Made a draft CoC from NumFocus at the link below. If peeps can send me their github username I can give you editing permissions.
For anyone who does not know how to use git but wants to contribute, I can give you access rights to the document and you can click the little pen in the top right corner of the document at this link in order to modify the document online.
Glad to see this happening! I would like to point you to ROpenSci’s Code of Conduct as a potential resource. An immense amount of effort went into that CoC, and it’s becoming a de facto standard for R conferences and events. ROpenSci also hosts community calls and training events where they share information on effective enforcement of a CoC. We used their CoC at the Chicago R Unconference 2019, and sat in on some of the community calls and found it all quite useful.
Merely as an anecdote, having a CoC felt very abstract until we worked out the enforcement process in gory detail. Who makes CoC enforcement decisions? Is that a consensus process or does one person take the lead? What are the most likely CoC violations? What are the consequences for these violations? How I am going to tell someone who I might know and be friends with that their behavior is unacceptable? I would encourage you to similarly spend time organizing enforcement procedures, because we didn’t feel ready to actually run our event until we had put about as much effort (or more) into the enforcement procedure as into the CoC itself.
Hopefully this is helpful in your planning. Thanks again!
Thanks Alex!
I think what you’ve said is really true and valuable, and represents a lot of my resistance to the idea of leaving it to numFOCUS. I think it might be valuable for us as a community to spend time thinking about it ourselves.
Hey @alexpghayes, do you think for a project without a CoC that it’s worth investing in creating our own CoC and governance / structure / training around it vs. using outsourcing all of that to NumFOCUS?
I think it’s a matter of deciding what matters to you as a community. When you decide to write a Code of Conduct and develop training and governance procedures around that Code of Conduct, you indicate that community and behavior is something that matters to your project. If you outsource management of poor behavior, you effectively indicate that bad behavior doesn’t matter that much to you.
To put this more directly: if I were involved with a Stan project and a Code of Conduct violation effected me personally, I would report the violation and work with the Stan community, provided that Stan had written it’s own CoC and had a plan to respond to violations. If Stan didn’t have an explicit enforcement plan, I would (1) not report anything, and (2) leave the project. Of course this is just me and YMMV.
Oh jeez, I’m not talking about not adopting a CoC! Sorry, I meant to say that we would explicitly adopt the NumFOCUS one but rely on them to handle reporting, process, and decision-making.
@seantalts do you have any objections to my proposal other than it takes work to write and consult the community? A week ago you said this. It’s totally fine to have changed your mind, but right now what I hear is that you fear it’s too much work. What I would propose is that if that’s you’re only fear you allow me to continue writing a proposal and allowing consultation. Discussing whether it takes too much time to do this is taking the time we could spend just doing it. If your resistance is based on broader fears or I’ve misinterpreted I apologise for misunderstanding and please clarify. :)
I was tagged but have no preferences. Most familiar with the NumFOCUS CoC and it seems like a good default - I like @lauren’s idea of adopting it and adding some Stan-specific interpretations and reporting strategy.
Sorry, I meant to say that we would explicitly adopt the NumFOCUS one but rely on them to handle reporting, process, and decision-making.
For me this lacks the clarity (as you said on GitHub -they’d probably need to contact Stan folks but it’s not clear what that process is). Clarity is important because it allows people to know what would happen if they did want to report something.
To be blunt though, I feel that if this gets knocked back before we’ve even discussed the details, and the only reason is the work that it would take do it, then it’s hard for me to imagine an interpretation that it wouldn’t clearly signal that we don’t prioritize it.
For those following on discourse there’s simultaneous discussion over at the GitHub repo (Code of Conduct by SteveBronder · Pull Request #10 · stan-dev/design-docs · GitHub).
First, I just want to say that I’m really glad someone is taking charge of the CoC issue finally and that I think it’s in really good hands with you :) I think it’s great to present a couple of options to the community, so I hope you will continue developing yours. The reason I’d like to also present the pure-NumFOCUS CoC option as well is not because more sophisticated alternatives take time to develop, it’s because they take time, energy, and constant vigilance to execute them well. If that investment would certainly lead to better outcomes I would be in favor of spending the money, but this stuff is hard and I have no reason to believe we will do a better job than NumFOCUS. I also really like that they are completely independent, which any Stan-based proposal will struggle to achieve. Like I said, I’m slammed with the 2.21 release and a few other life things but hopefully next week I can put together a pure NumFOCUS proposal for a ballot - it should be pretty simple. At that point I might also be able to offer constructive commentary on yours if you’re still looking for it by then, but I also honestly wouldn’t trust me on this stuff as I have only very limited experience with it.
That’s honestly the whole point of a CoC. Like Alex said upthread it’s a community exercise to define and execute standards. Rather than the current method of waiting for something to break and then yelling a lot. The current method ensures that only the loudest people are heard, a lot of feelings are hurt, and everything stays terrible.
They have quite explicitly said that they will not be independent. They will depend on the Stan community in critical ways.
I do not agree with duplication of effort here. Work with Lauren and have input into the community proposal instead.
Broadly, I just don’t agree with your assertion that NimFocus are experts in this. Other projects do not appear to run things through them. (As Lauren said in the other thread)
This is a serious opportunity for the Stan community to demonstrate that we take our community, diversity, and safety seriously. I do not understand why we would not embrace it.
I made a full comment in the Github repo (https://github.com/stan-dev/design-docs/pull/10)
I want to emphasize something though. The ballot group does NOT reflect the Stan community (for those who are following this but not the rest of Discourse, the ballot group is the current members of the private dev group on Stan. There’s a push to change that and various proposals, but I don’t know when that will happen).
That doesn’t matter to me for a lot of things, but when it comes to deciding on the community standards that we all have to abide by, it matters. Even if it changes (and we don’t know when that will happen), the voting group won’t suddenly become representative - that will take time. As it currently stands I will not even be able to vote for my own proposal.
Just to step out of the discussion for a moment to point out that this is some serious uncompensated labour from @lauren, who has a long history of doing uncompensated labour for Stan. By uncompensated I mean that this is done without any public credit or reward. She is not on any list of developers, I doubt her name is on the stan website, there’s nothing she can put on her CV. She also has no decision making power. She can’t even vote.
So I am strongly inclined to not put barriers in her way.
Lauren, I agree with you that we ought to enlarge the electorate substantially to include users. Hopefully the impending SGB can agree on a way to do that.
Dan, you’re using a couple logical fallacies and other content-agnostic argumentation here; I’m not sure if you realize it so I’m going to try to point out what’s going on in what you’re saying.
First of all, Lauren said earlier in this thread that her boss asked her to do this. Secondly, no one is putting barriers in her way. I think you may not be aware of the first and I hope to make clear that I would like Lauren to have as much leeway and freedom in her handling of this process as she likes.
This is what’s called a “straw man” argument - you pretend that I was defending the no CoC status quo and attack that much easier target instead of what I’m actually proposing, which is adopting the NumFOCUS CoC.
They said they would like to contact folks in the Stan community for context. It’s true that the method they go about this could end up with some bias, and that is a flaw of leaving it up to them. If you’re comparing these for “independence” though, I think you’ll find leaving the decision-making in NumFOCUS hands to be strictly more independent.
Here you claim that you and Lauren’s proposal is for some reason the “community proposal” rather than the one Mitzi, I and to some extent Steve are supporting from NumFOCUS. I think this might be called “false authority” but I’m not positive.
That’s fair. I don’t think anyone is an expert but they certainly have more experience than we do.
Here you dive into ad-hominem attacks on Mitzi, possibly Steve, and myself, implying that the only people who could disagree with you must not love the Stan community, diversity, and safety. Of course we value those things! We just have different opinions on how best to implement them. So let’s keep the discourse here targeted at ideas and not people and their motives.
My preference is for collaboration, however I can’t force anyone to come to the table. If you’re truly refusing to see a middle ground let’s have two proposals (@mitzimorris and @stevebronder are you still following? Do you also share a reluctance to collaborate on a single proposal?) But first let’s decide how one will be selected.
I’ll state my views plainly. If it’s the dev only group voting as an electorate then I withdraw my proposal now. If it’s the SGB I would like them to decide on a design before we do indepth community consultation.
Thank you for your input. I’m done.
That’s fair. I’d rather let you do a thorough CoC proposal if you are keen to than to insist that a vanilla NumFOCUS one be on a ballot, to be clear. I just thought it was a nice compelling option and wasn’t sure what the community would prefer.
I’m not sure who is deciding, honestly. I did at one point think it was the SGB who would sort of prepare things, but we’d need the electorate to all agree to it at some point and thus sort of ratify whatever the SGB proposes.
No I get that, and I don’t want you to feel like you can’t put your option forward either.
Would you have time to write up a one paragraph description of your proposal this week? I can do the same. Then we can ask the SGB to vote on which they’d like to do a community consultation with. :) I would be happy with whatever their decision is and it doesn’t waste either our time (writing two separate CoCs or the community’s in having to read and provide feedback on both).
Once we’ve agreed on a way forward I’d like to ask @martinmodrak to close this thread for new comments. CoC are an emotive topic for many people and I think most people have had an opportunity to say what they wanted to say, and we will have decided the most that can be decided at the moment. Do you agree?
That all sounds good to me. I think @mitzimorris and @stevebronder also care so tagging them too just to alert them about that.
Great. I’ll post mine here later today so there’s a record of the outcome for those following along. It will also be sent to the SGB who I believe meet next week. @betanalpha could you please add to the agenda?
Martin could you please close this once a couple days have passed (to allow Sean to add his proposal).
Anyone else who’s commented should be getting notifications but just in case @andrewgelman @anon75146577 @breckbaldwin @sakrejda @mcol @alexpghayes. Please see the agreement Sean and I have come to and post if you disagree.
Yup; ROpenSci are members of NumFocus but as @alexpghayes mentioned, they’ve spent a lot of time and put a lot of thought and effort into their CoC. Just doing that sends important signals to your community.
Fair enough. I withdraw from being the person to present the NumFOCUS CoC + reporting structure alternative.