[python-committers] Making the PSF CoC apply to core developers

[Nick Coghlan]

On 2 March 2016 at 05:44, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 01 Mar 2016 19:00:21 +0000, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
>> Now obviously I could be totally wrong and this isn't an actual barrier for
>> getting women or ethnic minorities to participate in Python's development.
>
> Yeah, there's no way to know, as far as I can see.  But I think our
> *being* welcoming is way, *way* more important than our *saying* we are
> welcoming.

Words that weren't backed up by behaviour would be false advertising,
and hence far more problematic than silence or an explicit statement
that an environment is deliberately adversarial.

However, it also isn't reasonable for open source projects to expect
potential contributors to invest weeks or months in assessing their
likely treatment if they speak up on a mailing list or submit a new
patch - it turns out that having the kind of spare time needed to
speculatively invest in following a community for long enough to make
that kind of judgement for ourselves is a rare luxury.

That's where written behavioural commitments can help - as long as
they accurately reflect the way that community members actually strive
to conduct themselves, than it helps newcomers better assess "Am I
likely to feel comfortable here?".

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia