Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Mukund Sivaraman <muks banu com>]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:35:46AM -0700, Stormy Peters wrote:
> When bad behaviour happens we talk about it a lot but nothing happens. As
> Dave says, people (good contributors in many cases) just leave.

I know of this first hand in Dave's own case, where he left the GIMP
project due to issues with a contributor.  I was also badly harassed
during that time by this person.

My point is that the current way of handling things is sufficient, and
making foundation members sign a document is not going to change
anything.

> > How does requiring GNOME foundation members to sign this document help?
> 
> Making it explicit the behaviour we want. Hopefully this would cause greater
> self policing and peer control and eliminate the unwanted behaviour.

This is where the guidelines are good enough. There is no need to sign
documents.  Such issues can be taken care of on a case-by-case basis
locally (to the project) by the project developers, with caution and
restraint.

Also this policing is fine in theory, but I doubt you'd be able to
remove a core contributor who sometimes behaves bluntly towards users. 
There are such GNOME committers (who cannot be removed, for the project
will wither, or they are senior peers who the the developers will not
agree to remove), who are otherwise fine and decent people.  So if you
are implementing this policing at top-level where the foundation
decides, it can either be (1) without prejudice, or (2) skewed.  I feel
it's better to let the projects handle it censorship, ejection, etc. 
locally without policy documents.

Dave, you left the GIMP project because of issues with a contributor. 
Do you really think that person would have been deterred from behaving
so, if he/she had signed such a document?

		Mukund