[scikit-image] Community guidelines

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 11:09 AM, Juan Nunez-Iglesias
<jni.soma at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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?

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