[scikit-image] Community guidelines

Fri Oct 27 16:42:07 EDT 2017

Hi, everyone

Thank you for your input, especially François and Matthew who took the
time to explain opposing views.  I feel one thing we have in this
community that is precious, and that we should work hard to keep, is
that we can have friendly conversations on controversial topics.
Part of the reason I have not endorsed any CoCs before (in as much as
my endorsement is worth anything), is that I was concerned about it
stifling this type of conversation (or slightly controversial ways of
expressing your opinion, such as in the SWC case Matthew referred to).
The SciPy CoC is the first document that strikes me as taking a big
step away from a policing focus, while still laying down the ground
rules of play.
For let's be clear: *any collaboration has rules, whether they are
explicit or not*; and I would rather have them be explicit.  We would
never before have tolerated treating newcomers poorly (you may, e.g.,
have noticed me apologizing to newcomers on GitHub before when I thought
comments were overly harsh), never mind much worse behavior such as
racism and sexism.  Putting that down on paper does not change the
status quo, but as mentioned by others acts as an agreement between all
of us to watch out for one another, and as a signal to new players as to
how we conduct our business.
François, I hear your concern about judging others.  And here, I am
afraid, we will need to trust in the members we appoint to the
committee; because in the end these issues can be subjective.  In fact,
I think we should appoint you to that group, if you are willing, to make
sure we don't step over any lines ;)
A final point: we do not need to accept the document in its current
form, or at all.  While I think it is a good idea to do that, especially
if we want to receive sprint funding from groups such as NumFOCUS, the
PSF, any of numerous foundations, etc., we are not under time pressure,
and can take time to carefully consider various concerns and objections.
Thank you for taking the time to engage in this conversation, and I look
forward to hearing any other opinions you all may have.
Best regards
Stéfan

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017, at 05:28, Matthew Brett wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 11:09 AM, Juan Nunez-Iglesias
> <jni.soma at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 27 Oct 2017, 7:36 PM +1100, François Boulogne
> > <fboulogne at sciunto.org>, wrote:> >
> > I feel sad to see that we came to a point that we have to specify
> > such policies in a FLOSS community.> >
> >
> > This is undeniably sad, and, in my experience, it’s come to this due
> > to events in other communities, not SciPy. I have not (knowingly)
> > witnessed an event where this CoC would have made any difference in
> > the SciPy community.> >
> > I have, however, witnessed several instances of more subtle sexism
> > that would not be *directly* addressed by the CoC. I expect the same
> > would be true of racism. My support from the CoC stems from the
> > belief that it signals to underrepresented would-be contributors
> > that we won’t tolerate assholes and that they will be treated with
> > respect should they aim to make a contribution. This belief is on
> > admittedly shaky ground, but there’s been plenty of research to show
> > that female contributors tend to be more intimidated by online
> > communities (see e.g. this SO post), so we should do what we can to
> > reduce that. Maybe CoC is not the answer but I’d like to be doing
> > *something* to change this.> >
> > Moreover, beyond the declaration, I always have doubts
> > regarding the true efficiency of such guidelines in reality…
> >
> >
> > See above.
> >
> > and I’m embarrassed that some of us have the power to judge, when
> > it's not their job.> >
> >
> > “not their job” is a strange thing to object to. All of us are
> > volunteering, and the people named on the document have volunteered
> > to be so named. (At least, I hope so! ) So, in a way, they’ve made
> > it their job. In terms of qualifications, the main question is
> > whether you trust the named individuals to be reasonable in their
> > assessments. I’ll admit that I don’t know all of them but the ones
> > that I know I 100% would.> >
> > Stéfan in particular has been generally cautious about endorsing
> > CoCs, so I trust that he would exercise an abundance of caution in
> > enforcing them.> >
> > This is far from insignificant and could be more harmful than
> > helpful.> >
> >
> > I’ve seen a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt cast over CoCs, but
> > I don’t yet know of a case where it has been shown to cause harm?>
> As a contributor to the Scipy code of conduct, I fully share Francois'> concerns, while agreeing with much of what you say.
>
> I just want to add a couple of things.
>
> I humbly beg that we do not refer to anyone, real or imagined, as
> 'assholes'.   It's an ugly feature of online communities that it seems> to be acceptable to give extremely unpleasant labels to people, on
> subjective grounds, as if we were ourselves infallible in judgment and> behavior.   "Troll" is another much-overused and highly subjective
> word that is very effective for labeling and excluding people.   Yes,> we will occasionally be spammed by people with nasty and irrelevant
> stuff, but that is not a hard situation to deal with.  We wouldn't
> need these kinds of codes of conduct if that were our only problem.
>
> Second - about codes of conduct causing harm.  On that - yes -
> absolutely - have a read about this incident where a woman was thrown> off the Software Carpentry mailing list for some pretty minor
> misbehavior, and in a cold, formal way [1]. Of course that has a
> chilling effect on other discussion.  I think the organization got
> carried away enforcing its code of conduct.
>
> But also - codes of conducts are new, we don't know what effect they
> are going to have.  But I can say, that many of the codes of conducts> I have seen, appear to be precisely aimed at 'assholes' - where they
> deliberately give a lot of space for interpretation of what an
> 'asshole' is.  That space appears to include being something close to> 'rather annoying' or 'a bit unpleasant' [2]. This is a perfect recipe> for bullying and exclusion, if anyone felt moved in that direction
> [3]. There's a reason that our laws don't look like that - otherwise
> they would be wide open for abuse.  Of course the counter-argument is> "Our leader X is awesome, they would never allow that", which, it
> seems to me, has been adequately refuted by the whole of human
> history.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Matthew
>
> [1] https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/23#issuecomment-269244281> [2] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MatthewBrett/posts/7mQYbw5P7Rc
> [3] http://kwesthues.com/diffprof.htm
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