[SciPy-Dev] establishing a Code of Conduct for SciPy

[Ralf Gommers]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 2:11 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Back to the code of conduct discussion, Nathaniel has raised a
> pertinent theme over at the Scipy PR - main comment at:
>
> https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/7963#discussion_r145580285
>
> Nathaniel's basic point, as I understand it, is that one common type
> of behavior that we should be able to deal with, is flagrant and
> aggressive abuse, likely from people otherwise not involved in Scipy.
> He gives this example "Last night someone logged into the #scipy
> channel on Freenode and started pasting racial slurs in giant
> letters.".
>
> Nathaniel then goes on to argue that the language and procedures in
> the CoC as stands don't apply to that case.
>
> I think that's reasonable, but I think we have to be careful to
> distinguish:
>
> 1) obvious flagrant abuse, likely from someone who does not
> contribute, possibly from someone who does contribute who is having a
> breakdown of some sort and
> 2) discussions that started in good faith and have gone out of control.
>
> It's true that the current code of conduct is aimed more or less
> squarely at the second.
>
> I don't personally think we're going to have too much trouble
> distinguishing these two cases, so I'm going to suggest that, instead
> of switching the doc to aiming at case 1 rather than case 2, we have a
> safely-valve mechanism for case 1.   This would go something like:
>
> """
> As a special case,


Your suggestions all make sense, but I suggest not calling one of possible
types of cases a "special case".

Ralf

we know that it is painfully common for internet
> communication to start at or devolve into obvious and flagrant abuse
> including violent, racist and sexist language.   In the specific case
> of violent, racist or sexist language, these {named moderators} will
> use the following procedure:
>
> * immediately disconnect the person from all Scipy communication channels;
> * if the originator appears to be a previous contributor, the
> moderator may try to contact the contributor by some other means to
> check whether their account has been hacked.
> * if the originator is in fact a previous contributor, and the
> contributor wants to be reconnected to the Scipy channels, then
> {consider some cooling off period, an agreement not to repeat the
> behavior, and email moderation.  A previous contributor also has the
> right to an appeal to the code of conduct committee}.
> * in every case, the moderator should make a reasonable effort to
> contact the originator, and tell them specifically how their language
> qualifies as "violent, racist or sexist language", and they should
> copy this explanation to the code of conduct committee.  The code of
> conduct committee should formally review and sign off on these cases
> every year to make sure this mechanism is not being used to control
> ordinary heated disagreement.
> """
>
> I've argued before [1] that the best way to think about these
> documents, is in terms of specific use-cases.  In Nathaniel's case
> above, I think it's fairly obvious how the mechanism above would work.
>   Next we consider the famous case of the sexist joke on the Ubuntu
> mailing list [2].  I think that would also qualify for the mechanism
> above, but where we would expect the resolution to be that the
> originator would have to agree not to post sexist material to that
> list, and be moderated for a while,   Last we consider the SpacedGirl
> Software Carpentry Case [1], where this procedure could not reasonably
> be invoked, and the rest of the current code of conduct would apply.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Matthew
>
> [1] https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/23#issuecomment-269244281
> [2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Ubuntu_Code_of_Conduct_incident
> _______________________________________________
> SciPy-Dev mailing list
> SciPy-Dev at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/attachments/20171019/777bd870/attachment-0001.html>