Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Wed, 2009-11-25 at 12:48 +0000, Lucas Rocha wrote:

Hi board, Lucas,

> The Board has recently received some complaints from members of the
> community about certain the inappropriate behaviors. In the context of
> GNOME Foundation, it's really hard to argue about how we expect our
> members to behave if there is no official guidelines that members are
> supposed to comply with.

I read that the complaint was about something that appeared on the
planet.

My opinion is that incidents like this can be better managed by asking
the maintainers of the planet to do editorial control, and to not shun
away from skipping blog posts.

I think this could use some guidelines (for both the bloggers and the
planet maintainers who for example could inform the blogger about their
decision, allow the blogger to adapt his text, etc).

> The GNOME Code of Conduct[1] has been serving
> very well as an informal guideline for the community but we'd like to
> make it an official document that new Foundation members are expected
> to explicitly agree[2] with before being accepted. This way we'll have a
> common ground for dealing with certain conflict situations and avoid
> trying to base our discussions on guidelines that certain members
> haven't explicitly agreed on.

To reiterate my POV in this new official discussion thread:

My opinion is that existing foundation members should first all be
convinced to sign the document themselves.

o. If not all of the current members have signed this document then we
   don't have credibility to ask new members to sign it.

o. If not everybody (current members and new members) have signed it,
   then the document itself has no credibility.

o. It's the responsibility of the current members to solve this chicken
   and egg problem. This isn't the responsibility of the new members.

Short: 

Who are we to demand *any* signature if not all of us have signed it
ourselves?

> Before deciding on this, we thought it would be useful to get some
> feedback from the community.

> Thanks,

Thank you for bringing this to the community members.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be