@mistfpga thanks for bringing up your concerns on the Zcash contributor CoC change. I really value your contribution to the community, and I believe we can address your concerns while also agreeing to a code of conduct and cultivating social norms that meets the goal of “fostering an open and welcoming community”.
The first and foremost idea I’d like to impart is that establishing healthy community norms is an ongoing process and discussion and will involve disagreement. That’s just the nature of the beast. So the Big Picture™ is that Zcash community needs to be able to respectfully and productively disagree, then come to some consensus out of that.
No amount of policy tweaking and language lawyering can make up for that big picture issue.
I also want to say that if I’m hearing you correctly I share some of your concerns. At the same time, I appreciate the need to call out dog-whistles when they occur, and I support this change to the Zcash contributor CoC as a way to clarify the kind of norms I’d like to see. So let’s keep iterating on those norms and sharing/working through concerns.
Here are a set of distinct concerns I heard from @mistfpga, please chime in if they’re inaccurate or need rewording:
- Naming specific categories of harassment / discrimination may introduce a bias (ie allow other kinds of harassment or discrimination to become implicitly condoned).
- Identifying examples of “unacceptable behavior” which don’t require knowing intent is problematic (ex: dog whistles).
- The scope of the CoC obligates contributors to enforce the same norms everywhere they represent Zcash, but other contexts/communities may have different established norms.
Are those the core concerns?
I agree all are important concerns.
The only one I have a suggestion for at the moment is the second: by just establishing a norm that moderation actions are proportional to the infringement. This allows “unknowing / no-intent” infringement to still be cause for moderation, but that should be proportional.
So for example maybe an appropriate response to an obscure dog whistle might be a moderated comment removal with a link to the description of the dog whistle. By contrast posting a well-established dog whistle fits pretty well into my definition of trolling. And here when I say obscure or well established, I mean to this community specifically.
This doesn’t seem onerous or extreme to me personally. I’m curious for @mistfpga or others who are concerned if this “rationale w/ proportionality” norm assuages any concern about that second point?
The other concerns are worth further discussion. The third scope issue is super important for me, because I see a need for Zcash to have multiple partially overlapping and partially disjoint communities as required to reach global adoption (and indeed Zcash already has that with very different fora, different language communities, etc…). So I want to encourage that kind of decentralized social adoption. At the same time, for the dev community I directly engage with “natively” I definitely want well established norms that foster inclusivity and collaboration.
