snoyberg / stack-coc

Unofficial, work in progress: Stack Code of Conduct

Unofficial Stack Code of Conduct

Unofficial, work in progress: Stack Code of Conduct.

For more information on motivation and goals, please see the announcement blog post:

https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2018/11/proposal-stack-coc

To make suggestions, please use the issue tracker and/or pull requests on the files in this repo.

Files in this repository

• Recommended communications guide
• Participants
• License (MIT)

Scope

This repo is explicitly an unofficial part of the Stack community. An official policy would need to be approved by the full Stack team. Such a policy could then have enforcement that includes excluding people from repositories, mailing lists, and other official community resources. I will not conceit to make such decisions unilaterally.

My goal here is different. I am trying to establish some accepted standards for behavior of the Stack community in general. I am hoping for this to be broader than just official communication channels. I'm going to encourage improved communications across all mediums.

But I have no right to demand this of anyone, especially in general communications. Therefore this repository serves primarily to document how I believe people should act in the Stack community.

As I have done in the past, I will be available for people to privately express concerns about the behaviors of others. And while I will not make unilateral decisions on behalf of the Stack leadership, I will, as necessary:

• Reach out privately to request changes in behavior
• Publicly request changes in behavior
• Raise the issue with the rest of the Stack leadership and consider a more official response

Code of Conduct

Following the discussion on issue #1, it does not seem to be appropriate to use a standard Code of Conduct for this repository. The reason is that this repository is an unofficial set of guidelines, reflecting one person's recommendations and offer to intervene in cases where concerning behavior occurs.

Instead, the Code of Conduct can be stated as:

• Try to keep discussions civil, respectful, and where appropriate focused on the technical details. For further details, please see the communications guide.
• If there is concern about the communications occurring in the Stack community, I (Michael Snoyman) am available to privately and discretely receive those concerns. I can be contacted at michael at snoyman dot com.
• There is no official policy of consequences for offending behavior. I will strive in general to handle matters with care, and prefer corrective recommendations to punitive actions.
• There is inherently some ambiguity in some cases as to whether behavior is in fact uncivil or disrespectful. I will attempt personally, and request from others, to give participants the benefit of the doubt. This benefit of the doubt must be balanced against protecting the rights and desires of those participating in discussion with them.
• The above creates a fine line to walk, and will require some subjective decision making. I apologize in advance if I err in this process.

stack-coc's Issues

Choose off-the-shelf CoC

The proposal calls for two documents:

• A standard, off the shelf CoC
• A custom document

This issue is for discussing exclusively that first point.

Based on my previous research and discussions for Yesod, I lean towards choosing the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct. I'm quite open to other ideas here.

What should "Respect privacy" entail?

On the "respect privacy" section of the communications guide, I see where @gbaz is coming from with "it seems to [...] introduce the principle only to immediately introduce language that undermines it", so I will attempt to reconstruct the point being made in that section, looking for ways we might make it sharper.

The motivation for the "if both sides agree" caveat is that an universal and automatic expectation of privacy can be abused. For instance, a bad actor might run a smear campaign against a third party using private messages. The current version of the guidelines addresses that by requiring an agreement reached upon "a private message requesting the other side participate privately". I presume this preliminary message would have to truthfully indicate the nature of what would be discussed. That being so, the aforementioned bad actor would have to ask something to the effect of "I have some hot gossip about Z. Wanna hear it?", at which point the recipient would be able to decline taking further part in the exchange.

Under such an interpretation, I believe the guideline is not contradictory. There is, however, another difficulty. Suppose that a fellow Haskeller sends me, without asking me beforehand, a personal message which includes personal information about their background and life story that, in principle, would be no one else's business. Should I have the right to share this personal information just because there was no preliminary message? Clearly not -- that would be against the spirit of the guideline, not to say against basic human decency. The one way out I see, and I know it is a bit of a minefield, is accounting for the content of the private messages when deciding whether there should be safe harbour for them. It might look like this:

On occasion, holding certain discussions in private can be the prudent or kind thing to do. However, private communications can also be used as a means for attacks and intimidation. As such, a message can only be reasonably considered as private if what it says does not affect anyone other than the sender, or if there was a previous agreement between sender and recipient about its privacy. If in doubt, send a preliminary message asking the other party to participate privately.

Somewhat obviously: if there is a reasonable expectation of privacy do not violate it!

Some examples of how that "does not affect anyone other than the sender" clause might work, in the absence of a previous agreement:

• X tells Y their opinion on a GHC proposal: reasonably private; no one is personally affected.
• X tells Y private matters about themselves: reasonably private; only X is affected.
• X insults Y: not reasonably private; Y is affected.
• X tells Y gossip about Z: not reasonably private; Z is affected.

There certainly are thorny corner cases here. For instance, a preliminary message saying "I have some hot gossip about Z" would arguably already contain an insinuation about Z. Still, it is probably not a good idea to rely on much more than the wise judgment of the involved parties to deal with the corner cases, as adding minute detail to those guidelines would be a hopeless endeavour.