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Message-ID: <568F4E81.1020205@garfieldtech.com>
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2016 23:52:01 -0600
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] [Draft] Adopt Code of Conduct
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On 01/07/2016 10:08 PM, Brian Moon wrote:
>> Why not? The harassment has been nullified.
> I agree with your position on most of this, Paul. However, free email, and thus, Twitter and other social media accounts are nearly unlimited. It becomes an arms race to try and block someone.
>
> Brian.

Simply cutting off contact (either by the receiver of harassment or 
otherwise) isn't the entire goal.  There are least 2 others:

1) Harassment does not need to be direct.  If I were to start tweeting 
up a hostile, insulting storm about someone else on this list, by name 
and talking about PHP Internals business, but not tweeting @ that 
person, them blocking me isn't going to accomplish anything.  The harm 
isn't that they are seeing the message necessarily, it's that everyone 
else I know is seeing it, many of whom that person may not even know.  
That's still an attack on a person's reputation, and damaging to the person.

And before anyone says "well report it", Twitter's track record in 
dealing with such matters is somewhat worse than pathetically abysmal.  
If you're not a rich white guy it's somewhat worse than that.  The same 
is true of Reddit, and in many places the police department, too.

2) It's not simply a matter of the two (or however many) people 
involved.  It's a statement of what we as a community are willing to 
tolerate.  "You're a malicious jackass who hurts people, buuuut you 
don't do it in a place we can ban you, technically, so *shrug*" tells 
everyone else (both on the list and off) that we are OK with members of 
our community being malicious jackasses who hurt people. That does harm 
to the whole community.

Conversely, if we do make it clear (through communication, mediation, 
and if necessary punitive measures) that we don't welcome malicious 
jackasses who hurt people, even if they happen to be good coders, that's 
signaling the opposite: That we will favor non-jackasses in this 
community, even at the expense of people who happen to be good coders.  
We still can't take care of Twitter, but we can make it clear that we do 
not accept such behavior amongst our inner-circle.  And that in turn 
influences the kind of people who show up and stick around, and creates 
a virtuous cycle.

It's about the audience as much as the actors.


And yes, I am aware that a large part of the concern is the definition 
of "malicious jackass who hurts people" and "hostile, insulting storm".  
There *is* a risk of that turning into a "morality clause".  That's 
true. But it could go either direction on such matters, not necessarily 
just in the "evil PC witch hunt" direction.  That's where, as has been 
repeated, 1) A well-defined code of conduct that takes a positive tone 
and is neither too prescriptive nor too vague is needed and 2) we have 
to trust the members of the conflict resolution team to not let it turn 
into that, and be as objective and sound as humanly possible.

Do you think we can find 5 people in the PHP community that we can trust 
to make fair decisions (NOT that we would always agree with, but that 
are fair) that don't fall too far into "thought policing", in *any* 
direction?  If not, then the community is already lost beyond all hope 
and we should all just give up now.  I do not believe that to be the 
case, at all.

--Larry Garfield