> Thus I am asking again, and politely despite my finding very disrespectful 
> to have a legitimate question ignored: who was on the short list to write 
> what is now our code of conduct, when was it initiated and in which 
> conditions ? (yes, there are three parts to the question)
>

Hi Nathan,

I participated in the initial drafting of the code. Our draft closely 
follows, and was stolen from, similar codes of conduct from other projects. 
Ultimately all that it  asks is that people be polite and respectful 
towards others. I don't think that this very onerous. 

Rather than being put forward as a fait accompli (or even a fiat accompli:) 
Volker's initial post asked everyone to (discuss and) vote on whether we 
should adopt the code. That is, from the onset people were asked for their 
opinion. If you reread the thread, when the discussion started becoming 
heated William tried to close it. When that failed, he asked everyone to 
vote on it. This looks quite democratic to me. This said, since the vote 
was so close, and seemingly so contentious, I'm not sure we should adopt 
it. Personally I would prefer to see it, or some variation of it, adopted 
as guidelines -- having to "enforce" a code is contrary to the underlying 
principle of being polite. 

The motivation for suggesting the code was that quite a few people were 
unhappy with repeated negative comments that appeared in a long series of 
posts. I had tried talking off-list with the person making these to try and 
explain to them why their comments were not helpful. Later I learned that 
several other people had, independently, talked to this person as well. 
(Incidentally, the poster is a valued developer, which makes them much 
harder to ignore than some one like rjf.) Speaking for myself, if one 
person tells me I'm being rude I'll probably take notice, but perhaps I'd 
shrug them off. If four people tell me I'm being rude then change my 
behaviour. Unfortunately, nothing changed.

A number of people have stopped contributing to sage because of such 
interactions, and there is a danger that others will stop. I don't want 
that. As nothing else had worked I thought that it was worth proposing some 
guidelines in the hope that this might help. I'm still a little baffled as 
to why the suggestion that we try to being nice to each other  is causing 
such a commotion.

Andrew

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