Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi,

(This is hopefully my last mail for catching up with this thread ;-))

Le mercredi 25 novembre 2009, à 12:48 +0000, Lucas Rocha a écrit :
> Hi all,
> 
> The Board has recently received some complaints from members of the
> community about certain the inappropriate behaviors. In the context of
> GNOME Foundation, it's really hard to argue about how we expect our
> members to behave if there is no official guidelines that members are
> supposed to comply with. The GNOME Code of Conduct[1] has been serving
> very well as an informal guideline for the community but we'd like to
> make it an official document that new Foundation members are expected
> to explicitly agree[2] with before being accepted. This way we'll have a
> common ground for dealing with certain conflict situations and avoid
> trying to base our discussions on guidelines that certain members
> haven't explicitly agreed on.
> 
> Before deciding on this, we thought it would be useful to get some
> feedback from the community.

This is the first mail of the thread. And I'm really sad of the way the
thread went. I'm certainly guilty myself of not taking time to read it
and participate earlier to try to moderate things, but we should all be
able to step back and moderate a thread when it apparently needs to be
moderated...

First, let me state it: the original proposal has nothing to do with
Planet GNOME. If you have an issue with Planet GNOME, you're free to
state it publicly, of course, but you can also directly contact the
editors. We even put some documentation to answer most questions:
  http://live.gnome.org/PlanetGnome

And if you read that page, you'll see that the editors expect people on
Planet GNOME to respect the Code of Conduct. I'm not aware of a case
where we removed a post or a blog because of this, but if this needs to
happen, then fine, we'll do it.

(and yes, the editors are not perfect, and are not always replying in
time, and are doing mistakes and all that, so keep this in mind please
;-))

Now, back to the original proposal. The idea is that we want the GNOME
project to be a cool place. With great people. Where newcomers feel
welcome. And all that. I'd love a rainbow, and illimited ice cream, btw.

That what is already behind the Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct is
only stating the obvious. There's nothing revolutionary there. There are
surely some cases where it doesn't help us. We can also all have a bad
day and not respect the Code of Conduct at some point -- if this
happens, as long as we can acknowledge that we could have had a more
appropriate behavior, it's fine.

If you think that having a "Yes, I agree that I should try to be polite"
requirement for GNOME Foundation membership is bad, then, well, okay;
that just means you might share one of the values of the GNOME
Foundation. Is it the end of the world? No. Does that make it impossible
to contribute to GNOME? No. (Hint: you don't have to be a GNOME
Foundation member to contribute.)

This is really all about explaining to the world what are values are,
and trying to lead by the example. This is not about adding rules.

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.