Behavioral standards in the free software community [LWN.net]

Behavioral standards in the free software community

Posted Jun 8, 2006 8:12 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524)
Parent article: Behavioral standards in the free software community

You have a choise.

Either you make your rules very general, very much subject to interpretation, very little concrete. ('Dont be a jerk') In which case everyone will agree, but on the other hand nobody agrees where exactly the border of jerkiness lies.

Or you make your rules concrete, precisely defined. In which case nobody agrees with the what exactly the rules should be.

I don't see a benefit in either. I also don't see any evidence that the way we do things currently needs changing. Essentially policing of a set of undefined, unwritten, unspecified, everchanging codes of conduct by the community itself.

It works like this: If you're a jerk, people don't like dealing with you. If people don't like dealing with you, they will avoid dealing with you as much as possible. Which again tends to work as a pretty efficient exclusion-mechanism.

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Behavioral standards in the free software community

Posted Jun 8, 2006 12:26 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]

I strongly disagree. I think there are rules of conduct that are reasonably clear and concrete that would help a lot in these things.

The most important one would be this:

* Praise people in public, flame them privately.

If you subject someone to public flaming, then he will feel much more assaulted and will be much more likely to hold a grudge or even strike back in an irrational way. There are of course exceptions, mostly if repeated private mails do not yield any result.

Other rules that I think are reasonably clear and easy to follow include:

* Try not to treat people differently based on on name, gender or ethnicity.
* Don't repeat yourself. Specifically, don't spam a list with rehashes of your previous messages.

Behavioral standards in the free software community

Posted Jun 8, 2006 13:33 UTC (Thu) by csamuel (subscriber, #2624) [Link]

I've always liked "Focus on the issue, not the person".

Chris

Behavioral standards in the free software community

Posted Jun 8, 2006 15:14 UTC (Thu) by wilck (subscriber, #29844) [Link]

Try not to treat people differently based on on name, gender or ethnicity.

Another thing that comes to mind is language. For non-native English speakers, it's more difficult to get heard (and easier to offend) than for "natives".

It's hard, but I wish we all would try not to discriminate by English language abilities.

Behavioral standards in the free software community

Posted Jun 8, 2006 16:17 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]

Oh, right.

That's a pretty hard issue. I've seen a lot of witty, subtle and ironic responses to messages from people who are obviously struggling with their english. The result is generally that the true intent of the response is completetly misunderstood.

But on the other hand a code of conduct that says "don't try to be funny" won't really help in building a community.

A related issue is that a lot of the time, attacks are disguised as irony. On mailing lists you'll see all kinds of 'Ha ha, just seriously' statements.