New code of conduct discussion

Meta Moderation
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Wait, wasn’t the entire point of the moderation team (RFC 102) to avoid bringing up a code of conduct? RFC 98 tried to do that, resulted in a very long discussion that brought up politics and what not and ultimately lead nowhere; because, as usual, no one can agree on anything besides strictly technical matters.

I’m sure writing down a set of guidelines can be useful for making the action of the team more transparent, training new moderators, etc. but using a code of conduct for this is problematic, in my view. For example, the document you just linked starts with “we as contributors and maintainers pledge to make participation in our project […]”.
This wording implies there is now a sort of contributor agreement you have to subscribe, or does it not? And what if someone doesn’t make this pledge? Are you going to reject their contributions?

I’m just puzzled.

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I would interpret “we as contributors and maintainers” as referring to the moderation team, since that’s the only way other uses of the second person in the text (like “Our Responsibilities”) make any sense. We changed other phrases in the document to make it explicit we were talking about the moderation team — maybe we should change this one too.

There’s no requirement for a pledge from contributors — contributors are simply required to behave appropriately towards each other, just as they were yesterday. All the code of conduct does here is to set out some examples of what that means, and to give people some information on what they should expect from the moderation team and how to get in touch, in an easier to find location.

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A “code of moderator conduct” is a totally reasonable thing to have.

It is a bit ridiculous that this did not happen.

Also, I think the fact that this didn’t go through the RFC process is the final nail in the coffin of my respect for the RFC process. Apparently RFCs are only for “significant, but not too significant” changes.

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I don’t think that has anything to do with the RFC process. Too significant changes are simply too hard to bring about in a way that is agreeable in a large and diverse group of people deeply invested into the thing to be changed.

If anything, this proves the RFC process successful: the too significant change was not agreeable, so it wasn’t forced on anyone. Instead we have a more constrained, pragmatic outcome that strictly follows prior agreements. If this is not good governance, I don’t know what is.

(Although it indicates we may want to decode RFC to Request For Consensus in order to set more realistic expectations…)

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Note that CoC via RFC process would have a completely different status. This one is downstream from moderation decisions, documenting them; an RFC-based CoC would have a claim to being upstream of moderation, regulating it.

(Maybe some part of the preamble used in this thread should be prepended to the CoC file in the repository, just to make it clear this is a downstream-type document)

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Apparently RFCs are only for “significant, but not too significant” changes.

I don’t think that has anything to do with the RFC process. Too significant changes are simply too hard to bring about in a way that is agreeable in a large and diverse group of people deeply invested into the thing to be changed.

If anything, this proves the RFC process successful: the too significant change was not agreeable, so it wasn’t forced on anyone. Instead we have a more constrained, pragmatic outcome that strictly follows prior agreements. If this is not good governance, I don’t know what is.

Doing nothing is often preferred by those who benefit from the status quo, typically not those who are at risk of marginalization. Some of these people are deeply invested in nothing changing, and making an RFC ‘controversial’ with concern trolling or similar is an efficient way to take advantage of the process to get what they want.

While doing less, or even nothing at all, may be the best outcome for the project and those who use it, it’s not inherently desirable or neutral.

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Yes, and what I’m trying to say is there are both sides to action and inaction, and it appears to me we got a workable compromise in this instance. The only thing I find sad is that it took so long. But I guess that’s part of a learning process to develop such a community.

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The RFC process doesn’t work for fuzzy decisions like this. Look at RFC 98 to see people talking past each other and getting anxious about hypothetical things. I was also working on RFC 114, and that’s when I realized that it should come from the moderation team instead. So feel free to blame me for this :slight_smile:

The moderation team has developed their own modus operandi, which understands the context of this project and our culture. So it’s good that the CoC is coming from them. That means that it’s more than a nice piece of paper; it’s also something that makes sense to them. Instead of setting it in stone through a RFC, it can be more of a reflection of the current practices of the team.

In general, we should empower teams and give them the tools that they need to fulfil their responsibilities. That way, decisions can happen faster, and also make internal sense to the team.

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I might just be a normal NixOS user and I wasn’t sure if I should comment on this one. But I find it interesting nonetheless to get a deeper sense of what is going on and how the processes work in the project. There are some things I do not quite understand to begin with:

  1. Why is the Code of Conduct necessary in the first place? If the moderation team has a working modus operandi, what good would a Code of Conduct do? If doing less, or even nothing at all, may be the best outcome for the project as one commenter has put it before, is it not evident that doing less or nothing is the exactly the right way to proceed for the project?

Bottom line: Why is this needed?

  1. I think the reason why Codes of Conduct have become somewhat controversial is precisely that they are in most cases NOT mandated by the immediate needs and ends of any given software project. They do NOT make the software better, they do NOT make the project more successful by any metric, and I dare say, they do NOT even improve its culture. Rather they are, more often than not, tools to promote political ends which are not the immediate goal of the software project itself. And, I believe, the Contribuer Covenant is a good example of this tendency.

Bottom line: If you decide to adopt a Code of Conduct, even only for the moderation team, why adopt a model for said Code of Conduct that is inherently feeding into the political divisiveness that already exists among people right now?

  1. To be fair, looking at the RFC 98 proposal (which I didn’t know about before reading this), the current attempt looks a lot better than before. However I believe this one still suffers from essentially the same problem, just to a lesser degree. And that problem in my opinion is this: that instead of focusing on building norms for the betterment of software development as such it introduces stuff that is entirely alien to this end. Like for instance making empathy mandatory. Or mandating inclusive language.

Bottom line: Why do people need to introduce their political opinions, over and above the obvious good of free software and that derives from its underlying licencing model?

  1. Looking at NixOS GitHub it now appears as if the Code of Conduct is applied to the entire repository level of nix and nixpkgs and all other repositories. That would make for a very different impression than just being a loose moderation pledge applying to moderators. The phrase “contributors and maintainers” then appears to refer to all contributors and maintainers of nixpkgs and nix and other repos. This is somewhat misleading.

There I’d ask for some clarification here: What is the actual status of this code of conduct?

Anyways, I’d be happy to read your answers if anyone cares to comment!

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No offense, but I don’t have energy to answer the rest and I have low energy in general, so this is probably not going to be a real answer.

But I am exhausted to live in a world, in a society and to imagine that I live in a community where questions like “why should we introduce the political opinion to make empathy mandatory or inclusive language” can be read, this is seriously disturbing.

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My idea is that people can collaborate in a civilised manner without pointing them to a set of “don’t do this, don’t to that”. I just think this is mostly demeaning to the contributors having to read a document that says “we agree to not insult other contributors because they are disabled”. But that’s maybe just me being naive, having never be a moderator.

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You see but that is in a way why I wrote what I wrote: I have reasons as to why I believe making empathy mandatory (!) is very dangerous. I don’t believe having empathy is necessarily bad. But I think making it mandatory is dangerous and shouldn’t be done.

And calling my view as such “seriously disturbing” is at least an indication to me that proponents of Codes of Conduct are not really upholding what they to claim to uphold: to be “respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences.” Which is where it quickly gets contradictory. There are more such contradictions, even in this Code of Conduct, of course. But my post was long enough already.

All of this is what that nourishes my skepticism against these documents.

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Well, no offense again, but you said it at the end of your post. I call this wishful thinking and in practice, online communities (but any community really) has to deal with that. If you know of better ways than being explicit, please do mention them, otherwise you are just saying “Hey, I have no significant experience on the matter, but I think doing X is enough”. It is difficult to answer such things because we do not share the same mutual understanding of those questions and there is no specific venue prepared to explain why / what / etc.

I will mention some reading https://pythondev.readthedocs.io/diversity.html because I will interpret the current problem as a lack of knowledge on the matter.

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I will give charitable interpretation to your post, but I will mention that what you are writing is indistinguishable for me from Concern troll - RationalWiki. You are free to pursue your rational examination of the CoC, the CoC need, and pondering many things that, I wish, would constitute baselines.

But for the sake of people who may not feel welcome in a community because things like that have to be questioned, I am standing my ground and I will tell you that the view of making empathy mandatory is not a differing viewpoint or experience when you don’t explain even why this is problematic. From my perspective, this sounds like “why should we bother with empathy?” and this is seriously disturbing.

We have many more matters to fight against in this technical project, I would like to work with people on the basis that everyone tries hard to have empathy otherwise this is just a free hell we are creating.

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@APCodes if you have a practical concern with the NixOS code of conduct as implemented, please share it. This is not a philosophical forum, so I ask that you take general philosophical discussions about code of conducts to other places on the Internet.

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Why are you ascribing hostile attitudes to me the very moment I start to raise a question that really concerns me?

I also have to stand my ground here:

  1. I am not trolling, I really want a reasoned reply to my questions. I think as a human being I deserve that.

  2. If you really want to foster an environment in which everyone tries hard to have empathy, why do you not respect my viewpoint as a baseline at least for 20-30 min? You don’t have to share it of course, just let it stand for a little while. You are doing exactly the opposite of what you claim you would want. Why do you tell me, for instance, that you are being charitable, but then retract that statement immediately and give a hostile and very uncharitable reading of what I said? Even though the Code of Conduct that you are defending would mandate actually being charitable.

Is this arbitrariness going to be a general thing against anyone you deem not sufficiently concerned with empathy? Because that is exactly the kind of concern that I have. That reaction is the reason I am against mandating empathy. Mandating empathy is an excuse for aggressive behavior against all those certain people deem insufficiently empathic.

Also the article on concern trolling states: 'the term is open to misuse" which it clearly is. It is a good term to outright discard peoples concerns you don’t want to be discussed. That is clearly not an example of charitableness.

  1. I never said that we should not bother with empathy. I said something very different. And I stand by what I said: Mandating (!) empathy is very dangerous. And your reaction to me is exactly why I believe that.

Mandating empathy makes people very agressive against people they view as showing a lack of empathy and it delivers even a justification for that aggressiveness. And I personally, subjectively experience your reaction to me right now as quite agressive and outright dismissive. Again, if your Code of Conduct would improve things, as being applied to your own conduct vis-a-vis me right now, I have a feeling that shouldn’t happen.

That this happens the moment I ask a question, tells me the Code of Conduct will be outright dismissive of things that really concern me, and will foster a very hostile attitude against me. And all other people who are like me in this respect.

So yeah, I really really did not intend that to be an attack at all. Nothing I said was intended as trolling. I EXPLICITLY stated that I am only a simply NixOS user, and I may not have the background knowledge necessary to understand why this is being done here and now. And I really wanted to know this as it is not obvious to me at all.

However the reaction tells me: I indeed did encounter a serious issue with adopting a Code of Conduct. For some reason it unleashed and unearthes a certain agressiveness. I would hope that there is a type of Code of Conduct yet to be discovered that avoids just that.

Anyways, I am out for today. I am not a troll and I don’t feed on the kind of environment I inadvertently helped express itself here. I don’t draw energy from that type of response.

If anyone else feels offended or distrubed by my views, I am sorry for that. That was not my intent.

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Good idea breaking this out into its own topic. I’m happy to see the moderation team put written words to their practices. I think Nix has done very well without a code of conduct thus far and I expect it to continue to do well in the future with this code of conduct. Regardless, it’s the hard work of the moderation team that has helped the Nix community do so well, if they decide a code of conduct will make their jobs easier than I can only support it.
Also, let’s not end up like Hyprland. I know even without a code of conduct our standards are way higher than that, but let’s not forget how nasty people can be on the internet in absence of any meaningful moderation.

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fair enough, that might be a fair point. But I think the fourth question I asked is quite practical.

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Well, no offense again, but you said it at the end of your post. I call this wishful thinking and in practice, online communities (but any community really) has to deal with that.

None taken, as I said, I admitted it as a possibility.

If you know of better ways than being explicit, please do mention them

No, I’m pretty happy with the way the moderation team has been operating so far.
In fact, from a few episodes listed in that link, It seems to me their Python equivalent have been unnecessarily aggressive, but I don’t know the contexts.

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I expect a technical project to care both about a document as implemented and the same document as written.

Thus the question of whether the applicability and downstream status of the code is clear from the code as written is a relevant question even if implementation itself doesn’t raise concerns.

On the other hand, I do not see any language in the code as posted that makes encouraged traits mandatory all the time. Which is of course good.

As I have said, I do believe that the moderation team implements a reasonable vision, and the code is an attempt of «serialising» it which doesn’t affect back the implementation in an especially powerful way. Still the question whether the code is misleading about some parts of expectations can be meaningful.

Nixpkgs has long passed the size where relying on empathy was a good idea. We should have sympathy to others’ perception to which we cannot empathise because they are too different and too dissimilar to our own. Failure to admit that we need to learn to find a not-too-bad tradeoff across a gap too wide for empathy to cross will not magically make the gap disappear. After all, diversity of perceptions with which one can empathise is much narrower than the entire available spectrum.

Just to give a hopefully no longer too charged example: basically any presentation for a large amount of text will either be called wall-of-text by some, or be called visual noise by some others. As a pro-wall-of-text anti-visual-noise person, I find it way more promising to ask and to tell which things are OK and which are not, than to use empathy to things we don’t really perceive in creation of a lossy model to be used to replace a sympathetic but honest dialog.

(And in any case there is a trade-off between acceptability to different groups and the overall complexity, we should admit conflict of different interests when there is one)

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