Someone responsible for enforcing the code of conduct in a project reaches out to you to discuss your behavior.
Do you (1) listen to them in earnest, ask questions if things are unclear, and take the opportunity for introspection and improvement, or (2) interpret everything they said as a threat, immediately escalate it into an argument, and characterize the email as a harassment campaign targeted against you and endorsed by the employer of the conduct enforcement person?
@drewdevault ① should be done and is the best scenario, at least I'd say it should be seen as learning the limits and politely acknowledging them, ② is off limits.
By the way I can easily see a scenario ③ where the person disagrees about it, even with being a bit rude, but doesn't creates further drama, like heat of the moment kind of thing, this is why ② to me is off limits.
(Plus a scenario ④ where the person says okay or even apologises but continues exactly as before)
@lanodan@drewdevault
I would say that your scenario (4) should be deemed like (2), just with added passive aggressivity (which makes matters worse in my book)...
@levitte@drewdevault Yeah, ④ is off-limits as well, it's just that it can easily end up being a really weird one to enforce, specially in open/large communities.
@drewdevault If this refers to the recent hyprland drama, there are so many things wrong with the situation that nobody came out clean.
I wish people would stop using company emails for personal business. I consider responding to a large company to be a completely different situation and it is best to avoid confusion.
From what I've seen, none of the mentioned issues are less than 1.5yrs old and have already been already addressed publically
I don't think this is a problem and I think interpreting the email as an official statement on behalf of RedHat was a ridiculous strawman
The case was never closed, as far as I'm concerned, the accused has never apologized for their behavior and has spent those past 1.5 years posting screeds against social justice warriors on his blog
@drewdevault 1. I agree it should not have been taken as on official redhat email. It just seems messy to be getting emails from *@redhat.com
In his first response, he states "Later in the e-mail, they bring up a few points I've already explained, apologized for, or clarified, in past blogposts or other places. All of the comments they bring up are well over 1.5 years old.".
I was under the impression that he apologized to anyone he hurt. If not, I'll need to revise my opinion.
@drewdevault 3. From what I understand, the communication was over a public(I think?) mailing list. I believe that initial communication should be done in private if possible.
Vaxry should not have responded in such a harsh manner. If he didn't escalate, this likely wouldn't have become such a problem
I'm still a little confused why the free desktop is trying to moderate his server. He is just an occasional contributor to some projects to them
@drewdevault 3. That explains quite a bit actually.
4.
5. I personally don't belive that projects should care what individual contributors do in their spare time unless it is causing problems in their spaces, which I don't belive to be the case. There is obviously a line to be drawn, but I believe apologized for conduct in a separate server isn't there yet.
I think his conduct was poor, but I do agree with many of his points and empathise with his feeling threatened weather or not it was justified. I do feel that, regardless of his conduct off platform, he is still deserving of being included in on topic technical discussions on freedesktop.
@MyBeansAreBaked "I do feel that, regardless of his conduct off platform, he is still deserving of being included in on topic technical discussions on freedesktop."
For the record I find his behavior in this thread sufficient cause for a ban even without taking into account his behavior off-platform. And the official reason for the ban is even more agreeable: he stated that he will refuse any future communication from the CoC team.
@lritter tact is an essential skill in a conduct enforcement role, for sure.
What annoys me is that your framing minimizes the offense and the need for corrective action without any knowledge of the offense, which is a philosophical position which, when applied generally, weakens conduct standards. And since there's no context and this is a subpost the only context to which your arguments apply is generally.
Your framing is not exactly victim blaming, but it's not exactly dissimilar from that.
@drewdevault How could I minimize anything? You said it yourself, I have no context, because you gave me none. Yet you expect me to side with you in a conflict that I do not understand. So what did I do? I try to establish the baseline of a sensible approach to gain more context. My expectation was that you would have responded with something to the effect of "here is what I did...", and then I would likely be satisfied.
@lritter I was not actually involved in the dispute I'm talking about except from afar.
All you know about this is enough to make a reasonable inference about the situation. Per my interpretation (here you're trusting that my interpretation is reasonable), one party "reached out" and another party "interpreted this as a threat", "immediately escalated it", and construed it as "a harassment campaign" which was "endorsed by the employer".
@lritter your response either assumes that there's more to "reaching out" where the conduct person behaved badly, or that there's less to the reaction and the offender didn't actually do these things.
To draw a conclusion from the facts as presented which is sympathetic to the accused is a bit of a stretch and does not really add anything here except to weaken standards of conduct enforcement.
@drewdevault I have previously witnessed people in power strongarming others over rule violations in a way that escalated the situation and made the offender's response seem crazy and overblown, so that has made me cautious.
@bensonk@lritter characterizing "receiving an official warning from a conduct enforcement team" as being "threatened" is provocative and confrontational to the point of absurdity.
@lritter@bensonk it was sent in private, yes. I only know about it because the accused published the email thread to submit their case to the court of public opinion (and so far as my role as a juror in that court in concerned, the accused is a piece of work)
@drewdevault I have recently been reprimanded myself, so I do understand the other side a little better now. In my case we had a rather productive chat afterwards where the moderator explained the limits of the reprimand to me. That was the first time I realized how important it is to ensure the offender understands how inconsequential his mistake was, provided his aim is to work together with the community in the future.
@lritter I see. You are projecting your own experience onto the situation I am describing.
I would generally caution you against the impulse to side with the accused on the basis that you were once accused of something yourself, without any additional context to justify your position.
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