Comment by art187 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by art187 | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer, I help run an organization that requires CoC's on all events.

I like this article but it doesn't go into the positives of a CoC. There are many problems but if you don't weigh them against the positive characteristics, you don't see the full picture.

My organization NumFOCUS, asks all conferences and projects working with us to adopt some CoC. Why do we do this? First it has been shown in our community to help encourage minority groups to participate. Second it outlines a real procedure if something does go wrong. Finally, it sets the expectation of professionalism early.

Our numbers on diversity have skyrocketed as we enforces CoCs. It's not just a bandaid, it's an invitation to people of all types that we, the organizers, will protect your right to be at our event. I don't think event organizers are in any position to think they can solve all the problems in tech but at least they can create an inviting space.

Without a CoC, the procedure on how to handle a harasser is very grey. What legal grounds does a person have to tell someone to leave an event? If it is any grounds then why for some and not others? Who makes these decisions? I've seen conferences not deal with up front and have to resort to the local law enforcement to intervene.

Which brings me to my last point, set expectations up front. It's like the big silver punch bowl at the new years party. We expect you to be an adult and treat everyone else like an adult. A CoC clearly lays out that your event is intended to be professional.

I don't think it is the end of all discussions, in fact only the beginning. Our staff put together more things to consider, https://github.com/numfocus/DISCOVER-Cookbook, but a CoC is the simplist.

>Disclaimer, I help run an organization that requires CoC's on all events.

>I like this article but it doesn't go into the positives of a CoC. There are many problems but if you don't weigh them against the positive characteristics, you don't see the full picture.

The author mentions this,

"People are trying to force organizations like CCC, or events I am involved with, at a smaller scale (I cannot talk for other events I don't know anything about), to adopt a CoC because they feel like it works for them, and therefore everyone should adopt a CoC regardless of the own culture of each community."

It seems you're doing exactly this and you've ignored large parts of the reasoning in the author's post.

Uhhh, it seems like you are making a baseless extrapolation, would you like to try again?

Please explain how the observation "it doesn't go into the positives of a CoC", is equivalent to "forcing an event to adopt a CoC".

>My organization NumFOCUS, asks all conferences and projects working with us to adopt some CoC.

I think it was likely this part.

Lots of these feel-good initiatives are actually dictated by very real concerns around legal liability. For example, many corporate diversity programs exist because they're trying to protect the company from the unfavorable EEOC decisions that are required before an employee can file a lawsuit alleging discrimination.

When people do things to prevent liability, they can't say they're doing them to prevent liability, or the liability effectively recurs. If such middling statments exist, it's much more likely that judges and juries would consider the action insincere, if not intentionally deceptive and evasive, and disregard it entirely, thus undoing the effect of the program/statement/rule in the first place and potentially inviting additional punishment for the supposed deception.

So why is it a good idea for venues to force events to have Codes of Conduct? Because if the venue gets caught up in a Donglegate-esque scandal, they can point to something and say, "We did everything we reasonably could to prevent such an outcome, we told our customers that they needed to warn attendees against such behavior, we acted according to the documented procedure, and we need to get dropped from the suit and/or not have bad press anymore".

Whereas, if they don't have such a policy, especially if other venues do, there's more ambiguity and it's much harder to make a decisive argument.

This is also a large reason why PR matters so much. Try all you want to find an unbiased jury or a judge totally unmoved by public opinion, couch it in pomp and circumstance until the cows come home, but like it or not, reputations and assumptions matter. You're much more likely to get a positive outcome with a positive reputation v. a neutral or negative one, and PR events frequently become legal props: "Of course we're non-discriminatory, see $LOCAL_NEWS for the story about how we're working so hard to recruit diverse talent!"

I'm sure lots of safety margins built into bridges are also respected due to liability concerns, but I don't mind the insincerity as long as the margin is actually there to protect me when needed.

You are free to feel different of course, both in the case of bridges and in the case of people.

This is a silly analogy. A piece of paper does not provide safety. Only when the codes are exercised (And well at that) they might be any good.

This is the same fallacy politicians always commit when they pass laws rather than regulations. Or when the regulations are then not observed and penalty is ineffective.

A technical margin of safety is different as it is built into the system and works all the time. A safeguard is different as it requires no action to work at all.

Rules require observance and agreement.

Just curious, why does stating that a particular training or policy is purely for liability purposes make it not valid?

It doesn't necessarily wholesale invalidate it, and it depends on the context. The danger is that if the claim is, for example, "they are making a hostile environment for $MINORITY", if statements exist that say "We are just doing this to avoid liability", those could easily be interpreted as indicators of insincerity and that the bias exists. Whereas, if they at least appear to be True Believers, it is harder to call that into question.

It also hurts from the PR angle, for basically the same reasons. News outlets don't want to be seen as tools of the machine spreading corporate FUD and saving BigCo from liability. They want to see themselves as noble soldiers on "the right side of history", and they want the public to see them that way too.

It's therefore much easier to get coverage, which will be useful for establishing your non-bias, if you don't tell everyone "we wouldn't be running this program and enforcing these 'everyone play nice now' codes if we didn't feel there was a meaningful legal risk involved in not doing so".

Hi, I’m not ignoring the article, I’m just commenting on it. No we don’t force a community to use a CoC but we don’t want to fund ones that don’t.

>I’m not ignoring the article

You didn't address any points made by the author. You made a generic comment that could apply to any post on codes of conduct, and that's specifically against Hacker News posting guidelines.

> I like this article but it doesn't go into the positives of a CoC > you don't see the full picture

While the comment doesn't directly address points by the author it does provide a valid and important perspective.

The irony here is art187 has illustrated CoCs not working while espousing their virtues. HN guidelines is a CoC, even though it isn't named that. It has all the hallmarks of a typical CoC.

Here, art187 has made a generic comment and, as you point out, posted a shallow dismissal of the author's work. Both in violation of hn guidelines.

The original post by art187 could have succinctly been stated as "I disagree" which basically adds nothing to the conversation.

No action has been taken after 17 hours. It's still the top rated comment.

The author's submission highlights what the author thinks is "The Problem": CoCs don't work.

It's fine to disagree with that, but it's helpful to point to examples of a CoC working rather than creating another example of them not working. At the very least, comments ought to discuss specific points. None of that happened here.

Contrast that with benign comments that moderators label as "personal attacks"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16456045

But when there are actual personal attacks made against people with the "wrong" opinions,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16449741

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16449842

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16067802

No actions are taken. The implications are clear. The CoC here is used as a stick to smack people with opinions that the moderators don't like. All more evidence in favor of the author's stated assertion that CoCs don't actually work.

Your post is so right I don’t understand how it’s not self evident. How could anyone be against the very concept of setting or codifying expectations?

What would Voltaire say after finding we’re still debating perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good? An imperfect document can’t invalidate the entire concept.

A code of conduct is not a solution, it’s just another form of communications and standards that may do some good if you iterate on and refine it enough to be useful.

> Your post is so right I don’t understand how it’s not self evident. How could anyone be against the very concept of setting or codifying expectations?

The first is that they are often overly broad and police what people can say in entirely different contexts, the second is that they become weaponised so that people can only contribute if their entire political position doesn't offend somebody.

Neither are usually intended consequences, but the people putting CoC's in place don't tend to realize they are potential consequences at all.

> How could anyone be against the very concept of setting or codifying expectations?

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

Yes, it sounds good on paper, but in my experience, a code of conduct is used as a veil of legitimacy on top of partisan decisions.

Even when a CoC exists, it is ignored or twisted to use as a justification for kicking someone out of a project based on their unconventional sex life (BDSM): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13935918

A frequently used code of conduct is explicitly used to invalidate others complaints. For example the Open Code of Conduct says: "We will not act on complaints regarding: ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’" I'm Asian and I hate that discrimination against Asians is still institutionalized behavior (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551) and codes of conduct seek to silence any complaints.

We have situations like Opalgate where someone not associated with a project, dug through a contributors old tweets to find one instance where he said something politically contentious about trans people to try to get him kicked off the project. A code of conduct would encourage more behavior like this: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

In my own experience, I was participating in a computer science organization which had a code of conduct. A speaker went on stage and gave passionate speech about how Fascists are invading our city, and we need to resist and join Antifa.

I wrote an email to the organizer explaining how this goes against their code of conduct which states that they are to be inclusive to all people no matter their beliefs. I mentioned that the group the speaker was encouraging people to join would likely be engaging in violence against peaceful protesters. Of course it turned out as expected: https://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/901910682030882816 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/2...

But of course the organizer ignores behavior that breaks the code of conduct as long as it suits them.

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