Policy proposal: New Code of Conduct

Project Discussion
45

That is a rather unclear statement, I am unsure if you are saying that people resist CoC because they want attention, or if people invent CoC because they want attention. In fact, it is unclear of the logical reasoning from “people want attention” and the rest of the argument.

Also, saying “communicate and behave differently” is a rather misleading way of presenting things.

Technically, shouting racist insults would indeed be “different”. But the difference per se is not the problem, the inherent aggression and its consequences of driving people away is what we want to prevent.

Reducing that to “communicate differently” is also ignoring that CoC violations are looked in context, that people usually have time to explain themselves, to reflect, etc.

Let me just quote a peer-reviewed scientific paper on CoC ( on https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7884606 ):

According to Hermans [15], codes of conduct should trigger
discussion and change people’s minds. She believes that if
the code of conduct does not induce some pushback, it is not
working properly. While she is referring to conference codes
of conduct, we share her vision of codes of conduct as the
discussion and reflection vehicle.

The pushback is a inherent part of the CoC process, caused by the reflection of people own behavior.

And I can understand why, as people tend to equate CoC with “OMG, people are going to ban me because I said something somewhere”. But this is not what happen in practice.

In practice, there is plenty of discussion, there is warnings, there is context. To get banned, you need to have several people reporting you, several times, and ignoring warning several time.

Since all of this is done privately (since that’s usually why the reported people seems to want), people just see the final outcome (someone banned/moderated) and conclude nothing else happened.

Mozilla has document documenting the consequences of CoC violation and while, as said in the document, people can start directly at level 7, this is not what happen in practice:

You can see in the Fedora CoC report that in 2020, the vast majority of tickets resulted in warning, with a 50% decrease for each ladder. You can also look up at others reports from others community to see the same trends.

So yeah, there is pushback, but the pushback is also the occasion to explain to people what the CoC does, far from false ideas propagated by a few people.

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46

This one.

If you don’t collect metrics on people driven away, how do you prove that CoC works?

CoC is not some sort of “moderaion guidelines”. In this respect it is the same as EULA - “leave if you don’t agree”.

This means that my current pushback should make myself guilty by this very moment. Instead of feeling guilty I’d rather avoid speaking at all to avoid being accused of having bad intent, and that leaves a room for other people to push their agenda. This is how the filter works.

I’d like to see the opt-out form, so that people could leave a public message when they leave.

47

We intend for the Code of Conduct committee to implement a similar “ladder” system. However, that’ll be part of the supporting documentation, not our code itself.

48

The metrics is quite informal, if people stop complaining about how the community is driving them away, that’s enough. You also assume that people will leave the whole community and tell you why. But sometime, people just say “Yes, I stopped interacting there because f X”, with X being a well know poster than everybody complain about, but no one say anything.

There is also the whole concept of “Broken Stair”. We used to have a few in the Fedora community, and I had people complain to me over the years (some coworkers, some people outside). As I also said, we also had existing CoC tickets. And we also have our own eyes.

But now, if the topic interest you, there is a whole book dedicated to the topic of diversity.

How is that different from moderation guidelines ? If you break the guidelines enough, you would be banned from IRC (to give one example), so that’s really the same. There is a whole SIG dedicated to irc moderation.

I really have a hard time to follow. I do not think anyone used the word guilty or made a accusation of wrongdoing. But if I read your own words, you feel guilty. For what, I do not know, but maybe you can clarify of what you feel accused of, and where ?

You also say “this leave a room for others people to push their agenda”. Can you clarify who are those others people, and what agenda they are going to push ? I also seems that you imply that this would be a problem, can you clarify that ?

49

One can not break moderation guidelines, because they are guidelines for moderators, which they may or may not follow. One can break rules thought, which are established if moderators can not moderate discussions otherwise.

CoC is not the moderation guidelines. If these are rules how to ban people, why not just call them Rules?

50

No, I am not assuming that. Quite opposite - I am trying to tell that without metrics nobody knows how many people are left behind. How many people left Fedora after the project “cancelled” RMS, for example? Without intent to collect those metrics there won’t be no metrics, and no proof that CoC works. So if there are no proof that previous CoC works, why do you need New CoC? Is that because old CoC was not enough to ban somebody?

51

My posts were hidden several times for the “harsh tone” like that on SustainOSS forum. Basically, I can not be skeptical even if it is “my gender”, because people don’t get it. I need to rewrite my posts as cheerful even if I don’t feel so. Which leads to…

Happy and cheerful people of course, with happy and cheerful censorship. Like in Belarus, for example.

52

If that’s a question of people left behind (which is different from people leaving), Fedora is working on a survey to see how is the community. But even without a survey, one doesn’t need to have accurate numbers to see that we are not doing much better in term of diversity than any random OSS projects, for which there is several studies. So who is left behind, well, all the people who are not here.

This one is easy, between 0 and 1. The only contributor who announced his departure is still posting on discourse and didn’t orphan his packages AFAIK. Let’s be generous and say there is 5 time more. That’s 5 out of the 2000 or so contributors in Fedora, or less than 1%.

But we can take a look at Debian.
Out of the 1000 Debian developers who would be able to vote on the General resolution, the vast majority did not care enough to vote (like 50%) as only 474 votes have been counted as valid. The majority of voters said “do nothing”, closely followed by “say something”, and in a very distant last position, the “support RMS” proposal (like 20 to 30 votes if I understood Debian voting system correctly), so roughly 2 to 3%.

And out of those 2 to 3%, I have seen none saying “I am leaving”.

Now, there is also the non-contributors.
Github has around 50 millions users. Ubuntu has 20 millions of users (according to their website), and I think Fedora download stats show we are also in the same range, let’s say 10 millions users.

The amount of people who signed the RMS support letter is in the range of 10 000 persons (6420 as of today, but let’s be generous). Even if we assume those 10 000 are all using Fedora Linux (they are likely not) and decide to leave the Fedora community over the Council communication, that’s 10 000 out of a estimate 10 000 000, or 0.1%. Even if we triple that number, that’s still less than 1%. And that’s making lots of assumption, like them all being Fedora users.

Now, that’s just estimations, but all signs point at “not much”, and so far, no one gave me better numbers.

That’s like with Systemd, people were saying this would result in a exodus from Linux to BSD.

6 to 7 years after, I still have to find anything to confirm this happened. No increase in mindshare on the BSD side, no significant increase in term of contributions (see for example pkgsrc or FreeBSD contributors over time, and how this didn’t move 6 years ago).

53

Hey friends,

Please remember to keep this thread on topic. The Fedora Council agreed to working on a new Code of Conduct about three years ago, this isn’t new or even up for debate. What this thread should focus on is the new Code of Conduct text. Feel free to request specific edits and provide an explanation of why you feel the change should be made.

Thanks!

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54

Please read my first post in this thread for some reflections on why we need an update. The existing CoC was adopted by the Fedora Board (the predecessor group the current Fedora Council) on May 10th, 2011, almost exactly a decade ago. We’ve had a lot of experience with what works and what doesn’t work since then.

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55

Why is this not more publicized with whom and what for were reported.

56

Reports are confidential. We want to use the Code of Conduct to help people come in line with the community’s expectations, not as a punishment. Publishing who was reported (including for what, which can often lead to figuring out the who) immediately make this adversarial and opens CoC reports to be used as a tool for abuse.

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57

I didn’t get a response regarding this example case:

Does that apply to private Twitter accounts? For example say a contributor who have “I contribute to Fedora” in their bio, then post a tweet supporting the Arkansas (?) trans health care bill, would it be possible they get a warning or get banned for transphobia?

Or any other relevant political issue (mostly US ones cause nobody cares what happens in the rest).

I reiterate this because of what happened in the NodeJS community in:

Someone took issue with a link posted on Twitter + some harassment claims.

See response here:
Requesting Rod to step down or be removed from the CTC · Issue #165 · nodejs/CTC · GitHub (Section 3 regarding the link posted on Twitter).

In the same post is also described how the report was handled:

My personal experience so far has been approximately as follows:

  • Some time ago I received notification via email that there are complaints against me. No details were provided and I was informed that I would neither receive those details or be involved in the whatever process was to take place. Further, TSC members were not allowed to speak to me directly about these matters, including my work colleagues also on the TSC. I was never provided with an opportunity to understand the specific charges against me or be involved in any discussions on this topic from that point onward.
  • 3 days ago, I saw nodejs/TSC#310 at the same time as the public. This was the first time that I had seen the list of complaints . It was the first that I heard that there was a vote taking place regarding my position.
  • At no point have I been provided with an opportunity to answer to these complaints, correct the factual errors contained in them (see below), apologise and make amends where possible, or provide additional context that may further explain accusations against me.
  • At no point have I been approached by a member of the TSC or CTC regarding any of these items other than what the record that we have here on GitHub shows—primarily in the threads involved and in the moderation repository, the record is open for you to view regarding the due diligence undertaken either by my accusers or those executing the process. I have had interactions with only a single member of the TSC regarding one of these matters in private email and in person which has, on both occasions, involved me attempting to coax out the source of bad feelings that I had sensed and attempting to (relatively blindly) make amends.

I hope you can empathise that to me this process is rather unfair and regardless of whether this process is informed or dictated by our governance documents as has been claimed, it should be changed so that in the future accused parties have the chance to at least respond to accusations.

What measures are in place to avoid this “unfair process” within Fedora:

  • Knowledge of the complaint and what it contains
  • Possibility of providing a defense against the complain
  • Communication with the future Code of Conduct Committee

The Fedora Council agreed to working on a new Code of Conduct about three years ago, this isn’t new or even up for debate.

I don’t want to be mean, but three years to finally adopt a variant of the Contributor Covenant…? Was any other even considered?

(including but not limited to sealioning)

I see what it looks to prevent but this can be also used as an excuse to not defend one’s position. It would be nice to reword it and not use “sealioning” which would not, in my opinion, be clearly understood by people outside of the US internet microcosm.

Publishing someone else’s private information, such as a physical or electronic
address, without explicit permission

It seems weird to me to include electronic address here considering this is the basis of most of our communication within the project. I’d use phone number instead.

Public or private harassment

This could be a little more specific. People have very different conception of what constitute harassment. Some people consider one instance of something to be harassement, others include that it should be multiple occurrences.

Unwelcome physical contact

The allowed-level of physical contact is very culturally dependent. I mean foreigners here are surprised about kiss on the cheeks to say hello (not COVID approved nowadays).

Will we have a ladder like Mozilla mentioned above by @misc ?

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58

yes, see Policy proposal: New Code of Conduct - #47 by mattdm

I guess then people will have to ask. I am also french and I know that not everybody is comfortable kissing on the cheeks even here. The problem is not what is cultural but forcing when people do not want. No one prevent you for doing that if everybody agree. But forcing someone when that person do not want is kinda not great, and that’s what is about.

59

So from what I know, part of the delay was actually caused by:

  • The new CoC had to be vetted by RH Legal. But they are already quite busy in normal time, and went from very busy to extra busy due to IBM acquisition (eg, the few months before the announce in October 2018), because reviewing all the paperwork was seen as more urgent than changing the CoC. And were also quite busy after the announce, because of more paperwork.
  • Then, at the start of 2019, Bex decided to move to another role inside RH and he was also quite busy outside of work. So he focused on more urgent tasks during this time period of transition, and so the CoC review was put on the backburner for a while.
  • The process to hire a replacement was also a bit slower than usual so @riecatnor was only able to start in November 2019.
  • then in 2020, you might have heard of the global pandemic, who kinda impacted lots of stuff, and also slowed down process, making it slower than before. Not going to say that without the pandemics, it would have been a lot faster, but surely it did push all of this by a few months

So the result of that perfect storm is the delay.

You ask if others were considered, I guess so, but this wouldn’t really change much about your others questions, because they are around the processes, and kinda independent of the CoC.

I can’t speak for any cases at Fedora as I know nothing about them, but for the ticket I opened, people had been contacted and were able to explain their point of view. I do not know how the discussion went exactly, but I guess it was “yeah, people said that this was not great, for this and this reason, so can you not do that” and “right, I can see that point of view, and will not do it again”. Nothing dramatic.

So on one hand, I agree, especially since there is indeed a point of detail on what would be a private email and what is not, and maybe there is also a subtle distinction on personal email vs private email (and distinction when translated).

On the other hand, phone numbers are also used and are visible on lots of messaging systems widely used (Telegram, Signal, Whatsapp) so I am not sure if the cultural perception would be that much different. Would the number assigned by your employer be “private”, or “personal” ?

But I guess it can’t hurt to add phone numbers too.

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60

Hi and thank you to everyone for all of the discussion around the proposed updated Code of Conduct. I have reviewed the comments and provided feedback below. It has been great to see positive comments here and in other spaces about the new CoC. Several topics were brought up several times, to which I wrote one reply. As many sufficient answers were given in thread, I am not responding to every single comment and/or question. The commentary on this ticket and my responses have been reviewed by Red Hat legal.

Based on the feedback from this thread, several small changes will be made to the Code of Conduct. I will implement the changes to the proposed Code of Conduct and publish the latest variation on the respective CoC Council Ticket along with a summary before the next Council Meeting (next Thursday 1700 UTC in #fedora-meeting).

I know these are examples but perhaps it should simply say “Official Fedora communication channel” and linking it to Marketing social networks - Fedora Project Wiki 1

  • This seems like a good change, I will update for the next version.

Fedora Community in their elected bodies? Communication channel moderators? As a collective brain?

  • Change from:
    • The Fedora Community has the right in its sole discretion and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct.
  • Change to:
    • Within their respective areas of participation Fedora Community members have the right in their sole discretion and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct. Those Fedora Community members are expected to exercise these rights in alignment with the Code of Conduct.

I find the term “sealioning” inappropriate and objectionable for inclusion in the code of conduct:

  • This will be changed to “Initiating controversy for controversies sake” in the next version.

Does that apply to private Twitter accounts? For example say a contributor who have “I contribute to Fedora” in their bio, then post a tweet supporting the Arkansas (?) trans health care bill, would it be possible they get a warning or get banned for transphobia? I remember a precedent using the Contributor Covenant and I’m concerned about the neutrality of POV regarding that CoC and up to where it extends, I’d like to add this:

  • Response to other platform comments/questions: The Fedora Project can only fully control Fedora channels. If someone is representing Fedora on their social media profile and they are sharing controversial posts, Fedora will take action if and when it makes sense, most likely they will be asked to unaffiliate with the Fedora Project in their bio, posts, etc.
  • Response to political orientation comments/questions: I discussed this with RH Legal thoroughly. We don’t want to add “political orientation” for a couple reasons. The Fedora Project is not generally a place for discussion of partisan political issues, and adding this may invite such conversations. The addition could embolden folks to initiate provocative discussions solely to test the limits of the Code of Conduct and the Fedora Community. Unfortunately, as an individual responsible for handling incidents, I can say this happens often, and is entirely draining for the folks who have to handle them.
    Meanwhile, issues inherent to free software and Fedora may touch political topics and folks should feel free to discuss in a respectful manner in line with the Code of Conduct. If someone were to be attacked for their political orientation apropos of nothing they have done in the Fedora Community, they should open a Code of Conduct ticket, and we would follow the due process as usual.

Can say we are fully diverse in age when US law requires a minimum age to contribute?

  • We are fully age diverse, while staying in line with regulations and guidelines around the participation of minors. I will add a note into the clarifying documents to specify the particulars around this point.

I don’t want to be mean, but three years to finally adopt a variant of the Contributor Covenant…? Was any other even considered?

  • Misc covered the time frame aspect of this question well. One follow up note is that in the research phase of the Code of Conduct, several Codes were reviewed(this phase was completed by my predecessor, Brian Exelbierd). Throughout the development of this updated Code, we often researched/referenced how other communities managed a variety of aspects with regards to CoC as well.
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61

The updated proposed CoC has been added to the Council ticket, found here: Issue #145: Code of Conduct Proposal - tickets - Pagure.io

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