I was busy writing this up yesterday and responding to individual points here before the huge accountability post was created, but I guess that ship has sailed. It was more relevant to this thread at the time, so I’m posting it here.
Long story short: There are ways we can avoid abuses of power as a community by divorcing particular political ideologies from moderation while also maintaining the dignity of contributors and inclusivity we would like to promote as a project.
- No “moderator code of conduct” for consistency’s sake - it should be the same one the rest of the community uses. “Rules for thee but not for me” is a way to enable abuse.
- Include reasoning for bans in public moderation logs to provide accountability.
- Policy allowing the removal of moderators for abuses of authority based on the same code of conduct, to keep everyone honest.
- Focus on using the Code of Conduct to reduce overall drama in the NixOS community rather than enforcing anything related to anyone’s political viewpoints.
If you’re interested in the reasoning, read on.
You are right. I believe in fact we are having a political discussion right now. And the decision about the nature of moderation and the goal of moderation is a classical political question.
That depends on the nature of “politics.” Historically speaking, the word “politics” refers to polis, the city, from Greek. If you can define the Nix project as, roughly, the “city,” maybe. Moderation would then be a choice for cultivating the project as one would have maintained a city. I’ll get to what that means in a second.
In practice, as you mentioned, “politics” is used to refer to the speaker’s politics:
But in recent times there has been a tendency to “add on”, so to speak, additional political causes to open source, over and above the cause of open source itself. I think this is not good for the cause of open source.
My take is that adding on additional causes that go beyond the minimum necessary to maintain the project, including that of modern party or identity politics, is an abuse of power. Politicizing moderation (in the modern sense) is a way to make people who only differ in backgrounds that are orthogonal to the goals of the project very unhappy.
In fact, creating different sets of rules for moderators and other users is an issue unto itself. People with different views should obviously be allowed to exist in the same city, and even moderators should be allowed to have them. I think there’s an alternative to all this mess that captures most of the intent, though.
And I want that people who engage in politically motivated defamation against certain people for some things these people said on other venues outside of the project itself, will face moderator action against this.
The alternative to pulling a particular political ideology into moderation is simpler and looks a bit more like the historical definition of “politics” - it’s curbing antisocial behavior through consistently encouraging on-topic discussion. I would like to briefly contend that our moderation should not focus on disagreement about ideology, but about abuse, including that which stems from a disagreement in ideology.
The Contributor Covenant lists some things that are forbidden for good reason:
- The use of sexualized language or imagery, and sexual attention or advances of any kind
- Trolling, insulting or derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks
- Public or private harassment
None of that is even on topic to begin with, which should be the first indicator that it should be moderated. How I’d explain “political attacks” consistently in that framework is that using your political views to your advantage, regardless of what that view is, is bad because it is an indicator that the community is playing a zero-sum game where multiple sides of an issue are throwing stones at each other. [post facto edit: as we have seen in the accountability thread]. The solution to that is not more stone-throwing; it is getting people to agree to disagree (and maybe keep things on-topic to avoid more of it). If the stone-throwing is ensuing and putting someone’s safety at risk, there is a fundamental problem with the moderation.
What I [do] not want is a restriction of civil public discussion on political matters relating to the organization and how it best can fulfill the goal of making free software. Including the discussion of the Code of Conduct. However that sadly appears to be a risk involved in the Code of Conduct issue as well I discovered, as the example of Guix shows.
Important: to avoid polarizing/hurtful discussions in our public spaces, any
matter pertaining to our use of this Code of Conduct should be brought
privately to the Guix maintainers at guix-maintainers@gnu.org. Failure to do
so will be considered as a violation of this Code of Conduct.
I think this could be read as an attempt to avoid a bunch of drama in public spaces. Still, IMO, it’s totally possible to discuss Code of Conduct enforcement in a non-hurtful way that remains respectful of everyone’s identity and personal beliefs. More transparency about bans instead of the process being a giant black box would help there.