Re: Code of Conduct: we need one (… in parallel / in addition to HBR)

[Richard Fontana]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2025 at 9:50 AM Ben Cotton <bcotton at funnelfiasco.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 24, 2025 at 9:20 PM Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn at ebb.org> wrote:
> >
> > I otherwise like the Contributor Covenant.  I just don't think it's a
> good
> > idea for various reasons for Richard or me to enforce the CoC, and I note
> > the Contributor Covenant says that "Community Leaders" are responsible
> > for enforcement. 🤔
>
> Can you say more about your concerns here? In my experience, CoC
> enforcement works best when it comes from people who are leaders in
> the community because they have (generally) earned the respect of the
> community*. Having an "outsider" handle enforcement can lead to
> resentment from the community, and can also mean that the person
> (ideally people) making decisions lack context of the day-to-day
> interactions in the project.
>
> As much as I hate to ask anyone to do CoC enforcement work, because
> it's unpleasant, I do think you and Richard are the two
> best-positioned people to do it, perhaps with a third person to
> provide coverage when one of you is off-grid for a while, etc.
>

I'm not sure I agree with bkuhn on the idea of "a CoC for copyleft-next
that designates a specific
enforcement agent — who is not too closely tied to the project to avoid
conflict of interest but who cares enough about the project to be responsive
when problems start early", for the reason given by Ben above. The main
concern I have with me and bkuhn enforcing the CoC is that we need some
mechanism to subject ourselves to the CoC too, which ought to mean
enforcement (in that case) by someone else, though I think that someone
else should be drawn from the copyleft-next community, such as it is.

However, I'd be curious to learn about projects that have used an outside
CoC enforcement agent successfully.

Richard
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