Re: Code of conduct (bis)

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Fri, 2006-12-01 at 15:02 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A while back, Murray asked the board to pronounce itself on the code of
> conduct.
> 
> We have had several debates on the issue, both on the mailing list and
> on conference calls, and Murray asked me to relay the conclusions to the
> membership.
> 
> The feeling of the board (a majority opinion, rather than unanimous) is
> that the code of conduct would be more hurt than helped by being pushed
> by us. Its adoption really needs to be bottom-up.

Thanks for being the messenger. I am deeply disappointed by this. I
think it's a failure of leadership and a failure to stand up for our
most basic common values. From an otherwise sensible board.

This was really the only way that this could be done. It will be
logistically almost impossible for me to individually persuade every
single mailing list, project maintainer, and sysadmin to endose this
explicitly. But "GNOME rejects Code of Conduct" is such an awful signal
that I'll try to do that anyway.

Or do the new board candidates see this more clearly?
http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct

> The issue is divisive, even within the board, and I don't think that we
> can come out as a group and say "the board thinks we should do this" -
> even in an advisory role. Adoption of a code of conduct should be
> something that people in the community do as part of their daily work.
> Olav has been a shining example of this in Bugzilla.
> 
> If approval for a CoC comes from the top, that will endanger the
> bottom-up adoption by giving the impression the board imposing it on the
> community, which is an impression we wish to avoid.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com