Hi, everyone Thank you for your input, especially François and Matthew who took the time to explain opposing views. I feel one thing we have in this community that is precious, and that we should work hard to keep, is that we can have friendly conversations on controversial topics. Part of the reason I have not endorsed any CoCs before (in as much as my endorsement is worth anything), is that I was concerned about it stifling this type of conversation (or slightly controversial ways of expressing your opinion, such as in the SWC case Matthew referred to). The SciPy CoC is the first document that strikes me as taking a big step away from a policing focus, while still laying down the ground rules of play. For let's be clear: *any collaboration has rules, whether they are explicit or not*; and I would rather have them be explicit. We would never before have tolerated treating newcomers poorly (you may, e.g., have noticed me apologizing to newcomers on GitHub before when I thought comments were overly harsh), never mind much worse behavior such as racism and sexism. Putting that down on paper does not change the status quo, but as mentioned by others acts as an agreement between all of us to watch out for one another, and as a signal to new players as to how we conduct our business. François, I hear your concern about judging others. And here, I am afraid, we will need to trust in the members we appoint to the committee; because in the end these issues can be subjective. In fact, I think we should appoint you to that group, if you are willing, to make sure we don't step over any lines ;) A final point: we do not need to accept the document in its current form, or at all. While I think it is a good idea to do that, especially if we want to receive sprint funding from groups such as NumFOCUS, the PSF, any of numerous foundations, etc., we are not under time pressure, and can take time to carefully consider various concerns and objections. Thank you for taking the time to engage in this conversation, and I look forward to hearing any other opinions you all may have. Best regards Stéfan On Fri, Oct 27, 2017, at 05:28, Matthew Brett wrote:

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 11:09 AM, Juan Nunez-Iglesias wrote:

...

On 27 Oct 2017, 7:36 PM +1100, François Boulogne , wrote:> > I feel sad to see that we came to a point that we have to specify such policies in a FLOSS community.> >

This is undeniably sad, and, in my experience, it’s come to this due to events in other communities, not SciPy. I have not (knowingly) witnessed an event where this CoC would have made any difference in the SciPy community.> > I have, however, witnessed several instances of more subtle sexism that would not be *directly* addressed by the CoC. I expect the same would be true of racism. My support from the CoC stems from the belief that it signals to underrepresented would-be contributors that we won’t tolerate assholes and that they will be treated with respect should they aim to make a contribution. This belief is on admittedly shaky ground, but there’s been plenty of research to show that female contributors tend to be more intimidated by online communities (see e.g. this SO post), so we should do what we can to reduce that. Maybe CoC is not the answer but I’d like to be doing *something* to change this.> > Moreover, beyond the declaration, I always have doubts regarding the true efficiency of such guidelines in reality…

See above.

and I’m embarrassed that some of us have the power to judge, when it's not their job.> >

“not their job” is a strange thing to object to. All of us are volunteering, and the people named on the document have volunteered to be so named. (At least, I hope so! ) So, in a way, they’ve made it their job. In terms of qualifications, the main question is whether you trust the named individuals to be reasonable in their assessments. I’ll admit that I don’t know all of them but the ones that I know I 100% would.> > Stéfan in particular has been generally cautious about endorsing CoCs, so I trust that he would exercise an abundance of caution in enforcing them.> > This is far from insignificant and could be more harmful than helpful.> >

I’ve seen a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt cast over CoCs, but I don’t yet know of a case where it has been shown to cause harm?>

As a contributor to the Scipy code of conduct, I fully share Francois'> concerns, while agreeing with much of what you say.

I just want to add a couple of things.

I humbly beg that we do not refer to anyone, real or imagined, as 'assholes'. It's an ugly feature of online communities that it seems> to be acceptable to give extremely unpleasant labels to people, on subjective grounds, as if we were ourselves infallible in judgment and> behavior. "Troll" is another much-overused and highly subjective word that is very effective for labeling and excluding people. Yes,> we will occasionally be spammed by people with nasty and irrelevant stuff, but that is not a hard situation to deal with. We wouldn't need these kinds of codes of conduct if that were our only problem.

Second - about codes of conduct causing harm. On that - yes - absolutely - have a read about this incident where a woman was thrown> off the Software Carpentry mailing list for some pretty minor misbehavior, and in a cold, formal way [1]. Of course that has a chilling effect on other discussion. I think the organization got carried away enforcing its code of conduct.

But also - codes of conducts are new, we don't know what effect they are going to have. But I can say, that many of the codes of conducts> I have seen, appear to be precisely aimed at 'assholes' - where they deliberately give a lot of space for interpretation of what an 'asshole' is. That space appears to include being something close to> 'rather annoying' or 'a bit unpleasant' [2]. This is a perfect recipe> for bullying and exclusion, if anyone felt moved in that direction [3]. There's a reason that our laws don't look like that - otherwise they would be wide open for abuse. Of course the counter-argument is> "Our leader X is awesome, they would never allow that", which, it seems to me, has been adequately refuted by the whole of human history.

Cheers,

Matthew

[1] https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/23#issuecomment-269244281> [2] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MatthewBrett/posts/7mQYbw5P7Rc [3] http://kwesthues.com/diffprof.htm _______________________________________________ scikit-image mailing list scikit-image@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scikit-image