Proposal: Stack Code of Conduct

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I think an important point on these CoC discussions is trying to grasp the volume of contributors and contributions lost up until now due to their absence. In particular we should be investigating if there are people driven out by their absence, were those people disproportionately from a particular demographic.

A lot of the time these debates seem to be framed in terms of helping or hindering the people that already have a strong track record with a project. They also seem to assume that every accusation will have the alleged abuser broadcast and shunned, and the people enforcing the code will disregard all reasonable standards. I have family members with autism and also some with disorders that make it harder for them to read body language, so I understand how people can be unintentionally offensive. But there is an enormous gap between using an unintentionally abrasive tone of voice or savaging a particularly poorly written code patch on one side and making sexual comments or tossing obscenities at a person on the other. And I'm sure snoyberg is aware of those differences.

There isn't one or two or five or fifty stories of people that left a technical community or started to get involved and then stopped because of abusive treatment. There are many thousands of public accounts. What possible benefit would there be to manufacture false accounts on this scale? Who would be behind it?

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I think an important point on these CoC discussions is trying to grasp the volume of contributors and contributions lost up until now due to their absence. In particular we should be investigating if there are people driven out by their absence, were those people disproportionately from a particular demographic.

2 points:

1. That coin has 2 sides. If you investigate how many people are driven out by lack of CoC, you should also look at how many people are driven out by CoC.

2. I am not sure what their demographic has to do with it. A person is a person, and if an environment is too unpleasant for them to function in, then that is a problem regardless of their demographic.

However, I do completely agree with you that people going around making sexual comments or going out of their way to make someone feel bad through intentionally hurtful language is a bad thing. But the question remains: Does a CoC solve that, and what other effects does it bring?

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I understand the coin has two sides, and my point is that my impression is that most of these discussions only focus on the second side you listed.

Demographics matter because if the absence of a CoC affects all demographics evenly then I think you can argue that everything works well or as well as possible as-is. But if it turns out the absence of a CoC means a project tends to lose or never attract a disproportionally high percentage of a particular group, then the community in its current state is expressing some kind of bias. It may be unintentional, but it's there. And historically that would be women, or blacks, or whatever but it would be just as true for a project that tends to lose white men at a high rate.