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posted by CoolHand on Monday October 29 2018, @02:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the be-excellent-to-each-other dept.

GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

Lest you think this is yet another CoC, the guidelines assure you that they are not a CoC.

Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

The GNU Kind Communication Guidelines, initial version, have been published in https://gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html. On behalf of the GNU Project, I ask all GNU contributors to make their best efforts to follow these guidelines in GNU Project discuaaions[sic].

[ . . . ] The difference between kind communication guidelines and a code of conduct is a matter of the basic overall approach.

A code of conduct states rules, with punishments for anyone that violates them.

[...] The idea of the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines is to start guiding people towards kinder communication at a point well before one would even think of saying, "You are breaking the rules." The way we do this, rather than ordering people to be kind or else, is try to help people learn to make their communication more kind.

[ . . . . ] I disagree with making "diversity" a goal. If the developers in a specific free software project do not include demographic D, I don't think that the lack of them as a problem that requires action

The best way to avoid conflict and encourage diversity is to force everyone to voluntarily think alike.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday October 29 2018, @03:33PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 29 2018, @03:33PM (#755142)

    documenting 9 concrete examples of specific behavior in open source communities

    Note if you read that very carefully, those are outside community behaviors intruding into the tiny OS subculture. This is not a story at all about "OSS community behaviors" like refusal to merge in git requests or passively aggressively manipulating bug reports and code comments.

    Its probably a waste of time to have your cigar smoking club focus on demonizing drunk driving if the greater overall culture strongly supports it.

    This is the fundamental problem many people have with pointless virtue signalling; its unfair "punishment" to rant against a subgroup for merely following the norms of their supergroup, its a virtue signalling waste of time. Essentially "pick on somebody your own size" sense of unfairness.

    More specific to the anecdotal claims, sounds like the frat boy bro-grammers ARE behaving somewhat better than they normally would at a kegger. Now you can feel better by bullying the programmers who mostly not frat boy brogrammers, but nothing will happen other than bad feelings of oppression and alienation against "the movement". If you don't like frat boys, fight the frat boys directly, don't beat up on the CS department because they're easier to beat up and bully.

    Its possible to discuss these issues more ... calmly if the people being picked on are the actual troublemakers, but it turns into a weird white knight moral and ethical offense to "beat up on the CS nerds because its easier to beat up CS nerds and might makes right". So you've got people offended more by the bullying tactics in general than by what some mostly unrelated group is doing... How virtuous should you feel if you select someone to beat up solely on the basis of their being easier to beat up?

    Now if the narrative were "frat boys are assholes and some become programmers so heres issue #23466 of frat boys being assholes" I don't really see an issue worth getting riled up about, at least in the sense of not being able to calmly discuss it.

    Maybe a bad SN analogy is one specific outlaw biker bar can sometimes be violent; that doesn't mean that bar owner sux and if we just give him the two minutes hate because he's an easily bullied nerd then the entire world will turn into a girl scout friendship song merely because we're holier than thou bullies, the reality is simple, outlaw bikers are unacceptably violent, and if you fixed outlaw bikers by (bravely) targeting them, then things would be better everywhere including the one specific outlaw biker bar run by some easy to bully nerd which was never the source of the problem anyway.

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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday October 29 2018, @03:55PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 29 2018, @03:55PM (#755153) Journal

    This objection feels a bit pedantic, but I guess it deserves addressing.

    Yes, of course OS culture is not a monolith. There have long been subgroups and individuals that don't have these problems, and not every concern for broad systemic problems represent universal systemic problems.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 29 2018, @04:35PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 29 2018, @04:35PM (#755182) Journal

    Damn, man, you nailed it. Modded up, and thank you.