Hey all, We have had a couple of incidents now of what can be interpreted as misbehavior. There has been room for interpretation as to whether it actually was misbehavior. There will almost always *be* room for interpretation. Sometimes this will be by design, and sometimes it will be accidental.
We are approaching an emotional topic, and we can expect people to feel and express anger, disappointment, frustration, confusion, and more. But we also hope to talk to and convince people who are afraid, hurt, sad, jealous, and more. The latter is true both for people who we've had trouble including in our communities, and among those community members who may not see the need for diversity and inclusion work. We need to talk about what are acceptable ways to express our feelings on our lists, and we need to find ways to talk about it when our boundaries are crossed or when we believe others are being mistreated. We need to be able to do this without limiting our ability to approach difficult topics and exchange unpopular opinions and unpleasant facts. Social contracts without consequences cannot succeed. So we will also need to talk about what consequences we wish to apply when a participant repeatedly and willfully crosses boundaries. We need some of those consequences to be low-key, and even loving, because otherwise we will hesitate to apply them until a conversation has already left the rails. But we also need at least one tool in our toolbox for removing the (vanishingly rare) "true villain" who wants us to fail, and is actively working to undermine us. I believe we will need different standards for our different lists (private@diversity, dev@diversity, diversity@). On diversity@ I'm willing to be very tolerant, because it is a sort of "user" list. On private@ I expect us to keep traffic as low as possible, regardless of content. So what I'm most interested in talking about right now is CoC and enforcement specifically on our working list: dev@diversity. But our other lists will come up in this conversation too. Best Regards, Myrle 1.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory 2.) "When hawks give rise to doves: The evolution and transition of enforcement strategies" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3675804/ 3.) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38323-7
