Civility notes (was "Traversable instances for (,,) a b")

[Tom Murphy]

To address your point about:

"My subjective estimation is that discussing this a bit further is more
   constructive than working on a CoC. What parts of the discussion were
   unfortunate, exactly, and why?"

The problem with just discussing it further here is that:
  a) Nothing specific needs to get explicitly agreed upon, so we can all
leave with our own interpretations and conclusions of what was decided
  b) We're 20-something emails into an email chain. All of us discussing
will have developed more nuanced views, but for example a new person coming
to the community will have no idea about what was discussed here.

A CoC, on the other hand, is a big neon sign at the front door of the
community, summarizing the basic bullet points of what we can agree we want
our community to be.

(By the way, I agreed with much of what you talked about but I think your
points could have been made without calling anyone else out by name. Just
my 2c.)

Tom






On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 5:49 AM, lennart spitzner <
lsp at informatik.uni-kiel.de> wrote:

> A couple weeks earlier there was a discussion on tuple instances on this
> list
> that got somewhat out of hand, leading to a meta-discussion on civility.
> There was the suggestion to create and endorse a CoC for this community.
>
> Now both topics have not received much further contribution, an indication
> that
> not much more can be gained from these discussions. Yet I have a bad
> feeling about leaving them in such a manner, because: There is no real
> conclusion, there is no agreement, and I do not see much advancement of how
> we, as a community, cope with negative situations. And while I can
> understand
> that there is little incentive/motivation to continue due to negative
> emotions involved, I also fear that ending discussions on such negative
> emotions will discourage contributions in general not only now, but in the
> future as well.
>
> So I will dare to continue, ask a couple of questions, and make some
> suggestions:
>
> 1. At which point of the particular tuple instance discussion would it have
>    helped to have some CoC, and in what way? Is the hope that the
> participants
>    had considered this CoC and not said something in the way that they did?
>    Or would it have allowed us to quickly point out the CoC at some
> specific
>    point in response to some mail? Or something else?
>
>    I _can_ see a couple of instances where a CoC could have been pointed
> out,
>    but these don't convince me, because
>    a) in those cases giving clear, respectful negative feedback (for
> example
>       regarding "joking") (would/should) have worked just as well if not
> better
>       and
>    b) because simply pointing out the CoC during a discussion is rather
>       non-constructive because it is a vague form of criticism and the
>       receiving party will most likely consider it inappropriate, and so
> it has
>       the opposite effect.
>
> 2. on a related note, I have a hard time pinpointing the moment in the
>    discussion where things transitioned from cool to flaming. I'd perhaps
> name
>    as important factors the useless rhetoric (go and ask those
> mathematicians)
>    and the case of hiding behind "it was a dumb joke" followed by what in
> my
>    eyes reads like a dishonest apology. But I am not certain and perhaps
>    unfair.
>
>    My subjective estimation is that discussing this a bit further is more
>    constructive than working on a CoC. What parts of the discussion were
>    unfortunate, exactly, and why? The general opinion here seems to be to
>    ask for civility without naming names. I disagree: I have little hope
> that
>    giving the vague feedback to all participants that some parts of the
>    discussion were non-constructive/disrespectful will improve things in
> the
>    future.
>
>    As an example, we might take the following advice from this:
>    "Humour is important and generally welcome, but it is necessary to be
>    especially careful to make it clear when exactly we talk in jest, and to
>    not let slip phrases that can easily interpreted as offensive if not
>    interpreted as a joke. We will not accept retroactively hiding behind
>    'it was a joke'."
>
>    (perhaps some people think such a statement belonged in a CoC, but then
>    this is a different/more specific kind of advice than what I can see in
>    existing/proposed CoCs.)
>
> 3. And back to first discussion: I refuse to vote -1 or +1, because the
> topic
>    is more nuanced than that. Instead, I vote for the following:
>    "Additional tuple instances shall be added after such a point in time
> where
>    either the methods have been renamed as to avoid confusion, or after the
>    generic versions are no longer exposed in the default Prelude.
>    (and whether this point will come is intentionally left open.)"
>
> 4. And reflecting on the previous point, I encourage all participants to
> try to
>    not make pure -1/+1 votes, but to include conditions under which they
> may
>    switch, especially for controversial subjects. I have hopes that this
> will
>    help finding a majority-backed compromise.
>
> 5. It would help to have the discussion and the arguments made by both
> sides
>    archived somewhere other than on the mailing list. In one of the last
>    mails I wrote to this list I implicitly complained about the
>    signal-to-noise, and to be clear, I don't mean that any messages consist
>    of noise. But it can easily take a couple of mails back-and-forth to get
>    some point across, and these threads can grow to over a hundred mails
>    quickly.
>    I realize that the main issue here of course is the amount of work it
> would
>    mean to somewhat objectively summarize an (often heated) debate. But
> then
>    the alternative is the reiteration of the same topics in an almost
>    predicable frequency.
>    Thoughts?
>
> (Sorry, Tony, for somewhat singling out the "joking" as the negative
> example.
> This might be unfair. You have a valid point, but conveyed it rather poorly
> especially to the end of the discussion.)
>
> -- lennart
>
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