Hi Nathan, I participated in the initial drafting of the code. Our draft closely follows, and was stolen from, similar codes of conduct from other projects. Ultimately all that it asks is that people be polite and respectful towards others. I don't think that this very onerous.
Rather than being put forward as a fait accompli (or even a fiat accompli:) Volker's initial post asked everyone to (discuss and) vote on whether we should adopt the code. That is, from the onset people were asked for their opinion. If you reread the thread, when the discussion started becoming heated William tried to close it. When that failed, he asked everyone to vote on it. This looks quite democratic to me. This said, since the vote was so close, and seemingly so contentious, I'm not sure we should adopt it. Personally I would prefer to see it, or some variation of it, adopted as guidelines -- having to "enforce" a code is contrary to the underlying principle of being polite. The motivation for suggesting the code was that quite a few people were unhappy with repeated negative comments that appeared in a long series of posts. I had tried talking off-list with the person making these to try and explain to them why their comments were not helpful. Later I learned that several other people had, independently, talked to this person as well. (Incidentally, the poster is a valued developer, which makes them much harder to ignore than some one like rjf.) Speaking for myself, if one person tells me I'm being rude I'll probably take notice, but perhaps I'd shrug them off. If four people tell me I'm being rude then I change my behaviour. Unfortunately, nothing changed. A number of people have stopped contributing to sage because of these interactions, and there is a danger that others will stop. I don't want that. As nothing else had worked I was in favour of proposing some guidelines to the community in the hope that this would help. I'm still a little baffled as to why the suggestion that we try to be nice to each other is causing such a commotion. Andrew -- 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 post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
