Hello all,

(I've been lurking on the Haskell community list for a good while now and I'm just now plucking up the courage to say hello.)

I feel that Wren is spot on: this isn't somehow an attempt to change the existing behaviour but a way to confirm to existing members and advertise to newcomers that this is a safe and friendly community.

As more of a reader than a contributor to this community I don't feel I have earnt much say in what a future Haskell Community CoC contains. However, Wren has linked to some good articles that talk about existing CoCs that are being used in anger. I think that they would be a really valuable resource in this endeavour.

I believe that Rust's CoC is MIT licensed and that some of the other codes of conduct mentioned in those articles are licensed under the Creative Commons. Deriving our own from one of these which have had a diverse set of people writing, discussing and refining it sounds, to me, like a good starting point.

No matter what, I look forward to seeing this discussion continue and also to the finished document!

Regards,
Paul.


On 25 April 2017 at 02:39, wren romano <wren@community.haskell.org> wrote:
I'm +1 to having a CoC. It doesn't have to be complicated, and indeed
CoCs are better when they're uncomplicated (but explicit! vague CoCs
help noone).

The point of a CoC is not to change people's behavior (if you want
that, there are more effective approaches). The point is to serve as a
touchstone for community values. Without a touchstone, communities
drift over time as people age and come and go. Drifting itself is
unavoidable and not necessarily bad, but sometimes that drifting is
the slipping that becomes corrosive. Touchstones give communities a
way to correct for corrosion: by concretely recording the past they
make the past visible, and thus make the present visible as something
that has changed from the past.

CoCs also, as Tom says, make the community values explicit for
outsiders to see. This is especially important for women and
minorities, because we are disproportionately affected by breaches of
civility. This is why numerous organizations for women in STEM
advocate for having CoCs. To pick a few examples:

    https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq
    https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/18/
    https://geekfeminism.org/2014/06/30/

The mere existence of a CoC indicates that at least at some point the
community cared enough about civility to try to ensure it. That alone
indicates that the community has higher standards for civility than
the vast bulk of online communities for programming. And it is
something we look for. If you want to avoid discouraging women and
minorities from joining, it's not enough to play Simon Says, you have
to write the rules down too.

--
Live well,
~wren
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Paul Connolley
Software Developer