There is a wide spectrum of bad faith behaviour. It may be simply not
caring if one causes harm ("recklessness", if you like), through
attempts to undermine the culture of a space or community, to attempts
to cause people material harm.
The wider Haskell community has witnessed all of these, even if not
everyone is sufficiently aware of it. On the "material harm" end of the
spectrum, an incident in 2016 grew sufficiently infamous that friends
with no connections to the FP community in general, computer science or
the computing industry were sending me messages of sympathy and support
- and I was forced to take some "opsec" measures to safeguard both
myself and others.
The nature of both this spectrum and of bad faith makes this a difficult
problem to deal with and one that mustn't be oversimplified - not all
acts are equal and the cultural impacts are complex. But people acting
in bad faith - some of them persistently and possibly even with a degree
of coordination - is indeed the root problem I'm highlighting.
Thanks for your time and effort on this,
Philippa
On 09/12/2018 18:03, Richard Eisenberg wrote:
What this email seems to suggest to me is that our guidelines assume
good faith, and yet some participants act in bad faith. I agree this
is not well accounted-for in the guidelines. (However, the guidelines
were designed with the GHC Steering Committee in mind, where members
join by way of a nomination and selection process and can be removed
-- quite unlike the broader Haskell community.)
Before thinking about specific words / documents that solve the
problem, I want to be sure I understand the problem you're
highlighting. Is it the presence of bad faith actors, specifically?
Thanks for coming forward with these concerns.
Richard
On Dec 6, 2018, at 4:59 PM, Philippa Cowderoy <fli...@flippac.org
<mailto:fli...@flippac.org>> wrote:
I lack the energy to contribute to GHC directly, but these guidelines
are far too easy to abuse by someone acting in bad faith and we know
that bad faith actors have been adjacent to our community and acted
on things that have taken place within it.
From where I'm sitting, guidelines like this risk doing even more
damage than not having any. Not only do they lack the means to handle
incidents that have already occurred, they actively discourage the
community from finding those means.
As someone these guidelines have been drafted to help include, I fear
they increase the burden on my participation and that of others like
me. For a community to hold together without sinking to the worst of
behaviour, there needs to be some acceptance that we will all fail to
act in good fatih on occasion, that some people will act in bad faith
and that behaviour in bad faith may take a great deal of explaining
to anyone who is not the target of it or familiar with its mechanisms.
I have spent a great deal of time running spaces within the wider
community and I have witnessed these things repeatedly. I also lack
the resources some people here have available to mitigate the risks
others have openly posed to members of the community including myself
and Simon.
One solution - whether GHC itself needs it or not - might be to pair
guidelines for respectful communication with guidelines for when
respectful communication is failing to occur.
Simon, I appreciate both the work you've put in and your love for the
communty. I hope you can appreciate that where I appear to be cynical
or even sowing discord here, I am acting out of love and care for a
community that at its best has done a great deal for me. I apologise
for being the one to open up what I see as a somewhat inevitable
discussion.
On 06/12/2018 10:35, Simon Peyton Jones via Haskell wrote:
Friends
As many of you will know, I have been concerned for several years about the standards
of discourse in the Haskell community. I think things have improved since the period
that drove me to write my Respect
email<https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2016-September/024995.html>,
but it's far from secure.
We discussed this at a meeting of the GHC Steering
Committee<https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals> at ICFP in
September, and many of us have had related discussions since. Arising out of that
conversation, the GHC Steering Committee has decided to adopt these
Guidelines for respectful
communication<https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/GRC.rst>
We are not trying to impose these guidelines on members of the Haskell
community generally. Rather, we are adopting them for ourselves, as a signal
that we seek high standards of discourse in the Haskell community, and are
willing to publicly hold ourselves to that standard, in the hope that others
may choose to follow suit.
We are calling them "guidelines for respectful communication" rather than a "code of
conduct", because we want to encourage good communication, rather than focus on bad behaviour. Richard
Stallman's recent post<https://lwn.net/Articles/769167/> about the new GNU Kind Communication
Guidelines<https://gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html> expresses the same idea.
Meanwhile, the Stack community is taking a similar
approach<https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2018/11/proposal-stack-coc>.
Our guidelines are not set in stone; you can comment
here<https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/commit/373044b5a78519071b9a24b3681cfd1af06e57e0>.
Perhaps they can evolve so that other Haskell committees (or even individuals)
feel able to adopt them.
The Haskell community is such a rich collection of intelligent, passionate, and
committed people. Thank you -- I love you all!
Simon
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