Mark Brown <broo...@debian.org> writes: > The usual reasoning for explicitly enumerating things is the thing > Solveig mentioned about people being (or professing to be) too inept to > realise what appropriate behaviour is. Personally I do tend to share > some of the concerns about rules lawyering and evasion with that but > it's a reasonable view and I suspect you don't win either way.
The other advantage of explicitly listing as unacceptable behavior some common behaviors, like sexual jokes, is that it sends an up-front message to people who are not yet part of the community that certain behaviors aren't acceptable, thus discouraging those who enjoy those behaviors from joining in the first place. Other organizations appear to have found this more successful than a "positive" CoC, which the same people seem to be more likely to ignore until they violate it. Most of this experience is with conferences, which have a much different dynamic than mailing lists, so it may or may not carry over. But what people are seeing with conferences is that the people who get very upset about their "freedom of speech" will get all upset and angry at a CoC that explicitly lists unacceptable behavior and then "boycott" the conference, which is the ideal outcome all around. I don't have any strong personal opinions about this, but that's partly because I'm also not one of the people who is likely to be the target of any serious harassment. My inclination is to weigh more heavily the CoC experiences of people who *are* frequent targets of harassment than those of us who are already happily participating in the project and have rarely been on the receiving end of problems. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/87ior3s81e....@windlord.stanford.edu
