political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group.” Interesting -- I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to promote white supremacy on the job -- though that's not a partisan political group per se (can't find the definition of partisan, either) TL;DR: I think "political beliefs" should be included, but it should be clear somehow that that doesn't mean you can express any political belief in the context of the project. Honestly, the really horrible people often can't help themselves -- they will actually *do* something inappropriate in the context of the project. And if they don't, then how d we even know what horrible ideas they may promote elsewhere? -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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On Thu, 2018-08-02 at 12:04 +0200, Sylvain Corlay wrote:
TL;DR: I don't think it matters, as for the CoC as such, it seems fine to me, lets just put it in and be done with it. I do not think we should have a long discussion (about that list), and in case it might go there, would suggest we try to find a way to refuse to have it. Maybe by letting the committee that is in the CoC decide. Actually: I am good with the people currently listed for SciPy if they will do it, or anyone else wants to jump in? I won't really follow the discussion much more (except for reading) and do not feel like I really know enough about CoCs, but my point is, that I do not care much. The CoC as suggested seems pretty uncontroversial to me (it does not draw any hard lines worth fighting over). And that is probably the only current believe I have, that I think it should not really draw those lines. Political opinion being included or not? I am not sure I care, because as I read it and you point out, it does not really matter whether or not it is included, including it would just raise awareness for a specific issue. This is not about freedom to express political believes (on numpy channels), I suppose there may be a point where even a boycott can be discriminatory and things may be tricky to assess [1], but again those cases need careful weighing (by the committee mostly), a CoC might bias this a little, but not much, and if we decide which way to bias it we might end up fighting, so lets refuse to do it outside specific cases? Freedom of expression is always limited by the protection of other individuals rights (note that I believe in the US this freedom tends to be held very high when weighing the two). But, since there is normally no reason for voicing political opinions on numpy, it seems obvious to me that it will tend to lose when weighed against the other persons rights being protected [2]. Weighing different "rights" is always tricky, but cannot be avoided or really formalized too much IMO [3,4]. Which comes to the point that I think the list is one to raise awareness for and be welcoming to specific people (either very general or minority), who have in the past (or currently) not felt welcome. And such a list always will be set in the current time/mentality. We are maybe in an odd spot where political discussion/judicial progress feels lagging behind social development (and some fronts are hardening :(), which makes things a bit trickier. Overall, all it would do is to maybe suggested that "political opinion" is currently not something that need special raised awareness. It does not mean this defines a "bias", nor that the list cannot change at some point. Either way, I do not read the list as giving any additional protection for *voicing* your opinion. In fact, I would argue the opposite may be the case. If you voice it you make the opposite (political) opinion feel less welcome, and since there is no reason for voicing a political opinion *on a numpy channel* when weighing those against each other it seems like a hard case [5]. At some points lines may have to be drawn (and drawing them once, does not set them in stone for the next time!). I do not think we draw or should draw them (much) with this statement itself, the statement says that they will be drawn if and when necessary and then it will be done so carefully. Plus it generally raises awareness and gives a bit guidelines. It seems to me that this may be the actual discussion with many of those other discussions. Not so much the wording, but over how exactly lines were drawn in practice. Sure, probably we set a bit of bias with the list, but I doubt it is enough to fight over. And hopefully we can avoid a huge discussion :) (for now looks like it). Best, Sebastian PS: I do not mind synchronizing numpy and scipy (or numpy and Jupyter or all three) as much as possible. I guess you could sum it up to, maybe I am even -0 on removal (I am not sure ;)), but anything is fine and even something like "Jupyter removed it, lets stay synchronized" seems like a fair enough argument to me. PPS: Since this is a CoC thing... if anyone finds my opinion strange/offensive, please write me, because I honestly would want to know! [1] Strangely enough, I have done this in a very mild form, by ignoring an issue (or similar) on github, because I understood their github picture as an offensive symbol. If they were seriously active/representative, I might have asked to at least change it (e.g. before being on the steering council). [2] There are difficult lines when it comes to representative persons maybe, but I do not think you can really set up hard rules for it. It might be that my perspective is a bit different because german judicial system to my knowledge tends to draw few hard lines (two courts can easily decide differently on almost identical cases). [3] We could formalize it, but that would seem to be the exact opposite of what a CoC tries to achieve. [4] In germany there was a discussion recently with some politicians suggesting that "safety" should be a fundamental right or even "super fundamental right". As far as I know judiciary thought it was a very bad idea, because the "super" would mean that you strangely and definitely prefer safety over e.g. privacy, leading to an impossibility to thoughtfully weigh things against each other (not in specific areas, but in general). [5] Yes, there may be some tough points where a person (without doing anything else) practically represents something so much that it could be offensive. First, that probably will not happen, ever, second, I do not see how anyone can hope to anticipate it. There is a reason fundamental laws/constitutions/human rights all start very general like "The dignity (of a human) is unimpeachable.".
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 11:04 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
I was opposed to having a list in the first place, because the longer such a list is, the more significant the omissions become. And indeed, the arguments I have seen for omitting "politics" are that one should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of politics, because, reasons. One could marshal the same arguments to support discrimination on the basis of religion, nationality, or culture. Such discrimination is always a temptation and historically has led to conflict; the possibility of conflict is precisely why they are put these lists. The list is a declaration that we will *not* argue about these things because such arguments are well known to be contentious and lead to bad feelings. There are many places for such contention, but I would argue that NumPy development is not one of them. Chuck
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On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 6:04 AM Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think that's quite fair; I think Nathaniel's example, at least, was relatively clear, but let me see if I can summarize concisely (it's not my strength, as these parentheticals attest, but let's give it a whirl regardless). The main purpose of diversity statements is to signal that we will make a special effort to ensure that the less powerful, more vulnerable, or simply traditionally excluded are able to participate fully, safely, and comfortably. At the same time, we are not trying to exclude the more powerful, less vulnerable, or traditionally included that are already there; they just don't need the extra effort. So diversity statements end up more or less facially neutral. Bad actors sometimes take advantage of that facial neutrality, under the guise of "viewpoint diversity" or similar claims, in bad faith, to make use of the community's platform to reinforce or reassert the traditional structures that make the community less welcoming to the less powerful, more vulnerable, and traditionally excluded individuals. Sometimes the community is well-meaning and being taken advantage of by the individual bad actor, but sometimes the community itself is exercising bad faith. Sometimes the community wants the public cover of a diversity statement in name only but continue to be unwelcoming, using the facial neutrality of the diversity statement ot undermine the diversity goals. "Political belief", like "viewpoint diversity", is one of those common weak points that are exploited by these bad actors. Those bad-faith actors and bad-faith communities are not theoretical; we have examples. By including "political belief" in that list, we look like we might possibly be one of those bad-faith communities. The less powerful, more vulnerable, and traditionally excluded individuals may rightly want more of a commitment from us that they would be truly be supported, protected, and welcomed here. <looks back> Nope, concision is definitely not my strength. But I hope I made the argument clear, at least. Now, I'm not particularly in favor of just dropping "political belief" from the CoC. I think the concerns are valid, but I think that those concerns expose a structural weakness in the CoC that is better addressed with other statements about how we deal with bad actors. "Political belief" isn't the only exploitable item in that list, and "political belief" is also an axis along which less powerful, etc. such that I think it's worth keeping on the list as a reminder. Removing the list entirely for a "we welcome everyone" message is also exploitable, as bad-faith actors will just read in whatever they feel like they need. Personally, I view the list best as not defining a legalistic set of protected classes, but rather as a helpful set of examples for community members to keep in mind as they interact with the community. This is why I don't like a simple "follow the Golden Rule" or "Don't be a dick". It gives absolutely no guidance to the reader. Everyone is a good person in their own head. Telling them to be a good person doesn't give them any tools to be better at welcoming a broader diversity in our community. They will read that and carry on with their own personal status quo with no more reflection. And this requires reflection and work. -- Robert Kern
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I think I'm going to leave it there for the time being and mute this thread until I get back from vacation. I know that's terribly rude, and you all have my abject apologies. -- Robert Kern
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On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 11:01 PM Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
<looks back> Nope, concision is definitely not my strength. But I hope I made the argument clear, at least.
No, wait. I got it: Bad actors use "diversity of political beliefs" in bad faith as cover for undermining the goals of the diversity statement. Marginalized groups want more assurance that our community (1) isn't one of those bad actors and (2) is willing and capable of resisting those bad actors when they come. There. Okay. Vacation time. -- Robert Kern
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On August 3, 2018 09:50:38 Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
That's a very useful summary; thank you. I think we can fairly easily add a sentence that encourages participation from a wide diversity of people, while making it clear that including someone in the conversation does not give them free reigns in contradiction with the rest of the guidelines. Ralf, if you agree, shall we do this for SciPy, and use the new version for NumPy too? Best regards, Stéfan
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On August 3, 2018 10:35:57 Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Although, perhaps, a better question to answer is how many people feel that the current document is deficient, and does not go far enough in stating explicitly what we want from our community interactions. It is always hard to tell the opinion of the sometimes silent majority? Best regards, Stéfan
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Hi, On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 9:35 AM, Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
I must say, I disagree. I think we're already treading close to the edge with the current document, and it's more likely we'd get closer still with virtually any addition on this line. I'm in favor of keeping the political beliefs in there, on the basis it's really not too hard to distinguish good-faith political beliefs, and the current atmosphere is so repellent to people who would not identify as progressive, that I would like them to feel they have some protection. If you will not allow me "no change" and you offered me a) paragraph by group of the not-discriminated trying to imagine something comforting to imagined extremely sensitive and progressive (name your other group here) or b) no stated defense for not-progressive persons, I'd take b). Cheers, Matthew
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 2:04 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
If someone with good wordsmithing skills could draft 1-2 sentences and send a PR to the SciPy repo, so we have something concrete to discuss/approve, that would be great. If not, I can take a stab at it early next week.
There's a much more straightforward basis one can think of. There are many countries in the world that have dictatorships or one-party rule. This includes countries that we get regular contributions from. Expressing support for, e.g., democratic elections, can land you in all sorts of trouble there. For a US conference it may be okay to take a purely US perspective, and even then the inclusion/removal of "political beliefs" can be argued (as evidenced by this thread). For a project with a global reach like NumPy it's really not very good to take into account only US/Western voices. it's really not
I think "not allow" is too strong. Your opinion matters as well, so I'm happy to have/facilitate a higher bandwidth discussion on this if you want (after Monday).
Imho Robert made a very compelling argument here, so I don't completely understand the choice. Cheers, Ralf
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I’ve created a PR, and I’ve kept the language “not too stern”. https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/9109 <https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/9109> Hameer Abbasi
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 8:59 AM, Hameer Abbasi <einstein.edison@gmail.com> wrote
I’ve created a PR, and I’ve kept the language “not too stern”. https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/9109
Thanks -- for ease of this thread, the sentence Hameer added is: "We expect that you will extend the same courtesy and open-mindedness towards other members of the SciPy community." LGTM -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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One other thought: Given Jupyter, numpy, scipy, matplotlib?, etc, are all working on a CoC -- maybe we could have NumFocus take a lead on this for the whole community? I think most (all?) of the NumFocus projects have essentially the same goals in this regard. -CHB On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 9:44 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
-- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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On 3 August 2018 at 11:20, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
I think what matters in code of conduct is community buy-in and the discussions around it, more than the document itself. By off-loading the discussion and writing process to someone else, you are missing most of the benefits of codes of conducts. This is also the reason why I think codes of conduct should be revisited regularly. My 2 cents, N
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 11:33 AM, Nelle Varoquaux <nelle.varoquaux@gmail.com> wrote: I think what matters in code of conduct is community buy-in and the
discussions around it, more than the document itself.
This is a really good point. Though I think a community could still have that discussion around whether and which CoC to adopt, rather than the bike-shedding of the document itself. And the reality is that a small sub-fraction of eh community takes part in the conversation anyway. I'm very much on the fence about whether this thread has been truly helpful, for instance, though it's certainly got me trolling the web reading about the issue -- which I probably would not have if this were simply a: "should we adopt the NumFocos CoC" thread... By off-loading the discussion and writing process to someone else, you are
missing most of the benefits of codes of conducts.
well, when reading about CoCs, it seem a large part of their benefit is not to the existing community, but rather what it projects to the rest of the world, particularly possible new contributors.
This is also the reason why I think codes of conduct should be revisited regularly.
That is a good idea, yes. I'll note that at least the Contributor Covenant is pretty vague about enforcement: """ All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. """ I'd think refining THAT part for the project may provide the benefits of discussion... -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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On August 3, 2018 20:51:00 Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
But the SciPy CoC has a whole additional document that goes into further detail on this specific issue, so let's not concern ourselves with the weaknesses of the Covenant (there are plenty), but rather on what is being proposed for adoption here: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/dev/conduct/report_handling_manua... Best regards, Stéfan
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 12:45 PM, Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Actually, I did not indent that to be highlighting a limitation in the Covenant, but rather pointing out that there is plenty to discuss, even if one does adopt an existing CoC. But at Ralf points out, that discussion has been had in the context of scipy, so I agree -- numpy should adopt scipy's CoC and be done with it. In fact, if someone still feels strongly that "political beliefs" should be removed, then it's probably better to bring that up in the context of scipy, rather than numpy -- as has been said, it is practically the same community. To the point where the scipy developers guide and the numpy developers guide are published on the same web site. -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 11:20 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
Given Jupyter, numpy, scipy, matplotlib?, etc, are all working on a CoC -- maybe we could have NumFocus take a lead on this for the whole community?
or adopt an existing one, like maybe: The Contributor Covenant <http://www.contributor-covenant.org/> was adopted by several prominent open source projects, including Atom, AngularJS, Eclipse, and even Rails. According to Github, total adoption of the Contributor Covenant is nearing an astounding ten thousand open source projects. I'm trying to figure out why numpy (Or any project, really) has either unique needs or people better qualified to write a CoC than any other project or community. So much like OSS licences -- it's much better to pick an established one than write your own. For the record, the Covenant does have a laundry list of "classes", that does not include political belief, but does mention "political" here: """ Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include: ... Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks ... """ -CHB Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov
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On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 11:39 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
Nelle is right about the process and community buy-in.
The tone of the Contributor Covenant is far from good. All of this and more was extensively discussed when introducing the SciPy CoC. Can you please read the mailing list discussion on scipy-dev before suggesting a major change in direction? Also keep in mind that the SciPy and NumPy communities strongly overlap, and everyone was okay with the SciPy CoC. We're discussing one tweak to that; removing two words or adding 1-2 sentences. It is counter-productive to start from scratch. Cheers, Ralf
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 10:04 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
This all seems very sensible to me. In personal projects I use the WeAllJS CoC, because I think it does a good job of giving clear guidance on behavior and non-scary enforcement examples, while also avoiding legalism and being clear that trying to game the rules won't work. It might be a good source of inspiration here: https://github.com/WeAllJS/weallbehave/blob/latest/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 5:57 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
No. For one, from experience as a previous EuroSciPy program chair where we had a pretty similar case. Keynote speaker accepted invitation, then shortly before the event says "I cannot speak unless you introduce a CoC". There was little discussion possible. It felt like blackmail to the whole committee. Because, well, that's what it was. If existence or exact wording of a CoC is that important to you as a speaker, you should check it carefully before accepting an invitation. (and for the record, a CoC was adding the next year after there was time for a serious discussion) Also, I probably agree with all or almost all of her political views. However, starting with unrealistic hypotheticals like people with neo-Nazi insignia just ruins the credibility of the rest of the post for me. I'm not too interested in continuing this particular discussion, it won't be very productive. For the record, I don't much appreciate the parody comment. Cheers, Ralf
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Hi all! I’ve been following this thread mainly from the sidelines and thought I’d give a few of my thoughts. I like the idea that one of the rules or “protected classes” such as people of a certain race, gender, political affiliation etc. can’t use their “class status” to break any of the other rules. I believe we can make that clear in not so many words. Nathaniel’s WeAllJS CoC seems a bit too conservative, and might promote an overly uptight and formal atmosphere, cruising through some of the examples. People should be allowed to joke and express themselves, so long as it isn’t derogatory towards others. Use of the word “crazy” should be allowed if it isn’t directed towards a person/group/work, or if it expresses extremes rather than a mental condition. However, I do agree that a some people do like to insult people/groups/work out of habit and then just call it “jokes” or “shitposting”. No version of this should be allowed, even in humour. Best Regards, Hameer Abbasi
participants (20)
-
Allan Haldane
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Antoine Pitrou
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Charles R Harris
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Chris Barker
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Hameer Abbasi
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Ian Henriksen
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Ilhan Polat
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Marten van Kerkwijk
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Matthew Brett
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Nathan Goldbaum
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Nathaniel Smith
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Nelle Varoquaux
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Ralf Gommers
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Robert Kern
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Ryan May
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Sebastian Berg
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Stefan van der Walt
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Stephan Hoyer
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Steve Pointer
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Sylvain Corlay