it’s perhaps a bug in the ubuntu code of conduct that it does not include something that we can find elsewhere — in the KDE code of conduct.
i believe that “be excellent to each other” very much includes “assume that people mean well”.
i’m personally a bit tired of seeing people repeatedly publicly flogged for an innocent action (where i define innocent as “very obviously without malice”).
ps: can we please get back to work? boston summit just ended today and i can tell you that there is certainly no lack of actual interesting things to be spending time on.
edit: thanks to murray for pointing out that the “assume people mean well” language appears also in the GNOME code of conduct. KDE just had better google juice for the term :)
16 Comments
Blog post of the month. +5 internets and a webby. Would buy again.
Great to see common sense winning over extremist political correctness!
Yes indeed! I think that’s something that really needs to be kept in mind in the talks about sexism that are occurring lately. It’s a problem, but it’s certainly not out of malice.
No-one is ‘being flogged’. This kind of misrepresentation is getting really tiresome. Someone pointed out a remark which had an unfortunate effect – no malice was ever presumed, no allegation of malicious intent was ever made – and asked for an apology _for the effect of the remark_, not for any malicious intent. No apology has been made. There is the story in a nutshell. The lack of apology is the most worrying thing. Everyone assumed Mark meant well. That’s why someone approached him privately to ask if he’d maybe say sorry before making it public. That’s why everyone was extremely careful to say they were complaining only about the substance of an individual remark, not suggesting anything negative about his character in general or his intentions or motivations. Despite all of this care, there’s still been no apology.
Jamie, if you think this is extremism, you lead a really, really sheltered life.
The sheer number of blog posts and comments some people (lefty, adam etc.) have left are a clear indication of extremism.
Tim: that’s…uh…what? Barack Obama makes rather a lot of political speeches, does that make him a political extremist? Some people write lots of blog entries about coding, does that make them coding extremists? You’re not making any sense. I don’t really know what else to say.
In agreement with Adam Williamson here. I was always taught that you should be respectful of other peoples’ feelings, so if you’ve offended someone, you should apologise for offending them and try not to do it again. I think that’s pretty reasonable. People are clearly offended, I don’t see what’s so hard about apologising (and meaning it).
I agree that some of the blog posts about this have gone totally over the top, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an issue.
Yeah, that’s in the (slightly older) GNOME code of conduct, which is a little more concise:
http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct
“be excellent to each other”
Bill and Ted! Excellent!
Aha, thanks for this Ryan. This is also how I feel about this trend where the online society wants to say for each and every person what they are doing wrong (even if there’s no malice at all).
I explained my point of view on this here:
http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2008/09/14/moral-indulgence
“I questioned whether only intent can either be good or bad, but that question was refuted as irrelevant. For it’s the beholder who matters. Not the producer.”
“The reason for this irrelevance being that an audience doesn’t take the responsibility of trying to understand intent. I disagree with this conclusion. I think the audience does understand intent.”
And in comments:
“I said audience has a responsibility to decide for themselves whether or not the ideas that appear on a website (like my blog) are either true, false, idiot, genius, acceptable, immoral, etc. …”
“I say that audience has the capacity to understand intent and that audience, if it wants to be relevant audience, needs to utilize this capacity. “
adam: my comments were very clearly written under the assumption that everyone discussing this already has *no doubt* that there was no malice. my appeal to this shared belief is the entire crux of my argument, in fact.
i’m not suggesting that anyone is accusing malice. i’m saying that in the absense of malice, the response has been rather extreme.
pvanhoof: you seem to be caught up in the overly dramatic view of this as some kind of personal attack against the Evil Sexist, which it isn’t on anyone’s part. No-one’s using this issue as some sort of stalking horse to persecute Mark personally (well, the occasional comment thread nut job may be, but I’d hate for our side to be judged by our comment thread nut jobs just as much as you’d hate your side to be…look up MikeeUSA if you want an example of why).
This isn’t some kind of contest where the Forces of Righteous Feminism root out the Forces of Sexist Evil and punish them for their sins. No-one’s asking Mark to flagellate himself in public, or anything. No-one’s asking him to admit some kind of personality defect.
The point is that the world of F/OSS has a problem with sexism that is causing *it* harm by helping to massively reduce its available talent pool. The compound effect of incidental, non-malicious bits of sexism like Mark’s is to heavily discourage many women from becoming involved with F/OSS. This is much more of a problem for F/OSS than it is for the women. They have lots of other things they can happily do with their time, after all. If F/OSS wants to be more successful in attracting women contributors, then we need to a) try and avoid unintentionally doing silly sexist things in the first place, and b) say ‘oops, sorry’ when we do, to make it clear to women that it really _was_ unintentional and we did not wish to offend them.
As others have said, if you step on someone’s foot on the bus, you say ’sorry’. You don’t refuse to say sorry on the grounds that you didn’t do it on purpose. In fact, if you do that, it makes it seems like you _did_ do it on purpose.
desrt: then the image of someone being ‘repeatedly publicly flogged’ seems inaccurate and I think you could have said what you meant to say in a much better way. Even so, I don’t agree. One, you’re making Tim’s mistake of confusing extremism with passion. _One_ post calling for Mark to be fired in disgrace for what he said would be quite extreme. One thousand polite posts asking him to make a small apology for unintentionally saying something dumb and offending people is not extreme. Volume doth not extremity make.
Other posts on the topic have been part of the meta-discussion, not directly related to what Mark said at all. Mark’s speech was just one incident in a rather long line – http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents lists some of the more high-profile ones – and some people are interested in discussing the higher-level question of what _all these incidents of sexism_ combined mean, how they should be addressed, and what happens when you do try to address them. None of those articles should be read as having anything directly to do with Mark’s specific incident. It’d be like saying that a high-level article on perceptions of big changes in F/OSS desktops, partly prompted by a blog post attacking PulseAudio, was also attacking PulseAudio. It’s not the case.
For the record, I assume that Mark meant well, and I think his words had an unintentional effect of making some people feel excluded that he should try to make amends for.
I don’t understand why someone would find this viewpoint to be inconsistent or objectionable — can someone explain? Actions performed with good intent can still have negative consequences that should be mitigated; that should be obvious.
Also, Adam, thanks for being so patient with the thoughtful replies you’ve been writing (here and elsewhere).
@Cris: To mitigate is not the same as apologize. And I’m not sure if I want society to turn into robot-like humans who are constantly stressed up about not saying anything that, oh dear god, could be interpreted wrong by people who are being intellectually dishonest.
Those bloggers have been *expecting* an apologize (not even just asking, but expecting). That expectation is excessive for something of which I don’t even think really needs mitigating. I’m not even sure whether mitigating is a good thing here. And no that should not be obvious. You apparently think it must obviously be that way. That people should always use gender-neutral words and crap like that.
But that’s you. Fine for you.
@pvanhoof:
You’re inventing arguments and putting my name to them — I don’t advocate use of gender-neutral words, or argue that people should make sure never to say anything that could be interpreted as hurtful. (I don’t think that’s possible.)
I do argue that, when it is obvious that you have hurt people and didn’t intend to, it’s ethical to *do something to fix that*. I honestly do not understand the mindset that argues otherwise, and your comment hasn’t done much to explain it to me. Maybe you can try again?
An apology’s an obvious way of making amends, but there are others too; just letting the people you hurt know that you hadn’t meant to do that and do respect and value their presence is an obvious candidate that also hasn’t been said.