I just want to say that I see your points and I definitely do not agree that you have engaged in any type of trolling.
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This was already answered in the original post. The CoC is a tool for the moderation team and makes implicit things more explicit. For example, providing a clear escalation path is valuable.
There is also a set of people looking at the CoC as a signal that the ecosystem is managed. It makes them feel more at ease that they will not be attacked. This is a good thing in my book.
Maybe this doesn’t apply to you, but moderating is also about making room for all different kinds of people.
I can assure you that this is not the motive of the moderation team. We looked at a bunch of existing CoCs, and the Contributor Covenant was pretty close to what we wanted. I get that it has a bit of a leftist taste to the wording, but I wouldn’t get too hung up on it. Fundamentally, the document is about setting a range of acceptable and professional behaviour. And the application is still done by the same moderation team.
I really think we should divorce this idea of politics and acceptable behaviour. If you go to a church, it comes with a set of behaviours and social norms. And people from both sides of the parties conform to it. This is a bit the same. We should be able to enjoy hacking on Nix together, even if we disagree on other facets of our lives.
I really think you’re getting hung up on those two words. There is a whole gradient there between having some degree of empathy and inclusivity and going full zealot mode. I can tell you that the moderation team is very reasonable.
One problem that the moderation team encounters from time to time is that some individuals take no feedback. If you think about it, this is problematic in an environment like nixpkgs almost entirely based on consensus. This means that they can dictate what they want. And people more sensitive to consensus are then left with this feeling of unfairness and frustration.
If we want to work together, we also need all the participants to accommodate a little bit for each other. I don’t think this is really political or controversial.
The moderation team’s scope is the entire NixOS project, and the Code of Conduct also applies where the team has authority.
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Thanks for the reply!
Let me make the following remark on each of your points.
- The very fact of me asking four substantive questions has led to a somewhat hostile reaction against me personally. That tells me something. And it doesn’t increase my trust that a Code of Conduct is beneficial to the community that I am, albeit on a low level, a part of.
Also on the signaling issue. I see Codes of Conduct specifically, as distinguished from general sets of rules, as being part of a larger trend in the industry. I believe this larger trend is not beneficial, but something that one should stand against if possible. And I believe it is in part driven by ideological reasons that make life worse for many people.
Let this be clear: I am not opposed to moderation rules or a set of moderation guidelines. I am for civil conduct and discussion. But I believe the general trend of recent years that software projects adopt these corporatist things called Codes of Conduct, is something to be opposed. It is really bad.
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The idea of politics and acceptable behavior cannot be divorced successfully if the standard of acceptable behavior itself uses an already politicized language. That much should be obvious. But I do agree that 95% of the text is actually not that bad.
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So my pragmatic improvement proposal would be this: remove the little bits of left-sounding language. It is just a few words after all. And they don’t really matter that much to you as you said. Also, among the long list of protected groups in the very beginning of the Code of Conduct. Add: differences in political orientation and opinion as illegitimate grounds for discriminating against people. I have a feeling the fact that this is missing is part of the slight political bias of this type of Code of Conduct. Adding it would help remove that bias. Also, demote the role of the Code of Conduct from project level to moderation guidelines and call it accordingly.
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Now the role of the moderation team itself is somewhat obscure to me. Even after I read RFC 102. How can the moderation team make a Code of Conduct be applied at the project level as a whole? Because its role is moderation, right? Has this gone through the same consensus mechanism as everything goes in nixpkgs according to you? If not, who has given a team which is, if I understood correctly, essentially self-selecting at this point, such wide-ranging authority?
To be very blunt, my outsider suspicion at this point is this: some people decided it would be a good idea to use the moderation team to take the initiative and get a Code of Conduct accepted at the project level in light of the fact that the earlier consensus mechanism seems to have failed.
To me it is just obvious that a moderation (!) team isn’t a legislative assembly. This is not the right way.
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Indeed not. And a code of conduct isn’t legislation. It’s documentation. It describes how the system of moderation can be expected to function, the same way that code documentation describes how a piece of software can be expected to function. If the software does something that surprises you, the documentation may help you understand it; but changing the documentation to be more to your liking doesn’t fix bugs. Mutatis mutandis, likewise for codes of conduct and moderation teams.
That said, if I interpret this quote as a feature request for a change in moderation,
that’s an absolutely awful idea—and I expect/hope the moderation team would agree. ‘All X people should be killed’ is a political opinion, after all, and one that should certainly be considered legitimate grounds for taking moderation actions in most communities.
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I think it’s actually pretty easy. Every social group of people, no matter the form or size, has a set of norms, rules and power dynamics. Many of these are implicit. But some are made explicit, by publicly acknowledging them or even writing them down.
Implicit rules and power dynamics are always a bad thing for the entire community. It means less transparency in decision making, more possibilities for individual cliques to get their will, and more “gotchas” for newcomers to learn.
Therefore, the Nix community already has as Code of Conduct, the same way it had moderation long before the moderation team was formed. Prior to the moderation team, moderation was done by whoever happened to have administrative power (so mostly admin-adjacent people). I’m not going to say that it worked badly, but I doubt anybody would disagree that making that power structure explicit by founding the moderation team was a great improvement.
I honestly don’t understand what the problem is with writing our community rules down, so that people can look them up instead of having to guess and hope. The only people who benefit from not having a written Code of Conduct are bad actors and rogue moderators.
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If it is normative, it is not just documentation.
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Why is this an awful idea? This is even law in the EU. Now obviously that has limits, one of which is calls to violence, which are outlawed even in the most free speech oriented places, just as any call to criminal behavior will be in any jurisdiction.
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I strongly recommend reading Writing the Economy (Graham Smart, 2006) on that one. It’s a dynamic, iterative process between day-to-day practice, agreeing on and codifying a model of reality, and following the codification as guidance for practice.
Having worked on Nix documentation for a living for almost two years now, I see that happen all the time. Often, the first step to fixing a bug can indeed be writing down what it’s supposed to be like instead, and asking others if they agree.
If you really wish the code of conduct to change, please propose the concrete change you envision and negotiate it with the moderation team in place.
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Thanks for the interesting book reference @fricklerhandwerk. And also for the solution-oriented response in general.
I will think a bit about proposing 2 or 3 concrete changes / emendations. This is better than nothing. Even if the current team in place might reject them, I hope they at least provide me with some reasons as to why.
I might still remind anyone reading this of my more general issue why this is called CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in the first place if it is just a set of moderation guidelines describing existing practice. Which goes back to the initial post of @rnhmjoj in this sub-thread. I am not sure how fruitful it is to go into opening a PR here. But maybe I will reach out to the moderation team some time next week on Matrix or so and just ask them in a more private context.
Maybe it is enough for a while. I think I stated my concerns and defended them more than once here.
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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?
If someone’s political opinion threatens your well-being or existence, it is highly irrational to “forget about it”.
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I wasn’t going to write anything more. But it is what it is. And that one is kinda important.
I could go long and philosophical on this one, but I’ll be brief. I think organizations are more productive if people don’t hate each other. Waving your political opinions around these days appears to have the effect that people start to hate each other. Hence I said it is better to keep them outside the professional context. Logical, right?
I also did not say “forget your opinions.” I said don’t introduce them into a context that exists for a different purpose. In this case to make software that can be used by anyone. Introducing your political opinions, for the reason mentioned above, is harmful to that context.
More broadly: The view that you state here, I think, is very dangerous on larger grounds. It is destructive to civilized exchange as such. It easily gets you to the view that it is good, or in your words “highly rational”, to actively persecute people because someone authoritative deems their mere opinion “dangerous”. And I think it is important to at least say this because it is a view shared by some left-leaning people I know. I have heard it before.
And it is very bad.
This is the reason why I think a Code of Conduct should protect against discrimination on the basis of political opinion and attitude. That does NOT mean on the basis of political action. In fact I very emphatically believe that no one should be allowed to act upon the opinion you just shared. If people engage in actively harmful behavior and action (!!!) inside a professional context that should, of course, be stopped immediately. And I believe such harmful behavior includes discrimination on the basis of mere opinion alone.
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It might help if you clarified your definition of ‘politics’. Because everything you’ve posted in this thread is what I would consider to be political opinions. Moderation is a political act: it directly involves making choices about what speech is acceptable and from whom, how power should be exercised, how vulnerable people should be protected and how powerful people’s potential for abuse should be limited. These are fundamentally political questions. There is no such thing as apolitical moderation.
is a political opinion.
is a political opinion.
You want, it seems, protection for having these political opinions. But simply having a political opinion should not be grounds for immunity from moderation. The paradox of tolerance requires us to recognize that some political opinions are incompatible with having a moderated community.
So perhaps you have a concept in mind that is more narrow than what I think of as ‘politics’, and if you can define that more clearly, maybe we could find common ground on something worth protecting.
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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. I’ll clarify my notion of politics more in the coming days if someone thinks more clarification is necessary 
Just this real quick:
I have a certain goal in mind. That goal is open source software. That is why I am here. To use it. And also to contribute to it. And to promote it.
Open source software as such is a political cause in a way. I adhere to it. A community made for creating and promoting open source software, such as this one, is committed to this cause as well. So my goals and the goals of the community align.
I believe this goal of open source software, albeit political, crosses the political spectrum as understood by electoral politics. It is not left-wing or right-wing.
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. This tendency tries to usurp the making of free software as an end in itself of certain organizations, and attempts to transform these organizations into a means to some other predefined goal that certain political activists, which are not primarily open source activists, consider more important.
The Hippocratic License, incidentally authored by the same author, Coraline Ada Ehmke, who is also responsible for the Contributer Covenant that forms the background of many of these Codes of Conduct, including the one we are debating right now, is an example of this tendency.
To that I am adamantly opposed because it is harmful to the goal of open source software in my opinion.
The protection that I want, for myself and others, is that people, without advertising their own political beliefs on abortion or social justice or feminism or Israel or what not, can contribute to making software and keep using it. 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.
What I 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. They have this preamble to their Code of Conduct:
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.
So in a way you are no longer allowed to discuss the use of the Code of Conduct publicly because that leads to hurtful discussions. Which is somewhat ridiculous, but also shows some of the dangers of adopting a Code of Conduct that has at least some divisive elements in it.
Thanks for all the replies so far! I really hope I am not hurting people in sharing my views! Have a good night everybody! 
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Ahh, see that is something I can get behind. But I feel this is already covered?
As others have said, if you think this isn’t clear enough, then submitting a PR that suggests a change of wording is probably the best way forward, that allows iteration and discussion of the specific wording.
Yeah I do think it’s pretty cool that this discussion can happen publicly in this forum. Splitting it from the original announcement was reasonable, and most people have stayed very civil, which I appreciate a lot.
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Yes, it is mentioned under the examples section. But it is not really clear from the rest of the text, WHY this example is there at all. However this would be much clearer, I feel, with differences in political opinion and orientation being explicitly mentioned as protected.
And since this appears to be the time to make explicit what has been implicit, why not add it?
This, and the mandating of empathy, is something I will open a PR on once I have written a hopefully somewhat coherent draft for my reasoning as to why I believe these changes would be good. I am travelling right now, so it might take a few days.
Which might also be a good thing to let this whole thing here cool down further.
And, as mentioned before, I will also reach out to the moderation team on Matrix roughly around that time.
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If there is no pledge, what point is there to having a CoC then?
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There is no contributor pledge of aiming at inclusivity of whatever, but there are certain expectations of civility in communication, and moderation is the process of enforcing them.
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Documenting what is enforced is often somewhat useful.
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GitHub has specific UI to highlight a thing that is called «Code of Conduct», so that’s what the moderation documentation gets to be called.
Since this issue has been coming up again and again here.
I suppose an argument could be made that for purposes of clarification on this aspect of the Code, the phrase we as contributors and maintainers pledge might better be replaced by something along the lines of we as moderators of the nix community representing its values pledge etc. etc.
In that way the pledge would be by moderators, but the authority for moderation of conduct would be for the whole of the nix community and all related projects / venues.
But that would be another PR I guess
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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.
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To preface this: I have not read the entire discussion yet.
Furthermore, I am not concern trolling or attempting any other less-than-desirable action.
As APCodes has mentioned, I too believe enforcing empathy is dangerous, and in my view, seriously disturbing. To the contrary to what some may believe, enforcing empathy is non-inclusive and ablest.
I, for instance, am not neuro-typical, and have never felt a shred of empathy for anything or anyone in my life.
That does not mean that I act like a jerk to everyone, but it does mean I will not act like I care about the other side’s emotionally-driven opinions. I will keep to the business at hand, and simply discard arguments which are not helpful to the task at hand.
I’m not sorry, this is how I, and plenty of other people are. Please do not exclude people because they cannot (or in most cases, will not) empathise. If they act like a jerk and say mean things in-context and on-site, sure, that’s fine, they should be moderated because they are acting out of line.
I’m not going to give people a pat on the back and pretend to be their best friend when they mess up, if there’s a mistake I will point it out, and ask them to correct it. If they refuse to without good reason or are emotionally upset that I point out their mistake, then I no longer have business with that person.
tl;dr: Please don’t exclude non-neurotypical people. It’s possible to not possess empathy and not act like a jerk. Feel free to encourage empathy, but do not enforce it.
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Please ignore the spin and read the Code of Conduct.
It’s one example of positive behavior. Nowhere else does the word ‘empathy’ appear.
Furthermore, the word ‘empathy’ is frequently used casually to mean a variety of different things, ranging from the actual feeling of other people’s emotions (something that people may not be able to do) to merely taking into account whether doing something would constitute ‘being a jerk’ from someone else’s perspective (something that some people have more innate talent for than others, but that almost anyone can learn if they try). Let’s not get too twisted around assuming that everyone is working from the literal dictionary definition of the word, and let’s ask clarifying questions of the mods if we think they’re expecting something unreasonable.
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