Hey Brandon, definitely some thoughts for consideration. I did want to respond to one piece of this:
> This is an important problem, because intent ("mens rea"
> in Latin, for "guilty mind") is typically required to convict people of
> criminal acts in much of the world. For example, you cannot be convicted of
> murder unless you had intent to kill the person (or should have known that
> your actions created the grave risk of death).
I think this is somewhat incorrect. For example, yes, you cannot be
convicted of murder, however you will be convicted still of
Manslaughter. Even 'Involuntary Manslaughter' is still a crime. In
those cases, even if you didn't mean to kill someone, but your
actions/choices lead to that happening, is a crime.
But that's very far afield of CoC violations anyway. Perhaps the best
analogy would be in the legal definitions of harassment. Harassment
does not require a 'guilty mind' to be convinced of such. IE: You
don't get to say: "Oh, I didn't mean anything bad when I grabbed
<person>'s <body part>. It was a compliment!". The issue in that case,
is that perhaps, truly to the person who commited that act, they had no
guilty mind, that they truly felt that they were doing something
right. Which 'average person' would respond 'oh heck no' towards. Of
course, most laws (in the US at least) about harassment happen to only
apply in a 'work context'. And not in 'general life'. Hence why one
could argue that a project like PHP might want to enact something similar.
What could be determined to be harassment to one person, might be
'perfectly normal' to someone else. That's why the US Supreme Court
came up with a method for determining this. Which was the 'Reasonable
Person' standard. Basically per the courts definition, if a
"reasonable person" / 3rd party would feel that action was harassment,
then it was. Regardless of intent.
And typically that reasonable person aspect is decided by a jury / peers
/ etc.
Which, is very similar to what the purpose of having a Mediation/CoC
team within a project would fulfill.
Anyway, just more food for thought / another POV.
Eli
--
| Eli White | http://eliw.com/ | Twitter: EliW |
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