Hi,
Brandon Savage wrote:
This morning, Gary Hockin posted a pull request to the Doctrine project,
proposing a rename from "Doctrine" to "Shitty". The full pull request is
here: https://github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/pull/5626 He then tagged one of
the maintainers personally. It was a master stroke of humor and trolling
between two friends. The PR was closed as "Cant Fix" due to "licensing
issues" and "namespace conflicts."
There are several things at issue here:
1. This was an obvious attempt at trolling the Doctrine maintainers, a
masterful stroke by a master (and well-known) troll who had no ill-intent.
But it was still trolling, violating the CoC.
Trolling is, by definition, ill-inteded. It is deliberately acting in
bad faith. It might be a "joke" in some circumstances, but it is
nonetheless not conducted in good faith.
2. The vulgarity used to rename the project would generally be considered
in most circles to be "unprofessional behavior."
Trolling, in itself, is unprofessional.
3. Tagging the maintainer could be construed as a "personal attack" on that
person's work.
This is really stretching things. How could it be construed that way,
and what would make you think that, say, a hypothetical body which
enforces a code of conduct would construe it that way?
A personal attack is an attack on a person. In this case the attack, if
it is to be called that, is clearly on the project. The request was to
rename Doctrine, not to rename its maintainer. That the maintainer was
tagged in it is of no consequence in this specific regard.
GeeH is well-known and well-respected in the community. There's no doubt
that in some capacity, he represents the community, especially since he
speaks regularly at conferences and events. In addition, by reading the
comments, it's clear that not everyone got the joke at first (see comments
by "nuxwin" on the thread).
Joke or not, it's nonetheless trolling.
If someone came to the mediation team with a complaint that this pull
request made them feel "unsafe", how would we as a community respond?
Without additional information to the contrary, we would assume that
safety was not an issue here, surely? Unless this was part of some
obvious harassment campaign or such, this would not be construed as a
safety issue.
The Code of Conduct, as written, makes no exception for the intent of the
person involved. 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.
Yes, but a code of conduct isn't a criminal code, and the consequences
are not the same as breaking the law.
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). Our current code makes no
exception for intent. Instead, "if you broke it, you're guilty".
I think you might be misunderstanding how mens rea actually works. If we
lived in a strange world where "trolling" were a criminal offence, then
you would have to meet the standard of intent to troll. I doubt any
court would find our subject here to not have had it. The fact that it
was a "joke" does not except them from it, nor would it from anything
serious.
The second problem here is the fact that all of us probably know that GeeH
was kidding, and would make that point to anyone who complained.
Their behaviour was nonetheless unacceptable.
This is
actually a HUGE problem. Being known to the community actually becomes a
benefit for people, because their past history is known, and thus they
might receive more favorable treatment than those we don't know.
Sure, that is a risk. Time and again, you see groups being kinder on
those with higher status in disputes.
Finally, the current Code of Conduct permits any person to complain, even
if they weren't a party to the original incident. It permits this by not
explicitly restricting it. Even though it should be (and is to the
reasonable person) clear that this was a joke, any person in the community
could complain and have an argument.
>
I think these are fixable problems. I propose the following:
* The Code of Conduct should specifically state that a person who is not a
direct party to the alleged incident is not permitted to make a complaint.
Sure. If someone breaks the rules, someone else can report it. What's
wrong with that? You can waste the time of who you report it to? You can
do that anyway.
Consider that the situation is worse if you *can't* report such things.
What if all the parties to a conversation in a project-run space are
complicit in blatantly violating the rules? None of them will report it,
they're complicit.
* The Code of Conduct should be modified so that abiding or not abiding by
it is demonstrable with evidence, taking "feelings" out of it entirely. For
example, a person shouldn't be in violation of the code because someone
"feels harassed/trolled/etc", it should be because they're ACTUALLY
harassed/trolled/etc.
The code of conduct doesn't say anything about feelings.
* The Code of Conduct should bar filing a claim of harassment if harassment
from both parties towards one another can be demonstrated.
Harassment isn't cancelled out by reverse harassment. If two people
violate the code, then they violate the code. Whatever usual procedures
there are do not change.
Anyway, I don't think we really need to worry about people joking to be
breaking the rules. The proposed code doesn't say "you will be banned
forever if you break these rules". It says that whoever enforces it
*may* choose to do so. Unless this was persistent, I doubt that the
person you were complaining about would have had much happen. At worst,
they would be warned.
Now, this is assuming reasonable people enforcing the code. If you worry
about unreasonable people, consider that all the stipulations in the
code about how they must act reasonably are surely not going to stop them.
Thanks.
--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/
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