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This may or may not be a frequently asked question; maybe it's only me. But when organizations, events, or projects announce the adoption of a code of conduct, I find myself asking "er, was there an issue? has there been a problem of which I have been blissfully unaware?", with perhaps the undertones of "am I really that clueless?" and "is this coming out of the blue?" (Why should anyone react this way? I don't know; I observe that I do. Perhaps it has something to do with the conversational maxim of relevance / relation. I hear about it, and I ask "why is this coming up now?"
On the hypothesis that one reason some people react negatively to the adoption of a code of conduct is that they believe it must be corrective (and thus feel, obscurely, as if they had been accused of bad behavior), perhaps an addition to the FAQ might be helpful. I am not sure of the best way to answer the question is (that is perhaps why I looked for it in the FAQ), but if I had to draft something this moment, it might be:
Q. Does this mean someone thinks some participants in the community or project have done something wrong?
A. No. Or at least, not necessarily. If you are asking the question, you are presumably unaware of any problems, and perhaps there have been none. In that case, the project is probably adopting the code of conduct not as a corrective measure but as a preventive measure. There are plenty of examples of projects in which problems developed and got worse because there was not a clear way, identified in advance, to address them. No project needs to wait until there is a problem before adopting the code of conduct, any more than a project needs to wait for its source code to be a hopeless mess before adopting routine code formatting rules.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:
This may or may not be a frequently asked question; maybe it's only me. But when organizations, events, or projects announce the adoption of a code of conduct, I find myself asking "er, was there an issue? has there been a problem of which I have been blissfully unaware?", with perhaps the undertones of "am I really that clueless?" and "is this coming out of the blue?" (Why should anyone react this way? I don't know; I observe that I do. Perhaps it has something to do with the conversational maxim of relevance / relation. I hear about it, and I ask "why is this coming up now?"
On the hypothesis that one reason some people react negatively to the adoption of a code of conduct is that they believe it must be corrective (and thus feel, obscurely, as if they had been accused of bad behavior), perhaps an addition to the FAQ might be helpful. I am not sure of the best way to answer the question is (that is perhaps why I looked for it in the FAQ), but if I had to draft something this moment, it might be:
Q. Does this mean someone thinks some participants in the community or project have done something wrong?
A. No. Or at least, not necessarily. If you are asking the question, you are presumably unaware of any problems, and perhaps there have been none. In that case, the project is probably adopting the code of conduct not as a corrective measure but as a preventive measure. There are plenty of examples of projects in which problems developed and got worse because there was not a clear way, identified in advance, to address them. No project needs to wait until there is a problem before adopting the code of conduct, any more than a project needs to wait for its source code to be a hopeless mess before adopting routine code formatting rules.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: