I’m part of the people who pushed to have a “code of conduct”. Personally my interest is not really in the text (I’m happy to go with whatever the code-of-conduct committee is happy with; and I think it’s wise to reuse something that exists rather than design our own). I think of such code of conduct as:
- Designed to deal with serious issues (typically: harassment, not forum moderation).
- Associated to an actual mechanism of enforcement / protection. If something bad happens to someone, they should know exactly how to report it and how the report is going to be handled.
I think the hard part is to have good people in our community that are willing to be responsible with dealing with serious issues when they happen, the “code-of-conduct committee” in this discussion. It’s a difficult job and I’m impressed that people are willing to do it.
Said otherwise: in the OCaml community today, people generally know how to behave to each other and I don’t think we have a big problem here. But we don’t have a policy in place to deal with serious issues when they show up. They will happen and probably have happened in the past, it’s just that we don’t know about them because we didn’t care to listen. I think this is a problem we have to fix.
Most of the discussion so far has centered around the issue of how precisely one should define “unacceptable behaviors”. (Just like we can talk for hours about the fine-prints of software licenses.) People care a lot about the details, and I’m sure everyone is doing their best to find a perfect proposal, but we cannot make everyone happy with a single choice. I’m all for “those who do the work decide”, letting people in charge of enforcement make their decisions about the description.
For me the part that is really important is to give clear information to the people who witnessed behaviors they think unacceptable and harmful: how they should report it, how the report is going to be handled, what is going to happen. The Ruby code of conduct mentioned previously does not contain any such information, so it seems to have a different purpose (more like defining broad community standards). Is there another document that documents what to do about harmful behavior? If yes, we should also look at this document for comparison; if no, I don’t think that is a satisfying choice for a community.