[Haskell] Guidelines for respectful communication

[Philippa Cowderoy]

I lack the energy to contribute to GHC directly, but these guidelines 
are far too easy to abuse by someone acting in bad faith and we know 
that bad faith actors have been adjacent to our community and acted on 
things that have taken place within it.

 From where I'm sitting, guidelines like this risk doing even more 
damage than not having any. Not only do they lack the means to handle 
incidents that have already occurred, they actively discourage the 
community from finding those means.

As someone these guidelines have been drafted to help include, I fear 
they increase the burden on my participation and that of others like me. 
For a community to hold together without sinking to the worst of 
behaviour, there needs to be some acceptance that we will all fail to 
act in good fatih on occasion, that some people will act in bad faith 
and that behaviour in bad faith may take a great deal of explaining to 
anyone who is not the target of it or familiar with its mechanisms.

I have spent a great deal of time running spaces within the wider 
community and I have witnessed these things repeatedly. I also lack the 
resources some people here have available to mitigate the risks others 
have openly posed to members of the community including myself and Simon.

One solution - whether GHC itself needs it or not - might be to pair 
guidelines for respectful communication with guidelines for when 
respectful communication is failing to occur.

Simon, I appreciate both the work you've put in and your love for the 
communty. I hope you can appreciate that where I appear to be cynical or 
even sowing discord here, I am acting out of love and care for a 
community that at its best has done a great deal for me. I apologise for 
being the one to open up what I see as a somewhat inevitable discussion.

On 06/12/2018 10:35, Simon Peyton Jones via Haskell wrote:
> Friends
> As many of you will know, I have been concerned for several years about the standards of discourse in the Haskell community.  I think things have improved since the period that drove me to write my Respect email<https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2016-September/024995.html>, but it's far from secure.
> We discussed this at a meeting of the GHC Steering Committee<https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals> at ICFP in September, and many of us have had related discussions since.  Arising out of that conversation, the GHC Steering Committee has decided to adopt these
>                Guidelines for respectful communication<https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/GRC.rst>
>
> We are not trying to impose these guidelines on members of the Haskell community generally. Rather, we are adopting them for ourselves, as a signal that we seek high standards of discourse in the Haskell community, and are willing to publicly hold ourselves to that standard, in the hope that others may choose to follow suit.
> We are calling them "guidelines for respectful communication" rather than a "code of conduct", because we want to encourage good communication, rather than focus on bad behaviour.  Richard Stallman's recent post<https://lwn.net/Articles/769167/> about the new GNU Kind Communication Guidelines<https://gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html> expresses the same idea.
> Meanwhile, the Stack community is taking a similar approach<https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2018/11/proposal-stack-coc>.
> Our guidelines are not set in stone; you can comment here<https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/commit/373044b5a78519071b9a24b3681cfd1af06e57e0>.   Perhaps they can evolve so that other Haskell committees (or even individuals) feel able to adopt them.
> The Haskell community is such a rich collection of intelligent, passionate, and committed people. Thank you -- I love you all!
> Simon
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell mailing list
> Haskell at haskell.org
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/attachments/20181206/e9552a0b/attachment.html>