Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[john palmieri <john j5 palmieri gmail com>]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

Hi,

Lionel Dricot wrote:
> Do you think that many people were turned out of the GNOME community
> because of an hostile experience? I don't think so.  (I might be wrong, I
> just never met anybody that has a bad experience).

Some names of good contributors who have drifted away from GNOME, at
least partly because of the tone of discourse:

Dave Camp
Seth Nickell
Alex Graveley
Telsa Gwynne
Jacob Berkmann
Ross Golder
Daniel Veillard
Joe Shaw
Jorge Castro

Another bunch of people who are still around the free software world,
but who no longer consider themselves GNOME community members - I can't
speak to their motivations, of course:

Nat Friedman
Miguel de Icaza
Glynn Foster
Jeff Waugh
Jody Goldberg
Bill Hanneman
Malcolm Tredinnick
Mark McLoughlin
George Lebl

Some of these people are still members of the foundation, but none of
them have been seen around for a long while.

Acceptable collateral damage for having unfettered freedom of speech?

Cheers,
Dave.
--
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org
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We should look at what wikipedia is going through - http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10403467-93.html

I should also point out that we would have most likely lost just as many members from them just drifting to other projects, and you don't count how many we have gained from being an open project with a lack of rules.  Let's be honest here, GNOME isn't a huge game changer, or at least in the last few years hasn't been.  It is a success by many metrics but these days as we have become more formal it just doesn't hold the wild west excitement it once had.  The shedding of some of the top contributors I see as a natural evolution of a project which allows new blood to rise without being constrained by old ideas.

I think a bigger issue comes when having a larger community you get more differing views and it gets tiring to defend design decisions amongst a louder constituency of those who are not keen to your ideas.  Signal to noise ratio isn't something you are going to solve with a code of conduct.  I agree that some people tend to use words like "idiotic", "crap" and other personal attacks when going to the negative but I just choose to see their views as invalid once they go there.  I feel this is the real issue that is trying to be solved and I fear that it won't do anything positive, and may actually lead to being a club to quiet decedent which is why I call for narrow rules if we do feel it is necessary in the most egregious circumstances.

--
John (J5) Palmieri