Sounds like the Racket project badly needs a Code of Conduct and a governing body to enforce it. Many FOSS projects have already done this, I believe.
racketcon 2018 had a "Friendly Environment" policy: https://con.racket-lang.org/2018/
so did 2017. i can't find anything for 2019. didn't look for 2020.
the project as a whole has https://racket-lang.org/friendly.html
> a governing body to enforce it.
here's the project management team
Everyone can have a bad day and jump at the throat of someone for no reason at all; but basic politeness would require them to flatly apologize later on.
I wonder if it's linked to the current social trend of "being the greater person" and "not escalating the argument", but it's regrettable in any case.
What a CoC does is give clear expectations for everyone in the community. It makes the discussion easier because it's a simple “Don't do this, rule #3” rather than having to lawyer about whether something is a problem after things have already become heated. This doesn't solve everything, of course, but setting a baseline cuts out a lot of tedious lower-level stuff and helps set a climate which discourages bad behaviour by removing the lower level stuff which can encourage it. That guy who infamously used a porn image in a conference slide probably didn't just wake up one morning and decide to do that but was in a subgroup where sexualized comments & humor was normalized.
That's my whole point; that CoCs might be a necessary step for social changes that quite many people don't understand and/or master yet (e.g. custom pronouns) is understandable. But apologize after you hurt someone is something I (and, I assume, most people) was taught when I was 4 y.o. and should be widely applied. What will be next, a little panel reminding you to say "hello" and "goodbye" when you come in and leave, or "don't forget to say thank you" next to the cashier?
If that's your experience I feel bad for the toxic environments in which you must be immersed.
Just this week I witnessed one of my co-workers apologize to another, publicly, in front of a number of their fellow colleagues, for behaviour they regretted.
And yes, it was a genuine apology. And no there was nothing to be gained for this individual, personally, by delivering that apology.
I myself have both given and received many apologies in my professional career. If that's rare, it's only because most people, most of the time, don't behave in a way that warrants apologizing later.
It's precisely the kind of fatalism you express, here, that leads to bad behaviour going unaddressed.
Asking for forgiveness, on the other hand, is admitting that what I did was wrong. That's not necessarily the same thing that I'm sorry about -- as an example, "I'm sorry that ball hit you on the head, please would you forgive me for not being careful enough?". This separates my actions from their consequences in a way that acknowledges their affect on other people.
And I'm quite glad that in most situations I find myself, someone being willing to admit when they are wrong is considered a positive. It builds trust, and shouldn't result in losing face.
That sounds awfully weird for me coming from an environment where accepting your errors and apologizing is seen as the only honorable option; "noblesse oblige" and catholicism-impregnated traditions I assume.
If the body tasked with enforcing the CoC is the same one being an abusive penis, its not going to change things.
However, I agree that its pretty shocking that people seem to struggle with the basics of human interaction. Yes social conditions are indeed real(the autism spectrum et al), but that's not a cover for being a weapons grade tool.
more importantly the is no excuse to indulging these behaviours. If you see it, call it the fuck out. I don't mean "be the ally" pussy footing around. Empathise with the belittled party and redress the person(s) being a shit. Yes it will be touch and go, but unless you set boundaries, "founders" and "thought leaders" will continue to be obnoxious shits who chase the fun out of everything.
I agree empathy must be deployed to everyone here. However there are some things that must be stopped at source. I leave that judgement to the reader.
I removed the analysis as I contributed effort to the wrong person, which invalidates my argument.
Codes of conduct deal with these self-absorbed members (they are not trolls necessarily). CoC probably help with many other things, but taking care of this low hanging fruit is already an incredible improvement.
It is sad that we need to make rules like "do not be a jerk", but sometime ago I was disillusioned from the idea that such rules are self-evident. They mean very different things to different people, so defining them ends up being useful.
It's not about the _rule_ being non-self-evident, it's about enforcement being uneven. Most humans will tend to perceive lower negativity and rule-breaking behavior in viewpoints they agree with than in viewpoints they don't. A formal statement of rules allows a community to try to do away with this bias. A documented set of rules also allows a community to reflect on their own norms and allows them to make changes to their norms as the viewpoints of the community change.
I'm not sure I would state it as trying to do away with bias. Bias is inescapable. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that bias is a good thing, insofar as we want communities to be biased towards things that they prioritize and biased away from things that they don't. What a code of conduct does, in the best case, is allow a community to be explicit about its biases, allowing prospective contributors to see up-front exactly what kind of community they're joining.
Of course, there are plenty of cases communities implement codes of conduct poorly, usually in response to some crisis.
Sure
> I'd go so far as to say that bias is a good thing, insofar as we want communities to be biased towards things that they prioritize and biased away from things that they don't
I'd argue that this depends on the community. For some communities, sure, but for others not necessarily. A discussion/debate club or a book club is probably more interested in plural viewpoints. A game discussion site probably much less so, and a support group probably has a very narrow set of allowed viewpoints. But it depends.
> What a code of conduct does, in the best case, is allow a community to be explicit about its biases, allowing prospective contributors to see up-front exactly what kind of community they're joining.
Indeed. But also, communities aren't unified or static things. Different members of a community, even founding members (as we can see with TFA), will have different viewpoints on what the community means for them. A formal statement of rules lets everyone agree on an explicit, documented set of common rules that they feel accurately represent their community.
When I was younger I ran or helped run many small and medium size organizations and I've never been in one with unanimous opinions, even among very friendly founding members. Creating explicit rules has always been an improvement in pretty much any community I've been in with over 10 members. Leaving rules and procedures undocumented always resulted in games of shadow politics where there were tacit holders of power and tacit power groups and frustrated newcomers.
Do they? It seems to me that a Code of Conduct just gives these sorts of people an entirely new set of rules to litigate/bikeshed. If the Code of Conduct prohibits personal attacks, for example, the sorts of people who will harangue mods for admonishing them to be nice will, instead, harangue the mods about how their statement wasn't actually a personal attack.
>It is sad that we need to make rules like "do not be a jerk"
I don't think the problem is in the rules or lack thereof. I think the problem is there in the (lack of) enforcement. Many internet communities are allergic to anything that smacks of "censorship", and thus find themselves at a loss whenever someone comes along and willfully violates community norms. We should remember that "well kept gardens die by pacifism" [1], and no matter how detailed and elaborate the rules, someone needs to be willing to actually enforce them. A Code of Conduct (or some other formalized set of rules) can help here insofar as it allows the moderator to point to something outside their own thoughts as a justification for why they're taking action against a transgressive community member.
However, it's possible to go too far. Wikipedia is a great example of what happens when rules become too elaborate. There are many trolls on Wikipedia who are around simply because they've mastered the arcana of the various rules and procedures Wikipedia has built up in its efforts to create an "objective" standard of community behavior. Whenever they're brought up for discipline, they can point to some previous case where superficially similar behavior was excused.
[1]: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-ke...
The solution there would be to make clear what constitutes a personal attack. No reason to bikeshed over it.
It's easy to spot! Not that there are unbiased observers. Just ones that are and aren't biased against you in particular. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Now I'm certainly not claiming a CoC has unintended outcomes, but surely as often as I see them recommended (and at times even demanded), I would hope there exists decent evidence of their usefulness.
In this particular case I agree, a CoC would be too-little-too-late. But if there had been a CoC it would be easy grounds for dismissing Felleisen (assuming the allegations are true) with little (but still some, since power abusers die hard) fanfare. Now there will be a whole bunch of witch hunt politics and the community will suffer the more for it.
One[0] short overview paper outlines the roles CoCs play in open source. Perhaps some of the works that cite it[1] could be of use to you.
0: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexander_Serebrenik/pu...
1: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=6026298708957212914...
Some communities do have formal "moderation teams" with this responsibility.
One major advantage of this is that such a moderation team doesn't have to be reserved for egregious cases; that team can also step in when things get somewhat heated and provide lighter feedback to keep things from escalating.
> it's not legally binding
It's not intended to be. The goal of a CoC is to state community norms and serve as a point of reference to reduce relitigation of those norms. It's also to help people feel that a community cares about those norms and will actually enforce them. (This stops holding true if a community has a CoC on paper but refuses to enforce it, which unfortunately does happen sometimes. But on balance, it's a useful signal.)
I'm all for training project members (i.e. people who are involved in organizing conferences or summer schools) in practical techniques for better organizing the community, and I think holding everybody responsible leads to better results than having activists with an agenda write the rules and just delegating authority to them.
This is not a CoC issue, this is an issue of enforcement, and in the absence of enforcement a CoC isn't worth the paper its written on.
For people who don't know, the Racket project was started by Matthias Felleisen in the early '90s. The next people on the project were all his PhD students:
- Matthew Flatt
- Robby Findler
- Shriram Krishnamurthi
- Cormac Flanagan
Later additions who are top contributors to github.com/racket/racket:
- Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (Felleisen's student)
- Jay McCarthy (Krishnamurthi's student)
- Vincent St-Amour (Felleisen's student)
- Ryan Culpepper (Felleisen's student)
- Asumu Takikawa (Felleisen's student)
- Eric Dobson (Krishnamurthi's undergraduate student)
In the top 10 contributors listed on GitHub, only 2 are not academic descendants of Felleisen:
- Eli Barzilay
- Matthias Felleisen
EDIT: I originally listed Eric Dobson as "not an academic descendant of Felleisen" because I hadn't been able to find information on a dissertation or the like, but a comment informed me that they were an undergraduate student of Krishnamurthi so I have updated the comment to reflect this.
Eric Dobson and I were undergrads studying under Shriram. I don't contribute to Racket, but it has nothing to do with Felleisen being an asshole.
A CoC is at least in theory a commitment to not make such a decision.
A CoC already destroyed many other communities.