On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 2:11 AM James Foster <Smalltalk@jgfoster.net> wrote:
One side-effect of the âCovenantâ discussion is that it is necessarily political, which is something that many (rightly, in my view) are trying to avoid. While I agree with most of the views expressed so far, I cringe because I anticipate that someone who disagrees will feel the compulsion to tell us that we are wrong, and things will go bad from there.
I havenât reviewed the full email chain, but Iâve spent a few minutes searching pharo.org for âcode of conductâ and âcovenantâ and come up empty. Before we continue the discussion of how âwoke" (politically correct) we want to be, could someone confirm that this "dastardly deed" (imposing a progressive âCovenantâ without asking for agreement) was actually done? Maybe a troll has just dropped a fire cracker on us and is sitting back, enjoying watching us run around screaming!
If there was, indeed, adoption of a âCovenantâ it should have been done by the board whose role âis to make decisions if in the future the community can't decide on a course of actionâ (https://pharo.org/about).
I suggest that we *suspend discussion* of the politics of speech codes until we confirm that there is one for Pharo. At that point we politely (but pointedly) ask the board (publicly and privately) to explain what prompted the decision to adopt a Code (is it really necessary?) and how this one was selected. Note that part of the reason for limiting discussion is to avoid attracting attention of outsiders who will want to shape the discussion. Letâs stop kicking up dust for the moment!
Dear James, I'm the one who submit the PR for the CoC. Similar text are adopted by a lot of open-source communities or conferences in order to enhance diversity. I read again this morning the document here: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/blob/Pharo8.0/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md and for me this quite neutral and I see nothing political here. I agree with you that this kind of document should have been discussed by the Pharo board and you can propose it for the next meeting. I'm a bit suprised by some overeactions here on the mailing-list. Apparently the Pharo community will be soon be doomed or under attack of nasty leftist activists ... But I will not discuss endlessly about that.
If we need a Code of Conduct, I respectfully suggest we start with ACM ( https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics) which has what should be adequate anti-discrimination provisions (see 1.4 for a list of âunderrepresentedâ groups) to satisfy the progressives among us.
Thank you James to move the discussion on github. Cheers, -- Serge Stinckwic h Int. Research Unit on Modelling/Simulation of Complex Systems (UMMISCO) Sorbonne University (SU) French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) U niversity of Yaoundé I, Cameroon "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." https://twitter.com/SergeStinckwich