Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:90076
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 209.85.192.172 as permitted sender)
To: Michael Cullum <m@michaelcullum.com>
References: <CAAyV7nFbngZ42qzbSFyveH+vsyir9QNtMJq8H=u9VqTBVBv5Og@mail.gmail.com>
 <568AE803.1080209@gmail.com> <568B0C8E.3080206@eliw.com>
 <CAEZPtU6oKG1aHWCb2YUFXPv5bU1E16w__QDZ2HmV-q_KRSceqQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <568B1041.1060601@gmail.com>
 <CAEZPtU7dpgh65Nzs61wPmckvPx4sfT4y+8P3fAfJoLyQfb5mxw@mail.gmail.com>
 <568B1DA8.3060908@gmail.com>
 <CADajX4Aur47K4_TnkhScUw6RfA+1LMoDi3JKT9zc0oGJ0EiaAQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <568B210A.9050103@gmail.com>
 <CAAqcDMgJdt-dSg8xzpPz7sObrosCFh49nMOX+4AgqYbzsCDVSA@mail.gmail.com>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Message-ID: <568B75F9.7050606@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2016 23:51:21 -0800
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:38.0)
 Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.4.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <CAAqcDMgJdt-dSg8xzpPz7sObrosCFh49nMOX+4AgqYbzsCDVSA@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] [Draft] Adopt Code of Conduct
From: smalyshev@gmail.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!

> difficult as it would be unlikely that 5 people would all be 'corrupt' in
> the same fashion compared to one where lots of individuals hold that power
> and can exercise it on their own.

Here's that "corrupt" again - but the point here is that no corruption
is necessary. Human perception is prone to multitude of biases, and a
cohesive group of likely-minded people often amplifies those biases. And
we always operate on incomplete information. Honest people are routinely
vehemently disagree on many questions, including ones that only one
possibility could logically be correct, without ever being corrupt.
People can misunderstand, be mistaken, be opinionated, be delusional.
Smaller is the group, bigger is the effect of biases (there are multiple
studies on groupthink and cognitive biases, those things are very real).
People do not have to be evil for them to go wrong. That's why
safeguards - like prior attempts at resolution (to ensure it's not mere
misunderstanding), public process (i.e. more participants, more chance
to reveal and challenge biases and misunderstandings), ability to
confront the accusations (thus challenging the biases and having chance
to correct the facts - or at least provide difficult perspective), etc.
are important. Even with all safeguards, nothing is guaranteed, but
without them, mere assumption that "we are all good people, we can do no
wrong" is a dangerous delusion. If we're talking about committing wrong
feature - ok, big deal, we can fix it in the next release. It's only
code. But when we're talking about something that can influence people's
lives - and something like being permanently banned from all PHP
projects could easily cost a person their career and livelihood - that's
wholly different matter. That's why I am talking about those safeguards,
not because I think those elected would be evil.
-- 
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com