The thread you're referencing contains a number of actionable, productive suggestions. Indeed, mine and other's participation on that thread was an attempt to counteract derailment.
I quoted a chunk of an email that was sent to me privately because the person who sent it had already offered to copy it to the list. I saved him the trouble by excerpting the bit I wanted to remark on. More to the point, the code of conduct explicitly states that grievances can be aired publicly. And in fact, an implicit part of what I was arguing is that most of the time, this is preferable. It should be as simple as saying "hey I think what you did violates this principal" and the other person (hopefully) going "oh right yeah sorry". This is good because it makes our community standards self-reenforcing. Newcomers learn what is acceptable and what is not. And that saves time and effort down the line. Saying that we ought to involve officers or board members communicates the idea that infractions ought to be very grave before we acknowledge them (which limits the utility of the code of conduct). Or, on the flip side, people see that and imagine that the tiniest thing is going to get them booted out of the community via board intervention (which causes unjustified fear of the code of conduct). In this particular case, there is additional justification. The person was challenging our desire to talk about safety whilst also behaving in a way that contributes to me feeling unsafe, and would contribute to other people feeling unsafe. And regarding your "cesspool" comment. I'm not sure that's a fair, or useful, characterisation. But what I will say is that this work isn't pretty. And the arguments that happen around it are not pretty. They're never going to be pretty. People don't like to be challenged. This is hard, upsetting work. But if we're lucky, our conversations have a real impact and help to make the whole of the foundation, and every community within it, safer, warmer, more friendly, and more welcoming. On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 at 00:53 William A Rowe Jr <wr...@rowe-clan.net> wrote: So I just sort of boggled at an post that seemed to quote private correspondence while making a CoC accusation, or at least that's what I think I read. Many of us know the holidays for the airing of grievances arrives in 2 months, but public archived email lists really are simply not the place. We have an organizational policy that anyone can approach any officer or board member to help resolve personal conflict or violations of the CoC. With that said... I'd like everyone on every side of the issue to take a moment to read the thoughts of one of the most effective convention organizers and another all around good friend, who together penned some thoughts on the subject of how we creates codes of conduct, and how we use or abuse them. Both are active within the SF community and have tried to weather the recent storms in the Hugo Awards world which took a dark turn into politics. These are their thoughts... http://copious-free-time.org/ss-hs/the-shield-or-the-weapon/ I'm re-sharing this publicly on Facebook so we will all agree not to pollute this list with a bunch of back-and-forth on the merits of *their* thoughts (they are tagged and will follow that dialog,) Here lies that thread; https://www.facebook.com/wrowe/posts/10154815771416929?pnref=story If you have an *actionable* and *productive* suggestion for the *ASF* please present it, but let's not let this list become that cesspool for endlessly debating the subject, individual comments or the entire thread on FB may be shut down without prior notice, if individuals can't keep it civil. Yours, Bill
