On Thu, Nov 03, 2016 at 03:31:41PM +0100, Mauricio Nascimento wrote: > I respect the effort of creating such code, but I am against of having a > Code of Conduct. People are able to decide by themselves how to behave in a > polite way and how to treat the others with respect and kindness.
People are many and varied: some of us are polite in the sense most of us understand politeness; some of us would like to be polite, but genuinely do not know how to be polite; some of us think ourselves polite, but fail to account for cultural differences; some of us just do not care whether we are polite or not; and some of us are impolite knowingly and purposefully when it suits us. Furthermore, this is not an n-chotomy: all of us fall into more than a single category on occasion. Now, it may not hurt much if people are impolite. However, attitudes vary on this and if we want to be a safe forum for the largest possible number of people, then we have to recognize that. This requires a *common* understanding of what constitutes civility and politeness. Further, different people also have different standards of behaviour when it comes to interacting with people from different religious, racial, sexual, or gender backgrounds. Some of these standards are outright criminal, others "merely" obnoxious. As FSFE, we want to welcome people from all backgrounds and we want to make sure they feel safe. Having a clear CoC will hopefully reduce the probability of any unpleasant behaviour and it will also tell victims that they will be looked after: we are prepared to eliminate perpetrators from our community, and where appropriate, encourage and help victims to make appropriate reports to the authorities. It is true that many of us want to do the right thing without having a CoC. This extends to excluding people from the community when necessary. Unfortunately, it is not possible to do the right thing without having a CoC in such an instance: would it be just to exclude people from the community if they never had the chance to learn our shared values and principles? would it be just to impose sanctions they were never aware of? No, it would not. We are not facing a choice between telling people how to behave or not doing so. We are facing a choice between giving everyone a shared understanding of the community values and principles, sanctions for violating them, and a safe space where the values and principles are upheld on one hand and failing the community by occasionally imposing ad hoc sanctions and on other occasions allowing our community to victimize its members on the other hand. To me, this choice is a no-brainer. Cheers, -- Heiki Lõhmus Vice President, Translation Coordinator Free Software Foundation Europe repenti...@fsfe.org repenti...@jabber.fsfe.org
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