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

[wren romano]

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