I have noticed, the first lema (communication decency) puts a pretty constructive constraint on what we can come up for the second (acceptance policy). 
At least if we can make that second answer short brief, we might have landed a double point.
Speakers are short ,
There seems to be a translation issue here, where German kurz is being assumed to mean brief in English, which is not the case. So the above ends up reading as “of short height”.
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We are a trigger-happy bunch of irresponsible people. If a PR hurts, you have to poof so in order to prevent it from being auto-merge after a 6 hour grace period.
(slightly humorist suggestion – at one extreme end of the policy that would definitely increase our merge turnover)
A lot of what positively impresses me in Nix* community boils down to «we know we have very different values but we still manage to collaborate when it is in mutual interest». So if we are trying to write down the implicit communication norms of the community, I guess some form of «do not expect people in a conversation to share similar values (or state this would be better)» should be there.
(As an aside, I think persistently violating this is a large part of «how to get banned by in a Nix*-related space»)
From mutual-respect point of view, I guess «be much more careful with statements about people than with statements about code» is a part of the implicit expectations (which I also find positive).
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- The proposal does not address the situation it’s created in response to: both speakers were similarly brief, and then a third-party jumped in.
- Since there’s typically a one-to-many relationship between speakers and listeners, it seems odd to optimise for the convenience of the former, rather than the safety needs of the later.
- Rules in general are a bad way to create social norms, as they are by nature game-able.
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That may be a misunderstanding, I personally did not create this in response to anything - it was in the air for a while, before and independent of yesterday’s discussion. It was just a prompt to start working.
Being brief and still get your message across is anything but convenient - I can relate to that famous Blaise Pascal quote on writing short letters.
The idea was exactly to optimize for that one-to-many relationship: it’s easy to produce noise everyone has to filter through, and it would be great if everyone tried their best to be respectful with their audience’s capacity to do that. Do you have a suggestion how to put it more clearly?
True, actually I’ve known this article for a while, it’s a classic. Also in response to the other thread:
Agreed. The goal cannot be to prevent anything like that - I don’t think it’s possible or meaningful - but to make explicit the common values we can all refer to, even at the risk of being generic.
These not are supposed to be rules. Rules are, as that post nicely puts it, reactive and game-able. I would rather not include clauses for every single thing we don’t want to go through again. For that reason I adapted the term manifesto, because it should instead communicate what we want to stand for. That’s also why I tried first person plural present tense; imperative would be more terse, and sound a lot like rules.
How can we address the psychological safety aspect? Because you’re right, the current form does not. Thanks for pointing it out.
While it is probably not strong enough, I like the gist of this, but did not manage to fit it in yet:
@7c6f434c I’m not sure what you mean by “or state this would be better”. Does this refer to giving unsolicited advice or the notion that sharing more values would be better?
The second sentence is too vague for me. There is this notion, I forgot who put it that way, of being “soft with people and hard with business”. Is that what you mean? Not sure how to proceed here.
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- The proposal does not address the situation it’s created in response to: both speakers were similarly brief, and then a third-party jumped in.
It actually does. The third party was claiming that someone was too brief, and we could put a high burden of proof on such claims.
- Since there’s typically a one-to-many relationship between speakers and listeners, it seems odd to optimise for the convenience of the former, rather than the safety needs of the later.
Valuing speakers being brief is for convenience of listeners, and for safety of speakers against expectations to specify everything lest their words get horribly misinterpreted and used against them.
Attacks on safety of passive listeners can often get supermajority support for moderator reaction among committers even without any rules, I believe.
- Rules in general are a bad way to create social norms, as they are by nature game-able.
I think the discussion is about writing something simple to help people find out faster which of the plausible sets of norms we have converged upon over the past couple of decades.
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@7c6f434c I’m not sure what you mean by “or state this would be better”. Does this refer to giving unsolicited advice or the notion that sharing more values would be better?
Statements that it would be better if more values would be shared very often end up looking disrespectful to other people’s values.
The second sentence is too vague for me. There is this notion, I forgot who put it that way, of being “soft with people and hard with business”. Is that what you mean? Not sure how to proceed here.
Pretty similar. There are some contexts where public statements about another person in general feel fully appropriate without being something that person has said about themselves. (I can think of granting some kind of further access, and of recognition of the value of longer-term work of a person). But generally one should be careful with claims about people.
On the other hand, disagreements about code happen I think we in general acknowledge them, and some people will say they do not like some code and that’s OK.
(But we do not all share the same values, so «how such code could be useful to anyone» needs a good justification…)
In another discussion (Nursing a thriving community - #19 by Pamplemousse), was mentioned the fact that it is sometimes necessary to reach out for help to “a moderator”.
Sadly, it is not always obvious who can assume this role, depending on the platform where the “problematic” interaction arise (GitHub, Discourse, IRC, Discord).
IMHO, these individuals need to be clearly identified, and I feel like the manifesto might be a good place to do it.
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We are a community of volunteers and stand on the foundations of good faith. We collaborate on mutual interests and may become friends.
(may intentionally emphazised)
I’m trying to convey the same message with a positive twist.
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Everyone is invited to lead by example. We ask informed questions, document our findings, gather consensus, and make pull requests to facilitate change.
As much as we encourage advancing our cause one Pull Request at a time, we owe each contributor a timely and considerate appreciation of their work.
However, our resources are limited. Therefore, everyone is eligible to claim a priority review for every two (2) reviews given in return on other PRs.
PRs shall be generally merged in a timely manner after two (2) approving reviews and without objections.
I have an impression that anything under such a heading would push the situation towards more uniformity in requirements instead of less uniformity and more impact-dependence. (Not sure how to put it instead)
I find this desirable, right now we have the PR template, which is good, but I think can be expanded. Then enforced through some PR gates. Ideally, the human review would just be, “does this make sense”.
Well, technically enforced rules need specifications, not manifestos.
(Hopefully we will not get anything as … interesting as Black-for-NixOS-tests story in the process)
The «making sense» part should be evaluated vastly differently in different cases, though.
I think you both have a point here, for the flight hight of a manifesto, we should rather empathically communicate certain general values: Like we respect contributions, we akcnowledge, that maintainers are putting their time on the table, but also contributors. We acknowledge that there might be a conflict in this reality. We aspire to resolve that conflict in the most considerate way possible.
This was a bit the spirit of my above suggestion:
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I added the above suggestion with the intent to inspire discussion around those two questions.
Erm, are we? (In the sense of are we heading in the same direction, and do we need to — or are we just doing our best to share the useful things we have to build for our quite disconnected journeys)
(I maintain my stance that the one thing holding the project together is corporate patronage of Hydra and binary cache — as a CoI declaration, I am not employed by any organisation having an official stance about Nix*, and I only came to know any people employed by such through Nix* community)
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@blaggacao Unfortunately I can’t refer to your changes directly, and only quote the current state of “my own” post. Thanks for pointing out your additions in separate posts. Maybe Discourse is too blunt a tool and we should switch to git/GitHub and continue as an RFC?
Strongly in favor of adding the good-faith-aspect somehow, but I dislike metaphorical wording in this context, as I think it stands in the way of clarity. Can we matter-of-factly distill from the other thread how we would say that we default to assuming good faith in our interactions?
Good point!
You changed the message, because now we’d collaborate on things that interest us mutually, instead of collaborating because doing so is in our mutual interest. For me the former is less important, as it easily derives from volunteering, but the latter is something we may want to emphasize, as it is easy to lose track of over day-to-day issues.
I doubt referring to friendship is considerate, given how some people feel about things here.
What’s the cause here? Please, let’s not add blanks. And no, no one owes anything to anyone, that’s implied by the statement that we’re a volunteer community.
It’s trivially true that resources are limited, and I tried to incorporate that by asking for deliberately considerate communication - which is observably non-trivial. Sometimes I feel we may need to add something like “we treat each other as human beings”, but that would go in the same direction - it should be trivially true.
This is not true. There is no obligation to assume responsibility.
First two statements: I don’t expect any consensus on this and will remove them.
Last statement: Is this what you observe? Sounds arbitrary to me.
I will also remove the additional headlines and any blanks. Let’s try to keep semantic and visual noise down as much as possible. Working on contents is challenge enough for me.
Also, where did it go that everyone is encouraged to review and that we navigate by RFCs?
I’m in favor of adding something very close to that, will have to think more about exact wording.
I’d add something like:
We try to establish an environment of psychological safety. Where personal conflicts arise, we resolve them in private, and seek help from moderators [link to appropraite list] if required.
We try, because we can’t say we have already achieved this.
Maybe also:
Shamelessly generalizing that beautiful statement… How about adding something along its lines?
@nicoo Would this address your concerns?
I also want to reword both headings. Maybe:
How do we communicate?
or even
What do we stand for?
and
How to contribute effectively?
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Perfect! I completely see hour point about avoiding metaphors.
Oops, that wasn’t even knteded. Thanks!
Here, I wanted to give it a positive and inspiring twist. I tried to say the same thing as before, but positively. There might be ways to put that even better.
I well noticed that we cannot properly embed the statement of values within a meaningful direction. And I also was vary about that blank. This is why I added the Vision, Mission & Objectives parts, so that it becomes possible to give the values a meaningful direction or finality.
The term “owe” is meant as an empathic expression of utter “consideration”. There should be better ways to express it.
It is trivially true, but it is also an empathetic fact to cite when managing expectations. A lot of expectations seem to form because this is forgotten in the heat of the action.
Of course not, the goal of a manifest is to inspire identification with its content. It would be a good outcome if more people assume responsibility and feel empowered to make that final call on a PR as I assume that could help to de-choque the PR process a little. How can we enable that outcome?
Yep, we can remove the whole barter idea, it might be too specific / rule-like for a manifesto anyway. Just wanted to put it up for discussion, but I agree, that might not be a thing for a manifesto.
We might need to introduce a new headline: How do we make decisions?
I think it’s an important question, too. RFCs is one component
The encouragement fornreviews yranscended in the review barter idea.
For the other suggestions:
In general, lets keep this strictly positive. There should be always a positive variant of any formulation.
Good! Also “How do we contribute?”
Semantically that would be the category (values) of those and other questions (tbd).
According to this, I’ll make some consensus updates to the wiki, please complement as needed.
Re: direction & consensus
I see your point about consensus on direction. On the other hand, I think a manifesto is the right place to at least attempt direction. If you wish, we can gather consensus on values, first and then attempt to extract and condense direction. It might be the right order of things, but I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to at least get a (normative, not observational) discussion on direction going.
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