Code of Conduct

My concern - when there are rules, they can be abused. I believe our community works without any written rules. I hope no one feels differently and I’d be deeply sorry if I overlooked something. There’s no need to introduce any formal document now in my opinion. If we need some guidelines, I’d like it to be “don’t be stupid”. I personally don’t want to judge, whether someone acted according to the code or not.

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May I ask, why do you think that? We have had guidelines on https://www.theforeman.org/support.html#CommunityGuidelines for a long time. Moreover, with the exception of the very ocassional kick on IRC, we have not had any issues at all. If we do have them, so our mechanism is to communicate to the community leaders as explained below the rules.

@Gwmngilfen @Ori_Rabin Would you say moving these guidelines into the repository in a more prominent place would be a good idea (top of README for example)? As far as I have seen there’s nothing objectionable, political and they have served us well. Maybe adding some text about how would we handle “guidelines violators” would make sense. Frankly I doubt we need to apply such level of bureaucracy as I see in here https://medium.com/mozilla-open-innovation/how-were-making-code-of-conduct-enforcement-real-and-scaling-it-3e382cf94415 - but I’m open to whatever you think makes the most sense for us.

This is (as we’ve already seen) a highly charged topic, so I want to set some expectations here:

  1. This is my problem

I’d don’t have to do this too often, thanks to our amazing community, but guiding and resolving these kind of discussions is absolutely the role of a community lead.

The chances are that I won’t put this to a vote. Votes are fantastic to judge opinion when your distribution of opinion looks like this:

image

In other words, when you’re struggling to pick up signal out of disinterest (for some) and not-so-strong feelings for others. However, when you have a polarising issue, and the community looks like this:

image

Then all you do is pick an option that nobody actually wants. That’s an excellent way to upset everyone. (To be clear, I generated random numbers for these plots, it’s to illustrate a point)) If you strongly feel it should go to a vote, then I want to speak to you too and understand your thinking. It’s not that I don’t trust the community, or that I think it’ll be a 50/50 split, but rather that I feel a vote will increase tension instead of resolve it. I’d rather shoot for a reasonable amount of consensus instead.

So, what I am going to do is speak to people, and keep this thread updated. It’s not going to get forgotten about, promise.

  1. We’re not going to rush this debate

Knee-jerk-reactions are pretty much always a bad idea, and certainly the worst examples I’ve seen of communities getting angry over these types of discussions has been because it was rushed.

In addition, right now, a sizeable portion of our community is on holiday (the folks in Israel, primarily), and they deserve a chance to speak.

So, don’t expect me to open a PR tomorrow. I need time to speak to people, and we need to allow time for those on leave to return.

With that said, let me reply to a few points:

That’s not true, we have Guidelines written down. I deliberately chose to call them guidelines when I wrote that document 2 years ago, because I felt that was what it should be called, but functionally it’s the same concept.

I do agree that our community works largely with reference to those rules, however, because this is a great community :slight_smile:

I used to hold this position too. However, it’s wrong to say “there are no rules” if they’re not written down - rather, we all have expectations of how to act, and how to be treated. When those expectations are broken, tensions rise - you can see this in person by travelling to a country with a strongly different culture, for example.

So, without further clarification, disputes will happen when two different peoples view of what those things mean clash. In other words, the rules already exist, mostly in our cultures & in our heads - by writing down what this community expects, we only improve clarity in what to expect.

Again, we already have these things written down anyway, on the Guidelines page, and it rarely comes up because we’re respectful. As previously stated, improving that page seems the likely option from here. However, I do agree with you in the sense that you cannot cover every situation, and the guidelines should be drawn up to allow for some interpretation. To quote from the Drupal link earlier:

“This isn’t an exhaustive list of things that you can’t do. Rather, take it in the spirit in which it’s intended - a guide to make it easier to enrich all of us and the technical communities in which we participate”

Yes, I alluded to this earlier. I’m unsure if it should be linked to from every repo, but at the very least it should be more prevalent on the website, and linked to from Discourse and Redmine (actually Discourse has a default set of it’s own guidelines at FAQ - TheForeman, which should also be updated)

Enforcement is absolutely important - happily it comes up vary rarely (so far). However, enforcement is primarily a problem for the community team to get right - but it doesn’t hurt to write those things down and be transparent. What we have right now is quite thin in that regard, and I’ll happily take improvements for consideration. I hope that section is less controversial, since it primary affects those who have to do the enforcing.

Lastly, let me take a moment to thank everyone for keeping this discussion civil. I’ve seen way too many CoC threads end in drama. You folks are all awesome. Stay tuned, there will be updates :slight_smile:

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That’s true, it worked 5 years without though. I read these rules 2 years ago and happily forgot. I have no issues with those generic guidelines, which are probably useful for new members of the community. I’d still prefer not codifying things, but if I can read, agree and forget again, that’s fine too.

Just please don’t expect me to judge, whether someone is not using welcoming language, gracefully accept constructive criticism or exhibits “Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting”.

I also obviously don’t want to be enforcing things listed above, if contributor covenant is accepted, please be mercifull when applying “Project maintainers who do not follow or enforce the Code of Conduct in good faith may face temporary or permanent repercussions as determined by other members of the project’s leadership.” on me :slight_smile:

Usually when I work on an issue, I start with figuring out, what needs to be fixed. I’m sorry it isn’t obvious to me, but maybe we should start with what we’re trying to achieve first.

I was discussing this at home last night. In some ways what I think @gwmngilfen has been dancing around without saying specifically is that - and I could be wrong - a CoC is merely a preparation for should something happen. What we are trying to fix is that the community managers need to have a community supported document that they can use as a defence when an issue does arise.

In it’s simplest terms, if something or some event or some member or some member’s actions were to create a scenario, it’s best to have a set of principles and procedures in place beforehand. Because once the chaos of a non “nice, helpful, patient, calm” starts that is the worst time to have to implement a CoC. It looks reactive because it is reactive.

When I said mature in my first response, this is what I am talking about. We are proactively setting up a set of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours, and we are setting up a system of procedures on how to deal with situations that fall into the unacceptable bucket. In that way, when it occurs we can point to the CoC and say “it says don’t schfnargl or you will be sent to Morpork. You schfnargled. You must now go to Morpork.”

Sorry, I should have been shorter.

What we are trying to fix is the problem that we have yet to provide our community managers with the tools they need to do their job.

This tool is most necessary when the community manager’s job is as bad as it will get.

Let’s get it done now, so we don’t need to get it done then.

Documents do not fix issues, it’s the people. We like to say “papír snese všechno” which means something like “you can draw elephants on a paper” and it can means as liitle as nothing. I personally don’t like much paperwork, you can spend your time in more appropriate way. As a technical guy, I also do not prefer “premature optimialization” and “solving non-existing problems”. I do respect others who like the opposite tho.

What I want to say, it can work perfectly without a document in community manager’s hands, thus I am arguing your verb “need”. Also, community manager is not the only one who would take an action - there’s whole group of core members with elevated permissions on all our services.

And lastly, I like friendly approach. If someone makes a mistake, instead of enforcing in any kind of way, I’d probably go for friendly explanation. Enforcement is important, but in a different way that some people think. It must be done in reasonable and sensitive way. And such a document won’t help you at all how to approach an individual issue.

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One aspect a lot of you have already sort of mentioned is how literal we should take things. I really like our guidelines which describe the spirit rather than the letter. Someone can always find a new way so it’s impossible to enumerate every single violation.

In my experience the Foreman community has almost universally been intelligent and professional people who can think for themselves. Telling them how to behave is treating them like children but we can set expectations.

I liked the suggestion of creating a Code of Conduct document at the place people expect it where we refer to the guidelines. It’s also a place to describe why we chose guidelines.

tl;dr: I don’t see a reason to change our current policy. We can make it easier to find

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Seems that there is a segment of the Global Community trying to push their own ideologies onto everyone else. They are attempting to co-op EVERY open source project with this CoC. I fully reject this concept as a Foreman user. Why?

I have been a foreman user for several years now. I have only ever experienced positivity here. I have only ever experienced people actively trying to help me with my questions and problems using foreman software. I never once was asked about my Gender Identification, Sexuality, or anything else discussed in the CoC.

In my opinion, the foreman community is one of the best communities I am involved with. Its all about the software. Its not broken and does not need any ‘fixing’.

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In summary I agree with opinions stating that the people in the community are responsible for their actions and their intercourse. That’s why I’m with lzap that papers do not solve social misbehaviour, people do.

Nevertheless a CoC is some kind of commitment from the community to the community and especially new members.

Imho we don’t “need” this document but it would be nice to have. And it’s perfectly okay if it will never be necessary to pull the document out and telling people “here it is written, adhere to it”.

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This community already has guidelines here: https://community.theforeman.org/guidelines

Actually that’s the default text that comes with Discourse, it seems we never got around to checking if it’s consistent with the existing stuff on our website (although I think it is, in spirit). Thanks for reminding me, I’ll add that to the todo list - at the very least it should have a link in there … :slight_smile:

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That would probably include GDPR and https://community.theforeman.org/privacy as well :slight_smile: