Three things. One, I won't hold this view against you, Steven, nor should anyone else. You expressed an opinion politely and it wasn't somehow prejudiced against a group of people. You should never worry about expressing an unpopular opinion as long as it's done with respect and not flat-out evil like being racist or something. The whole point of CoCs is to make it so people feel welcome to express themselves.
Two, the PSF CoC is not retroactively applied to all things. For instance, this list does not fall under the CoC (notice no mention in the footer nor at https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers). So deciding to apply the PSF CoC to all things related to the development of Python would require something like a PEP.
And three, we need a CoC. Not to explicitly call anyone out, but in the past week or so I have heard peoples' ideas called "ridiculous" and been told to "shut up" on various mailing lists. I have met people at PyCon numerous times who have viewed at least python-dev as at minimum cold and possibly hostile to people, and that's simply not the kind of environment I would like to foster. I honestly think all of us -- including me -- have been way too tolerant of core devs having bad attitudes and not calling them out on it, especially when they simply got too passionate and lost their composure (the magic of email is we can think before we send so tolerating outbursts of any regularity really shouldn't happen). Part of this tolerance for bad attitudes has been cultural, but having a CoC would help to start changing that by making people feel comfortable in standing up and stating they thought someone had been rude.
Anyway, that's why I support having a CoC that applies to everything involving Python's development.
-Brett from a tablet
On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 12:29:52PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
[...]
> I think their guidelines align pretty well with the way we try to run
> the CPython issue tracker and the core mailing lists, but we don't
> currently spell out those expectations for newcomers (or potential
> newcomers) as clearly as they have.
>
> Would folks mind if I drafted a CPython Code of Conduct inspired by
> their example, and proposed it for inclusion in the Developer's Guide?
Is there an actual social problem you are trying to solve here, or have
you just run out of things to do? :-)
The PFS has had a CoC for over a year now. I haven't seen any reduction
in "bad behaviour" (it was so low that it would be hard to go any
lower), but in my opinion it seems that people are even less inclined to
express unpopular viewpoints and more inclined to stay silent. I don't
know if that is due to the CoC. I haven't seen anyone directly threated
by it for voicing an unpopular opinion, but I know that its at the back
of my mind whenever I think about posting. If people don't like what I
have to say, can they use the CoC to threaten me? That makes me
self-censor all the time, and I don't mean "Am I being a dick?". I mean
"How unpopular will this opinion be?"
I spent a *long* time thinking about whether or not I should send this
and go against the multitude of +1s, and I'm not sure that people aren't
going to hold it against me. (What sort of monster must I be to be
against a CoC and in favour of trolls and abuse?) I know of other
forums, not Python related, where what I am saying certainly would be
held against me for being "disruptive".
To me, a CoC has a definite chilling effect when it comes to voicing
opinions that go against the majority. It's hard enough to swim against
the tide of popular opinion even in the absense of formal rules that can
be used against you. If there was a genuine problem with trolls and
abuse on the tracker, then I would consider stronger measures than what
we already have in place (i.e. social disapproval, and the ability to
close people's account on the tracker). You don't need a CoC to say to
somebody "There's no call for that, you went to far, you crossed a
line."
--
Steve
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