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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else, presumptive of their right to associate. Sorry, I disagree: people can decide they don't want to associate with you or me for reasons we don't find justifiable. I can throw a party and not invite you simply for writing this comment; I can start a project and not allow you to contribute. You can relate to the rest of the world that I did that, and let them decide what that means to them.

We've gone out of our way to encode into law the exceptions to that rule. We can talk all we want about "anglo-derived common law" in those cases.

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You inadvertently gave away the game.

We can all agree that everyone has the right to be arbitrary and capricious. Codes of conduct are a formalization of expectations and rules for behavior. The are often tied (explicitly or implicitly) to an adjudication and enforcement process much more complicated than the person in charge just saying "get the fuck out".

However when someone brings up the idea of improving that bureaucratic process by comparing and contrasting Codes of Conduct language and enforcement to our society's hard-fought experience in creating fair justice systems, you retreated right back to the right to be arbitrary and capricious.

This is why people can't help but wonder: what the fuck are we trying to accomplish here? All I know is I need to publish a specific flavor of bureaucratic boilerplate so I don't get my reputation attacked for not publicly promising to kick out people I would have kicked out anyway. And that I can use that document to dole out punishments with a larger air of legitimacy and seriousness than just telling someone not to come around my place anymore.

I think in your cynicism you've totally lost all meaning and purpose of the code of conduct

It's not a piece of legalese with which you can bludgeon people to get your way (I mean it can be, but that is not and should not be the point)

When an organization has a code of conduct, it makes clear how I can complain about actions or events that occur under their jurisdiction. This is important because if you have high friction to reporting issues, issues don't get reported. [1]

What happens then? People who have legitimate grievances are the ones who stop coming around and you're left surrounded by the assholes who chased them off

The code of conduct should be cheerfully received by everyone:

1. I know that my actions are above board, because I can read what is allowed

2. I know that any actions that aren't will be reported and processed not in public (eg on Twitter) but in some sort of well-defined process

3. I know what the range of penalties can be

4. If I experience a violation caused by someone else I know how to report it

Four is arguably the most important point. Otherwise you end up with would-be coc violations adjudicated on Twitter.

[1] I'll add that it should also describe how people who receive reports respond and how the issue will be mediated. All of these steps are important. It's important for conference volunteers to know what to do when they receive a report. It's important that you know how to make a report.

These documents don't stop at describing the appropriate mechanism for reporting an incident, but rather they address topics of remediation and punishment: topics of justice.

defen points out that when these constitutions tread into topics of justice, they would do well to consider how to set up a fair system and what common mistakes to avoid.

This is a reasonable point and should not be at all controversial. Do you want fair treatment?

This begs the question of who decides the rules of an organization.

I want to attend events with rules I like - I might like them because they're fair, I might like them because they ban symbols I find offensive.

Ultimately, it's up to the organization to define the rules, and it's up to me to decide if I want to attend an event with those rules.

Oh, I think you underestimate my cynicism. I think some people adopted a piece of legalese without caring about the exact bounds and effects of implementing the terms of that legalese. It was vaguely in the direction of "stopping the bad stuff from happening" and was written with serious-sounding words so they just sort of assumed everything would work out fine. This blog post and HN thread are proof it has not.

>The code of conduct should be cheerfully received by everyone

I never cheerfully receive process. Process is valuable, process is important to have, but god-oh-god is it ever a massive pain in the ass.

Designing, drafting, implementing and refining process is HARD. I professionally maintain what I'll brazenly call "actually important" process so I don't get why everyone is so squeamish around the idea of maintaining the CoC process. (Well, I suspect that they're worried it will be corrupted by those nogoodnicks that they inartfully adopted this process to get rid of instead of growing some spine and just tossing them out on their ass in the first place.)

>legalese with which you can bludgeon people to get your way (I mean it can be, but that is not and should not be the point)

Understanding that this _will_ happen is just another part of designing process.

This is a great response, thanks!

I think I agree with 99% of it.

I'll take the rest of this comment to note that elsewhere I'm lauding codes of conduct because they are lighter-weight than certain legal processes.

I think many of the people who write CoCs are oblivious to the fact that people lie, or may just be unreliable witnesses. Nor are the creators of a CoC trained or able to run an adjucation process.

If you punish anyone who has a report filed against them without evaluating those reports or requesting any proof, then you will quickly be left with a small pool of very manipulative people looking to game the system.

> I think many of the people who write CoCs are oblivious to the fact that people lie,

I posit that those who write CoCs are _precisely_ the type of people who lie. The average person DOES NOT lie as a matter of course. Small lies, bigger lies occasionally when embarassed. People who write CoCs want to control others. People who want to control others are narcissists/social dominants. Narcissists lie ALL THE TIME.

I think the problem arises when people want to have it both ways. If you want to say "we don't like you, please leave", you're probably [1] within your rights to do so, but then you don't also get to claim to have a fair and impartial process.

[1] This gets nastier when "you" is something like a corporation, a university, or the well-funded host committee of a generally public event. Legally and ethically, your latitude to exclude people from a private party is much greater than is your latitude to exclude people from a public-ish gathering that any person could show up to.

Yes the problem is giving the impression of a formal process and all that entails (i.e. fairness). If you want an informal process then the code of conduct should be informal: "Be nice, don't be a jerk".

It's not "every group of people" -- it's organizations that invite the participation of the public, or at least of others they don't know well, as long as they adhere to the mores of the community.

More importantly, I take the parent's point to be, not that such an organization "owes" anything to anyone, but simply that anyone formalizing a Code of Conduct and a committee to enforce it would do well to understand why the protections of due process exist. If their intention is truly to create a safe space for interaction, setting up a process that can be easily abused is not going to help with that.

> it's organizations that invite the participation of the public,

I feel like this is a very important classification: Inviting someone to an event with Byzantine rules and punishments should be frowned upon.

There's a disconnect here in that your argument presumes that we are talking about groups of people which organically and unanimously decided to install a CoC as a guideline or explanation on how exactly they are going to exercise their right to free association. However, the scenery that opponents of the CoC-associated culture typically see, and consider the modal scenario to be opposed, is that CoC proponents demand that groups of people that do not initially include them (or at least that they are a fairly marginal minority in) institute CoCs. Quite often, this also includes an implicit or explicit demand to install an outsider belonging to the "CoC proponent" group in a position that has wide-ranging powers to interpret the CoC. (After all, someone not properly trained might commit a rookie mistake such as thinking that in the story this thread is about, the enforcers were actually the ones who violated the CoC!) Consider the now-famous example of the person who first wanted to impose a CoC on Ruby canvassing/thinking out loud about removing Matz from his BDFL position.

You could argue that, if someone tells me to install a CoC or else (they will complain to my employer, and spread the message that I am a bad person), they are just exercising their right to free association and/or helping my employer and anyone who may see that messaging exercise theirs, but I think that this is very close to being a free association counterpart of the "free speech" defense of blatant slanderous misinformation, or people using a public list of businesses operated by members of a minority to inform their non-patronage.

> people can decide they don't want to associate with you or me for reasons we don't find justifiable

Unless your decision involves a protected group, in which case this is a little more nuanced.

> I can throw a party

Professional organizations putting together conferences do not get the same liberties as individuals organizing family events.

Individuals might have the right to disassociate, but organizations have more power then individuals, and concentrate power in the hands of a small number of people, and thus should have some democratic checks on that power. Elections are one form of democratic check on power, but a randomized selection of peers works as a statistically sampled approximation, which is why the concept of a jury exists.

Any organization without democratic checks to redistribute power to its constituents is generally seeking to hold hierarchical power over those constituents and others, and should be distrusted.

People also have the right to associate, like a person could crash your party if it’s a public place and not against the law. You can also be a dick and find ways to actively ruin other people’s events. What I’m saying is that your comment doesn’t make sense since no one is owed anything, not even the right to disassociate. He’s within his “right” to complain about them dissociating themselves with him and pointing out things he thinks might help someone’s decision when it comes to associating with them

Your party wouldn't have a formal written document that claims to set out specific rules, wouldn't be inviting arbitrary members of the public on the basis of a shared interest, would make no claim to be anything other than an arbitrary group of people picked by you on the basis of whatever, and generally differs from this situation in a lot of ways.

Nonetheless, if you invited a bunch of people to your party, then you and three others inexplicably ganged up on one of them, told them they were a bad person for claiming someone else was wrong, bullied them, made them cry and then banned them from future parties, then that sort of behaviour probably would get around and you'd soon develop a reputation for being an asshole.

Before today's post I had no views on JupyterCon, after today's post my view is that it seems to be run by assholes; that will certainly impact my future decisions around Jupyter and its community if I end up in a position to need to make them. That outcome could have been avoided by the advice to follow best practices from the legal system. This unfortunate blog post could have been avoided, and JupyterCon would have its reputation intact.

> Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else, presumptive of their right to associate

If you "start a project and not allow [me] to contribute" then you're by definition starting a much more traditional, hierarchical, authoritarian community, with the forms of dispute resolution you would expect there. Now that's okay, but it means that you should probably be upfront about it from the onset. And it also means you should expect pushback and accusations (probably accurate ones) of bait and switch if you change directions midway. They will say "that doesn't sound very egalitarian to me" and they will probably be correct. It shouldn't be a problem if you don't want to court that segment, or power your community through their contributions. But if you do want to court that segment, then I think they will want you to play by their rules.

I also think this is why the idea of Anglo common law was brought up. It is a form of dispute resolution which is pretty amenable to egalitarian, decentralized dispute resolution. What I like about Anglo common law is that it minimizes the need for a fair authority figure in favor of a fair autonomous process operable by a majority of equal peers:

> Does it allow anonymous accusations?

> Is the accused allowed to know the charges against them, before a finding of guilt is rendered?

> Is there a presumption of innocence?

> Is the accused allowed to have a trusted third party - one who knows the rules of the game - to advocate on their behalf?

> Who, exactly, is responsible for deciding matters of fact vs matters of "law"?

> Is there an appeals process to fix possibly incorrect decisions?

All of these concerns must be addressed to create such a system. And I think that a lot of prospective contributors (such as myself) do not want to be part of a community unless it is run by such a system. I also think that such contributors will be particularly incensed about contributing to such communities that say they are run by such systems but which are actually oligarchies. In that case, I would feel like I had originally contributed to the community as an equal, but I am instead now just a cog helping build someone else's dream. This will not just discourage me from contributing to the community, but it will make me regret ever doing so in the first place, and resent the community's leaders for lying to me.

So going back to your original example, I think you are well within your rights to start a project and not allow me to contribute. But if you do that, I think you have to be honest about what kind of community you are really building. It is one thing to say you wish to build a community through benevolent dictatorship. It is another to say you wish to build a community through distributed consensus. It's not really a two-way door. Switching directions midway can cause collateral damage with an extremely high blast radius.

> Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else

They very well might. When you exercise your judgment in any way, you are liable for damages. Due process might protect you from that.

I agree with the top-voted reply: you want Code-of-Conducts for the cover it gives to organizations, and not for the protection it offers to the victims of organizations.

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