llvm dev - May 2016 - Resuming the discussion of establishing an LLVM code of conduct

Weighing in as a mostly-lurker:

A CoC is a great idea. I'm ok with Chandler's current draft. I'm ok
with his first draft. I'm ok with just adopting a standard one like Swift
did. I think it's important to enumerate several of the most common kinds of
harassment, and it's understood that it's not a comprehensive list.

I think the pedantry of this thread is unwarranted; the very real cancer of
pervasive tech-community harassment dwarfs the slim chances of the CoC itself
being somehow abused, so I think it's a no-brainer to adopt it and move on.
We can always revisit if it becomes a problem in practice, but my intuition is
that a year from now it will have long since faded as a point of controversy.

Many thanks to everybody who has participated in drafting the CoC. You're
getting more grief than you deserve.

--
Larry Gritz
lg at larrygritz.com

As activity on the thread dies down and I guess it has been socialized
to the point of annoyance (myself and probably others based on private
emails).. I'll assume the current draft is mostly stable, but to
confirm, Chandler are you done playing with your CoC?

As a side note: I'm a bit disappointed by some of the "leadership"
around here, who immediately attacked my alternative instead of trying
to give more constructive feedback or having an open mind.

------------
Moving forward - A few questions
1) How will it be decided if this goes into effect? Will the counsel
of 7 rule, just ask for +1 on the mailing list, private ballot, draw
straws.. or something else..
2) Who is actually eligible to vote
3) How are revisions/errata to be handled in the future?

On 9 May 2016 at 03:07, C Bergström <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
wrote:
> As activity on the thread dies down and I guess it has been socialized
> to the point of annoyance (myself and probably others based on private
> emails).. I'll assume the current draft is mostly stable, but to
> confirm, Chandler are you done playing with your CoC?
I personally think the code is fine as it is.

However, we still need to sort out two main issues:

1. The committee

* How is this committee going to be formed? Vote? Nomination? From
where? By whom?
* How many people will compose the committee? A few? A lot?
* How do we know the committee is not just being fair, but truthful to
the code and the community? Some form of auditing is in order.
* How long are these people going to stay? How are they going to be replaced?
* If we find problems, how can we propose changes and who can they be
replaced with?

Also, another suggestion, is to have interim sub-committees for
specific cases. For example, if something happened around the ARM code
base, me, Tim, James could help providing insight, and ensuring due
diligence.


2. The code itself

One of the arguments in favour of long lists of minorities and
harassment examples is that the list has to be explicit to avoid
doubt, but to be precise and fair, we need to update the code to
reflect the problems we face in the future.

Regardless of my opinion, this seems to be a larger consensus than the
committee situation. But without the ability and a defined process to
actually change the code, that promise is void. So, I'll repeat your
question:
> How are revisions/errata to be handled in the future?

It's perfectly possible that neither the composition and dynamics of
the committee, nor the revision process belong to either the code of
conduct or the reporting guidelines. But we must discuss and reach a
consensus about this before both go in.

I don't think strong handed decisions will be for the good of the
community, with or without the code. We are a community that goes
beyond its individual members. We have values of respect, inclusion
and equality that go beyond individual countries.

We have never had a strong handed decision this large in the community
as far as I can remember, and doing so now would go against the values
that we all agree are good and we want to keep with the code.

I think the crucial things people are asking now is transparency and
representativeness. I don't think any modern community can thrive
without either these values. Nor I think we can drop them on the floor
because of other values. There's always a way to keep *all* your
values, it just takes longer to reach consensus.

cheers,
--renato