[Haskell] Guidelines for respectful communication

Mon Dec 10 12:51:16 UTC 2018

There is a wide spectrum of bad faith behaviour. It may be simply not 
caring if one causes harm ("recklessness", if you like), through 
attempts to undermine the culture of a space or community, to attempts 
to cause people material harm.

The wider Haskell community has witnessed all of these, even if not 
everyone is sufficiently aware of it. On the "material harm" end of the 
spectrum, an incident in 2016 grew sufficiently infamous that friends 
with no connections to the FP community in general, computer science or 
the computing industry were sending me messages of sympathy and support 
- and I was forced to take some "opsec" measures to safeguard both 
myself and others.

The nature of both this spectrum and of bad faith makes this a difficult 
problem to deal with and one that mustn't be oversimplified - not all 
acts are equal and the cultural impacts are complex. But people acting 
in bad faith - some of them persistently and possibly even with a degree 
of coordination - is indeed the root problem I'm highlighting.

Thanks for your time and effort on this,

Philippa

On 09/12/2018 18:03, Richard Eisenberg wrote:
> What this email seems to suggest to me is that our guidelines assume 
> good faith, and yet some participants act in bad faith. I agree this 
> is not well accounted-for in the guidelines. (However, the guidelines 
> were designed with the GHC Steering Committee in mind, where members 
> join by way of a nomination and selection process and can be removed 
> -- quite unlike the broader Haskell community.)
>
> Before thinking about specific words / documents that solve the 
> problem, I want to be sure I understand the problem you're 
> highlighting. Is it the presence of bad faith actors, specifically?
>
> Thanks for coming forward with these concerns.
>
> Richard
>
>> On Dec 6, 2018, at 4:59 PM, Philippa Cowderoy <flippa at flippac.org 
>> <mailto:flippa at flippac.org>> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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