Hi Petr,
Nobody is language policing, this is about preventing abusive behavior and creating an inviting environment where volunteers and staff don't have to waste time with emotional processing of traumatic interactions.
I think we're after the same thing, that we want to keep our community friendly and productive, so it's just a matter of agreeing on the means to accomplish this. I see the Code of Conduct Committee standing up to the nonsense and you see them as being hostile, so our perspectives diverge at that point. I also see lots of people on this list standing up for what they think is right, and I'd love if that energy could be organized better so that we're not sniping at each other, but instead refining our shared statements of social values and finding a way to encourage the good while more effectively addressing the worst in us.
This isn't coherent enough to share yet, but I'll try anyway—I've been thinking about how our high proportion of anarchic- and libertarian-oriented individuals helped shape a culture which doesn't handle "negative laws" [1] well. For example, the Code of Conduct is mostly focused on "unacceptable behaviors", but perhaps we could rewrite it in the positive sense, as a set of shared responsibilities to support each other and the less powerful person in any conflict. We have a duty to speak up, a duty to keep abusers from their target, we own this social space and have to maintain it together. If you see where I'm headed? Rewriting the CoC in a positive rights framework is a daunting project, but it might be fun.
Regards, Adam
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 9:36 AM Petr Bena benapetr@gmail.com wrote:
I am a bit late to the party, but do we seriously spend days discussing someone being banned from a bug tracker just for saying "WTF", having their original comment completely censored, so that the community can't even make a decision how bad it really was? Is that what we turned into? From highly skilled developers and some of best experts in the field to a bunch of language nazis?
We have tens of thousands of open tasks to work on and instead of doing something useful we are wasting our time here. Really? Oh, come on...
We are open source developers. If you make Phabricator too hostile to use it by setting up some absolutely useless and annoying rules, people will just move to some other bug tracker, or decide to spend their free time on a different open source project. Most of us are volunteers, we don't get money for this.
P.S. if all the effort we put into this gigantic thread was put into solving the original bug instead (yes it's a bug, not a feature) it would be already resolved. Instead we are mocking someone who was so desperate with the situation to use some swear words.
On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 12:06 AM, Yaron Koren yaron57@gmail.com wrote:
Nuria Ruiz nuria@wikimedia.org wrote:
The CoC will prioritize the safety of the minority over the comfort of
the
majority.
This is an odd thing to say, in this context. I don't believe anyone's safety is endangered by hearing the phrase in question, so it seems like just an issue of comfort on both sides. And who are the minority and majority here?
The way the bug was closed might be incorrect (I personally as an
engineer
agree that closing it shows little understanding of how technical teams
do
track bugs in phab, some improvements are in order here for sure) but
the
harsh interaction is just one out of many that have been out of line for while.
This seems like the current argument - that it's not really about the use of a phrase, it's about an alleged pattern of behavior by MZMcBride. What this pattern is I don't know - the one example that was brought up was a blog post he wrote six years ago, which caused someone else to say something mean in the comments. (!) As others have pointed out, there's a lack of transparency here.
-Yaron _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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