[scikit-image] Community guidelines

[Juan Nunez-Iglesias]

On 27 Oct 2017, 7:36 PM +1100, François Boulogne <fboulogne at sciunto.org>, 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?

Juan.
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