On 04.02.22 11:20, Andrew Nenakhov wrote:
1. From what I've seen, CoCs are used so silence or scare into silence
people with differing political opinions (so much for tolerance). The
language of this CoC, too, is too broad and allows for such misuse.
2. XEPs are not the place for such documents. If XSF wants to have a
code of conduct, it can well publish it on it's website in a Code of
Conduct section.
Use of XEPs for such purposes is a sign of bureaucracy apparatus that
had forgotten its original goal and is now a self-serving process.
I think one argument in favour of using a XEP is that this allows for a
community-driven governance process of managing and changing the
document over time.
A CoC simply hosted as a webpage outside of the XEP process is much more
open to abuse since it can be changed at any time without oversight.
- JC
On Fri, 4 Feb 2022, 15:10 JC Brand, <li...@opkode.com> wrote:
Dear list
The community code of conduct (xep-0458) came up for an approval
vote in a recent board meeting.
I've gone through the document and am writing down my thoughts and
feedback here.
Quoted parts are directly from the document.
> The examples in this document of what not to do are intended to
be just that - examples. They are not intended to be exhaustive.
Many of these examples have formal definitions, either in law or
elsewhere - in general, if you are reliant on such a definition to
argue why your behaviour might be acceptable, you have already
lost the argument.
I don't think it's in the purview of this document to
pre-emptively decide whether someone has "won" or "lost" an
argument. Even phrasing it that way, as a competition, is in my
opinion problematic.
> Ordinarily, the XMPP Standards Foundation welcomes and
encourages participation in XSF Activities, but this guiding
principle allows the XSF to partially or completely exclude anyone
from any activity, for any reason.
I think the phrasing "for any reason" is too harsh and leaves this
document open to abuse. It makes it sound as if the XSF claims the
right to be capricious. I would drop that last bit.
> By explicitly stating that this Code of Conduct applies this
allows the XSF to sanction bad behaviour outside of XSF Activities
should the need arise.
I'm against this statement as written. What someone does in their
private life, unrelated to the XSF and outside of XSF activities
has no bearing on the XSF and the XSF has no justifiable basis to
sanction that person for it.
Also "bad behaviour" is incredibly broad. What is "bad behaviour"?
In some societies things that are considered bad behaviour are
celebrated in other societies. Social norms change and a sentence
such as this makes this document and its related process open to
abuse.
This makes me think of Brendan Eich who got fired by Mozilla for
donating money to a campaign against gay marriage. With this kind
of wording in the document, I wouldn't be surprised if something
similar could be attempted in the XSF. I would be against that,
particularly because it's outside the purview of the XSF. The
argument made in Mozilla at the time was that Eich's act caused
Mozilla employees to feel "excluded", a word that pops up
regularly in this document as well.
Ideally politics is left outside of the XSF and I've made the
argument before that the XSF is apolitical and we should not get
involved in politics. One of my concerns of a document such as
this is that it can be used as a tool to start political fights
and campaigns inside the XSF.
> using sexualised language in your erotic fiction hobby is likely
to be irrelevant to this Code of Conduct.
The use of "likely" here leaves the door open to sanction people
for their private endeavors.
> It may also be in some cases people may prefer to report
informally; while reporting "properly" is preferred, the Conduct
Team should strive to handle informal reports in the same way if
possible.
To me this reads as encouraging gossip and for the Conduct Team to
respond to gossip. If someone doesn't report formally, I don't
think the Conduct Team should get involved in any dispute.
> The Conduct Team may ask for further information from you, the
person accused of bad conduct, or others who were present
This sentence and most of this section is written as if the reader
is the reporter. I find this biased. It might also be that the
reader is being reported, and I therefore think this should all be
written in the 3rd person, i.e. no use of "you".
>Finally, the Conduct Team will make a decision on sanctions or
other action.
This makes it sound like some action will be taken. In some cases,
no actions might be taken.
Considering the "Security Considerations" section.
> It is possible for almost any behaviour to have some argument
why it is not, in fact, exclusionary, and why it's just someone
taking offence too easily. It also is possible for the Code of
Conduct to be weaponised for exclusionary purposes, by using the
complaints mechanism to stall or silence valid debate.
There are other ways to weaponise a CoC and not just to silence
debate, but also to exclude and create ideological conformity
inside the XSF.
There are of course situations where this might be valid, for
example someone openly expressing illegal speech (e.g. calling for
genocide etc.), but IMO the bar should be very high here.
I see the terms "inclusion" and "exclusion" used a lot in this
document, but I don't see anything about tolerance. Tolerance
means that while you don't necessarily approve of someone's
personal decisions, you tolerate it in order to keep the peace and
to not let the disagreement interfere with goal or task at hand.
Regards
JC
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