Determining whether action should be taken on harassment should not be
based on a popularity contest. That would be a fail, and that's what
Karen is right to point out.
No one is suggesting that Code4Lib needs to develop a governance system
or that there need to be any future rules. We just need to determine
that there is agreement that this one policy is something we can all
abide by in this "nonexistent" space to make sure it's "safe" and
"non-threatening" non-space -- it's on us to make sure it goes far
enough, but not too far that it changes things for the worse.
Otherwise, there will continue to be ambiguity and people will spend
time in continuous debate when we could be playing and creating cool
stuff instead.
-Shaun
On 1/24/13 3:17 PM, Cary Gordon wrote:
The bottom line is that, technically, code4lib does not, AKAIK, exist.
It's one piece of property, the domain name is in your name.
Everything else is donated or lent.
Code4lib has no formal governance. It is more like a clique than an
organization. The question of whether we want to adopt formal
organization and governance has been raised often over the years, and
it seems to be as effective in emptying rooms as craft beers are for
filling them.
Since we don't exist, we can't do anything. We can collectively come
up with a policy, but we have no status to enforce that policy. Like a
clique, it really comes down to convincing everyone that you are a
cool kid, and you are committing to a policy, so everyone else who
wants to be cool should do so as well. This can work, except for the
goths.
Cary
On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 11:38 AM, Ed Summers <e...@pobox.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Mark A. Matienzo
<mark.matie...@gmail.com> wrote:
More to the point, no other decision about code4lib in terms of
"action" or "policy" has been made ever. This is new territory for us.
It's not really that new. We've voted on tshirts, logos, and whether
or not to have jobs.code4lib.org post here--perhaps other things that
I'm forgetting. I'm not saying we need to vote on the anti-harassment
policy to make it real--it's already real. Not everyone may respect
it, but hopefully we'll all continue being nice people and won't have
to worry about enforcing it. It's hard to imagine anyone being against
it. Personally, I find it regrettable that it's even necessary, but it
is what it is.
Voting can be a nice way of testing the waters for something. I found
the survey on the jobs.code4lib.org email posting very helpful. But
voting on everything would get very tedious, and boring very quickly I
imagine. code4lib has always seemed much more freeform than that to
me. I really liked Bethany's description of lazy consensus [1] at the
last conference.
//Ed
[1] http://nowviskie.org/2012/lazy-consensus/
--
Shaun Ellis
User Interace Developer, Digital Initiatives
Princeton University Library
