[SciPy-Dev] establishing a Code of Conduct for SciPy

[Ralf Gommers]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Stefan van der Walt <stefanv at berkeley.edu>
wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 11, 2017, at 14:08, Pauli Virtanen wrote:
> > It can of course be useful to think about writing such things down
> > explicitly to produce a document explaining (1), and I think the Apache
> > one gives good hints for keeping things productive. But it is less
> > clear to me this is something for which formal moderator action would
> > be necessary.
> >
> > However, if I understand correctly, the reason why people want these
> > things is more about (2). Indeed, this is standard stuff in the
> > workplace and in moderation of internet forums (usually in "Rules" in
> > the latter).


Agreed that many people want it for (2). There's an important difference
though. Forum rules and workplace policies are usually not very visible,
while with a CoC for an open source project one wants it to be quite
visible. Therefore the importance of it having a positive tone and
statements about what we value is a lot more important than for something
like a workplace policy.

It seems a good idea to structure this part so that it
> > does not fail if someone acts in bad faith, and so that the moderation
> > plan is reasonable to the reader and possible to implement.
>
> I feel it is important to mix in a bit of (1) with (2), the reason being
> that almost every person reading the CoC will not ever act in bad faith.
>  You'd think that those people could simply ignore language related to
> enforcement, but in previous discussions (e.g., around the Jupyter CoC)
> that turned out not to be the case: it is all too easy to frighten
> people into not speaking up.
>
> So, I'd recommend focusing on a description of the kind of community we
> want, instead of what we're trying to avoid; and postponing the
> enforcement language until later in the document, making it clear that
> enforcement only comes through (somewhat wide) deliberation of trusted
> community members (and, preferably, also after engagement with the
> offending party).
>
> This way, we can hopefully instill trust in our CoC as a process, rather
> than a set of rules.
>

That sounds quite good to me. The process at a high level (for all but the
most severe cases) should be something like:

  1. complaint
  2. reasonable discussion/feedback
  3. mediation (if feedback didn't help)
  4. enforcement via transparent decision by CoC committee (if mediation
failed)

And not what some people may be afraid of, and sometimes actually happens
in practice:
  1. complaint
  2. enforcement

For a new CoC draft, taking most of the Apache doc and tacking the more
rules/enforcement oriented content of the Contributor Covenant onto the end
seems like a good starting point.

Ralf
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