Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH-TOPIC] Review - Code of Conduct: Let's revamp it.

[Shuah Khan <shuah@kernel.org>]

On 09/25/2018 10:42 AM, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 10:45 AM Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> wrote:
>> On Tue, 25 Sep 2018, Olof Johansson wrote:
>>> Reaching out to the one who's misbehaving I see more as something
>>> friends will do to each other, not what the community as such is
>>> expected to do. I.e. if I enjoy having Thomas around (I do, but I'm
>>> also looking forward to him not blowing up ever so often), it's worth
>>> checking in to see if everything is OK and if there's anything I can
>>> do to help. Not before someone has checked in with the person at the
>>> receiving end, and I definitely would never expect that person to be
>>> the one checking in with Thomas.
>>
>> Let me put that straight.
>>
>> Surely everyone has to work on himself and I'm not expecting that the
>> person who got attacked reaches out to the one misbehaving. Obviously it
>> has to be the other way round and the one who misbehaved needs to reach
>> out.
>>
>> For me it's part of true excellence when the one who told me to stop it, or
>> a third person, reaches out to me as well.  John Stultz did that to me some
>> time ago, and I really appreciated it. It made a huge difference for me and
>> talking to him about it surely made me reflect deeper and helped me to see
>> where my own defense against my temper broke.
> 
> Fully agreed, having someone you can confide in and work through a
> complicated situation together in private helps greatly in
> understanding and improving long term. What really worried me here is
> that we brought this up in the context of a code of conduct -
> codifying the expectation that this should happen doesn't seem a good
> idea to me. The cleanups-after-explosions I've helped with were
> already tons of work, with typing a very carefully edited response in
> public (don't want to make it accidentally worse) and then lots
> chatting with recipients to make sure they're not running away.
> Loading up even more is not something I want to force on anyway. It's
> great though if it happens, maybe as some sort of informal peer
> maintainers group, since that's how we improve as a community.

Right. It would help when a third person points out. In general, what happens
is the receiving party either comes back with neutral tone (which is very tough,
and I have had to do that a few times), things calm down.

I worry about cases where the receiving party retreats and stops participating. I do
think that this CoC might help in those situations and fellow developers and/or
maintainers might be able to send a polite reminder in a private response to the
offending party and/or a polite public one to calm things. A public one could be
helpful in some cases, if it helps stop the hurting party to from retreating.

This is where we all have to be careful not overreact to perceived slights. I think
this is going be a lot harder in a global community such as ours. i.e one person's
joke could be another person's insult. Again, we have to be put some thought in when
responding which we should be doing anyway.

I am sincerely wishing for good outcomes with all of this.

thanks,
-- Shuah