Review community guidelines

[Skud]

Since we first created our Community Guidelines, a number of open source (and related) projects have also created codes of conduct for their communities. Some of these may be better than ours, or have aspects we want to consider using.

History of our Community Guidelines: I decided we should have them very early on, so I wrote something, ran it past the people then active in the community, and posted it (original version: August 19th 2012; the project had kicked off at the end of July.) I took some inspiration from [Dreamwidth's diversity statement] and some from the Geek Feminism Anti-Harassment Policy and associated resources.

Criticism of current guidelines: personally the one thing that makes me twitch the most is the "be excellent to each other" at the end. Since first writing that, the phrase has come to be a shorthand example of how not to write a code of conduct. That is to say, a bad CoC says only "be excellent to each other", while a good one explains what that means, and also what bad behaviour is, how to report bad behaviour, and what the consequences are for behaving badly. Ours does all those things but then ends with "be excellent", which might be misconstrued or something. In any case it makes me uncomfortable now.

Anyway. At the very least I'd like to look at some other CoCs, see what is current "best practice", and bring our CGs into line with that if necessary.

Here are some to look into:

• Open Source Bridge's Citizen Code of Conduct
• Contributor Covenant

NB, CoCs based on Ubuntu's, which emphasise desirable positive behaviours ("be excellent to each other") without specifying undesirable negative behaviours, do not meet my current understanding of best practice; in practice, such CoCs are often used to tone police people who want to address negative behaviour. (These CoCs are mostly of an earlier generation, which didn't recognise harassment and marginalisation as systemic problems.)

Other background reading:

• HOWTO design a code of conduct for your community

[pozorvlak]

Initial thoughts, without having (yet) read any of the linked documents:

It's unfortunate that "be excellent to each other" has acquired that connotation, because I think it captures something important - beyond avoiding a specified list of disallowed negative behaviours and acting on a specified list of desired positive behaviours, we should strive to go above and beyond and be excellent to each other inventively, in ad-hoc ways that no pre-written list can hope to capture. It's good to include an explicit list of unacceptable behaviours and a parallel list of expected behaviours (as we do, though I dare say our lists could be improved upon), but we should make it clear that both lists are non-exhaustive, and should be followed in spirit rather than in letter.

[Skud]

We're in awful company with the "be excellent" thing :( https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/CodeOfConflict?id=b0bc65729070b9cbdbb53ff042984a3c545a0e34