Re: [VOTE] Contributor Guidelines, and Updates to Code of Conduct progress

Hi, On 09/02/16 12:33, Derick Rethans wrote:

[snip] - Texts should be void from ambiguity. I couldn't agree more. Ambiguity has a chilling effect on speech, and will

damage the quality of discourse on internals. Having said that, I think that the CoC being proposed is too wordy, and still quite ambiguous, some examples of statements I think are problematic: 1. "Make sure you know what you are talking about." - ambiguous and hostile wording, which really isn't going to change anything. 2. "It is better to be descriptive than to be concise" is in clear conflict with "Write ... as little as you can get away with" and both address the same point. 3. "never attack a person's opinion" - challenging opinions is very important in technical discussion. I will submit a pull request later with some suggested amendments to improve clarity and remove duplicates.

- Although their CWG dealt with plenty of cases, no punitive action

     has occured as parties would often step back themselves. In most
     cases, a gently reminder was all that was necessary.

- A Code of Conduct without *any* 'teeth' would not be beneficial. These statements appear to be in direct conflict with each other.

If the Drupal CWG have not needed to impose punishments as a result of their CoC, and in the history of Internals you could count the bans on one hand, then I really don't see why we need to go to the lengths of establishing committees and punishment procedures. I feel that the CoC has a much greater chance of achieving consensus if we don't try to impose a 'court of law' alongside it, especially considering that most proposals for a 'court' have been secretive and focused on privacy rather than on transparency (the opposite of all well-functioning legal systems).

- We should be reluctant to limit the scope of the Code of Conduct and

     Contributor Guidelines.
This is an ambiguous statement, do you mean scope of enforcement (i.e. spaces

outside of PHP technical spaces) or something else? Would you mind clarifying and also providing a brief summary of what lead to this conclusion? Again, I think that the CoC has a much greater chance of achieving consensus if we aren't trying to use it to police behavior outside of our spaces.

I feel that the "Contributor Guidelines" are now in a reasonable shape to do a quick poll to gauge acceptability. As this is not a formal RFC vote, it's simply done through an online poll: http://twtpoll.com/y6hs4ndsfiki485 I've submitted a vote, not sure if I should as I don't have karma to vote on RFCs.

I think this is a lot better (and more technically-focused) than the Contributer Covenant, so it's a step in the right direction, but I still think it needs some refining to be 'production-ready'. - Matt Prelude.