Man, I'm so happy that things like https://github.com/mniip/wtfcoc/blob/master/CoC.md exist.
People are so fragile nowadays on the internets. how come?
People are so fragile nowadays on the internets. how come?
echo "Don't be a dickhead, or I'll block you from the repo until you stop." > CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
edit: A false sense of security if not actually security as the author of this article found out.
If people are idiots about enforcing the CoC, I'm willing to bet they'd have been idiots about enforcing the "don't be a dickhead" rule too.
Then people understand what the CoC is: the project owners just moderating the project as they see fit. This is basically what all open source projects have done since forever. If others read the public list of moderation actions and disagree with the project owners' enforcement behavior (it being too lax or too strict or otherwise unfair or wrong), they can choose not to participate.
Trying to codify every possible violation into a set of explicit rules, or, worse, trying to codify good behavior, just leads to this sort of "you technically violated this part here" bludgeoning.
I mean, that's basically a CoC-by-example. I don't really disagree with that modulo some surmountable reservations about giving too much attention to either bad actors or victims. Where I think this falls short is that, when spinning up a new project, you'd start with a blank page, so people _don't_ have the opportunity to determine whether they disagree with your moderation style until enough bad things have actually happened. Why not carry over your learnings from previous projects?
If every single project on GitHub right now removed its CoC, how much would really change over the next month or two? The vast majority of people know what's generally acceptable or unacceptable, and the vast majority of open source project owners share that sensibility. There may be a rare case of a project owner who thinks saying "hi, it might be better to do [X]" is offensive, or a contributor who thinks it's okay to say "this code is fucking terrible, you're a moron", but unless you're dealing with Linus Torvalds or someone else really unusual, it's almost never a concern.
When contributing to a project with such a blank page, you run the risk of encountering that odd project owner who seems to diverge from almost everyone else in the community, but I think the risk is so low and the impact so minor that it's not worth worrying about it much. And if it's truly a concern for some reason, you can just click on the owners' other projects or Google their names/monikers to see if anything concerning comes up.
I definitely think project owners should moderate shitty behavior, and I think for other sorts of communities (like message boards) there might be stronger requirements for somewhat more explicit rules, and if a particular project for some reason has had more than one instance of behavior the owner finds unacceptable but contributors don't then it makes sense to explicitly clarify some things, but in general I don't really understand all of the bureaucracy surrounding this.
(Sure, I can shrug off the judgement, but being blocked from their repo is still a hassle if it could have been avoided with better up-front communication.)
But knowing what's in the CoC doesn't actually tell you what kind of stuff the maintainer cares about. The maintainers will still block you if they consider you dickheadish, they'll just find a reading of their CoC that lets them declare you a racist (or whatever) first.
I don't think I'd use the wtfcoc, but it's just being explicit that the owner of the repo can block you if desired, which some people need to have said.
No, which is why I think the rule doesn't add any actionable information.
I don't need to see a person's behavior rulebook if I'm going to play D&D at a meetup, or jam on some music together or whatever. The vast majority of casual stuff like that doesn't need it and shouldn't need it. Neither does joe's casual github project either.