I agree with that. While I’ve advocated for “rule of law” systems, they’re such a massive undertaking that, realistically, no OS project will ever adopt one. They’re not only beyond the competences of tech nerds to create and administer, they’re beyond their resources. Such things only grow ever more ponderous over time. They can certainly become soul-crushingly heavy too.
So scratch that. Poking around, there’s a very different kind of approach. It appears that the Ruby community is well regarded for being welcoming and friendly to all in a highly international context. They don’t have a “code of conduct” as such, and no pretensions to a “system of justice”. Instead they list a few core principles. and trust the community to play nice. The community in turn lives up to that trust. It’s something I try to encourage by repeatedly emphasizing the Golden Rule and the principle of charity. That’s all a healthy community really needs 99.9+% of the time, and to stay healthy.
The heart of Ruby’s philosophy is MINASWAN: “Matz is nice and so we are nice”: Matz refers to Yukihiro Matsumoto, Ruby’s creator, who is indeed nice.
Here’s “The Ruby Community Conduct Guideline”:
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Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.
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Participants must ensure that their language and actions are free of personal attacks and disparaging personal remarks.
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When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions.
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Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.
That’s it. No pretension to legalisms or comprehensiveness at all, and it doesn’t bloat over time. It appears to “just work” for them.
Now Ruby on Rails is a different, although related, offshoot. Don’t conflate the two. The RoR creator is a much more controversial figure, a “utility monster” if there ever was one. RoR has its own ideas.
And Ruby conferences generally use some version of the Contributor Covenant instead. The concerns at in-person events are far more acute, where people are physically face-to-face in small spaces across some days. On the web, the worst we can do is throw pixels at each other across time zones
. Conferences merit potentially much more heavy-handed, swift, and dictatorial power. Very different contexts, very different approaches.
In the Python world, Nicholas Tollervey is a beautiful, gentle soul who abandoned “PSF spaces” some years ago due to perceived hostility to, well, being beautiful and gentle. He aimed at something roughly similar in spirit to the Ruby model, but even less prescriptive, via his “On Being Together” poem:
He went on to adopt the poem at the end as his “CARE_OF_COMMUNITY.rst” guideline for his own OS projects, licensed under CC0 1.0 for anyone to adopt:
So maybe those are better ways to frame the whole area. They certainly appeal to me. I don’t want to tell people what to do. I want them to “be nice” by their own reflective informed choice, encouraged to do so by seeing a community that is nice - to everyone. That can’t be achieved by force.