On Wednesday, January 10, 2024 at 11:37:59 AM UTC-8 Matthias Koeppe wrote:
I think we should start with electing a new sage-abuse committee that is willing to publicly affirm and enforce the Code of Conduct. I would suggest that nominations (including self-nominations) be sent to this list by Jan 24. The new committee should work with the community to clarify the Code of Conduct and spell out its procedures and the range of sanctions that it will consider (see https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/36844). I went back to the record of the discussions and have collected some background on the history of our CoC and of the sage-abuse committee, which goes back to a crisis in 2014. Here are some quotes from the 2014 discussion that led to the adoption of the CoC that I found particularly valuable. (It is my personal selection, without attempting to be representative for the whole discussion.) ====== 2014 "What will be the background of the 'group administrators', and the people who receive posts from sage-ab...@googlegroups.com? Are these people going to have a background in human resources and/or be trained in this area?" (Kirkby 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/iGxa2F01rFc/m/3h9NqOv7f-oJ "We were asked to vote whether this code of conduct should be introduced, yet it seems illogical to vote when the makeup of the administrators and those reading sage-abuse are not stated. Things that come to mind are: 1) Are the administrators and readers of sage-abuse going to be professionally trained to handle such situations? 2) Is it going to be a sub-set of sage developers, and if so who chooses them?" (Kirkby 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/iGxa2F01rFc/m/V3OMJ-5IjzcJ "Maybe there should be an intervention team of "senior" community people to sort this out: [....] But who are those and how do they gain authority?" (Schilly 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/iGxa2F01rFc/m/YViwtFFw3AcJ "I agree deciding who the intervention team is is an important question." (Schilling 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/iGxa2F01rFc/m/B29tL_ynho8J "Given the potentially political nature of such a choice, one possibility is to do something apolitical, and select based on ownership. In particular, based on lines of code contributed to Sage ... 1. Create a private mailing list called sage-abuse with these people as members. ... For now, the sage-abuse group would have exactly one duty, which is to ensure that discussions get moved to sage-flame when requested. That's it. We would give this a try for 6 months, and only then revisit whether the group should expand its duties or be dissolved." (Stein 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/iGxa2F01rFc/m/ZU3iZiZVx44J "we could do this list of by self nomination and see if this leads to anything. We could call this the "community management team" and initially it consists of at least 5 self-nominated individuals, who didn't face some strong objections. Of course, it is a problem to communicate objections against someone in such a role directly. Maybe there should be some kind of voting, where each of those 5 need at least 5 who aren't nominated but "vouch" for them to get support in the community." (Schilly 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/iGxa2F01rFc/m/UKDqdGd436QJ "In situations where it looks like real abuse has occurred, a committee of arbiters should exist to rule on it. Otherwise, we're left with mob rule and the onlooker effect (where nobody speaks up to stop abuse, assuming somebody else will take care of it)." (Boothby 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/iGxa2F01rFc/m/B6uQyDiI0g4J "[...] mentioned many times that "don't feed the troll" was the right thing to do. In my opinion, it is not quite enough. Let's say you receive a personal attack on a thread if you leave it just there, it's not helping you: * the thread was probably started on a real question that you still want to discuss. You can start another thread but you might be afraid that the attack just occurs again. * you leave a public attack to you unanswered on a public forum, I find it difficult to do. * if you say nothing to the other person, you might give him/her the idea that he/she was right to do so. (And also maybe future readers, speaking of "giving the good example")" (Pons 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/iGxa2F01rFc/m/ydJCmWyo3KYJ "laws that can't/won't be enforced only encourage scofflaws." (Perry 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/iGxa2F01rFc/m/R_6M2JikNGMJ "pointing to the code makes it clear that I am not making a request on behalf of myself, rather on behalf of the entire community." (Bradshaw 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/iGxa2F01rFc/m/6K1mgi0H2_sJ "the whole conundrum is not about one person having a bad day, but repeated behaviors that many different people perceive as offensive and are turned away by. That, to a community of volunteers, is dangerous! It is counterproductive and takes a lot of positive energy away. [...] the situation where someone opens a thread to discuss something, but then gets attacked and/or the discussion disintegrates. Then what do you do if you still want to discuss these issues?" (Schilling 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/voyJJG2qNTE/m/npla6isgTu8J "There were questions [...] about who exactly would deal with sage-abuse complaints and how. If you do not trust that we Sage developers can responsibly select people to be on that list, and that those members can find ways to sort out issues on a case-by-case basis, then you may vote "no" to this proposal. We are mostly not lawyers or politicians and are not going to make things more precise in this code regarding composition of the group or specific sanctions." (Stein, VOTE: code of conduct, 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/dR3_eyIUyac/m/LyALpiLcHuQJ "I created [sage-abuse list]. The members are me, David Joyner (sage Dev #2), and Harald Schilly. [...] Anybody can post to the list. It can be used for other things besides just the code of conduct, e.g., copyright issues, etc. Frequently people just email me directly when they feel abused as a result of the sage project, so this will be better." (William Stein 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/Zeyin-3-gjg/m/L9fHX0EeOvwJ "[Responding to message by S. King] If you - as a long time sage dev - would like to be an admin on the list to help make our perspective more diverse, let me know and we will add you." (Stein 2014) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/Zeyin-3-gjg/m/uzBNUdLbG2IJ ====== 2014 What I found striking in re-reading the discussion from 10 years ago is how it predates today's common knowledge and awareness about the damage that toxicity in the online realm is inflicting, on a daily basis, on our personal lives and the public and political sphere. After the adoption of the CoC in 2014 (and the attempts to refine the text of the CoC in the weeks after, traces of which can be seen at https://wiki.sagemath.org/Community?action=show&redirect=CodeOfConduct), there appears to have been very little discussion of the topic. I have only found the following, from 2016. ====== 2016 "[Responding to 'Should we start a process of nominating/electing moderators?'] Before that, we should decide what the process is. That's something that might be complicated to do via email (remember what happened with the code of conduct). In my opinion, a Sage Days completely dedicated to this kind of issues would be a better venue to have this kind of discussion, provided we manage to get enough people to come. (Luca De Feo 2016) https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/EAngC-bmZWY/m/gVW7GD2bBQAJ ====== 2016 I made the Code of Conduct more visible by adding it to the repository in https://github.com/sagemath/sage/issues/33565 (March/April 2022). This prompted an update of the sage-abuse admin list, https://github.com/sagemath/sage/issues/33565#issuecomment-1418167864 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/0dacdd51-e4ba-4867-a416-5a90dedf54f5n%40googlegroups.com.
