CoC discussion as i see it

[Mitchell Baker]

I'm outlining below where the discussion has brought me. I've waited
until I thought the bulk of useful conversation has occurred so as not
to be premature in coming to conclusions. The key of course is to make
a proposal. I'm hoping to get to that very shortly that takes the
following into effect. I am in touch with Deb and will be working with
her. Deb has done a very nice job at what she signed up to do, which
was look into how the Ubuntu Code might fit Mozilla. There are some
bigger questions which I think are more than Deb signed up for and are
mine.

1. I'm supportive of a Code of Conduct. The idea that we treat each
other decently is worth stating, as is giving some flavor to what that
means.

2. It's critical to distinguish between Mozilla activities and the rest
of life. Whatever we say needs to separate these two categories very
clearly.

3. Much of the discussion to date has not made this distinction. The
proximate cause -- Gerv's post -- had nothing to do with opportunities,
exclusion or inclusion *inside of Mozilla activities.* It was aimed at
an aspect of life quite separate from Mozilla.

4. The issue Gerv's post raised is whether content some people find
offensive that is not related to Mozilla should be allowed in Mozilla
spaces. If the answer is "no" then there is the question of what kind
of content and which Mozilla spaces.

5. On the "which kind of content" the advocates for restriction have
used the "discrimination language.' I question whether this is the best
language; more on this later.

6. The comments that the advocates for content limitation are primarily
employees and primarily North American remain -- to my mind --
unanswered.

7. The Code of Conduct's main purpose needs to be to address how to
treat each the *within Mozilla.* Trying to govern life outside of
Mozilla activities will e over-reaching. It might address types of
content related to other aspects of life we don't want inside Mozilla
spaces.

8. I do not want to implement anything where the standard is "no one
can be uncomfortable." I don' think a group of humans can live and work
together without someone being uncomfortable. The poignant story about
pain on hearing about children makes this point very real.

9. I'm not fond of the discrimination language and I particular do not
like the long list of words that require links to wikipedia for even
native english speakers to understand.

10. I do not want to sign up to "honor" the list of things in the
current draft. For example, I acknowledge that a range of institutions
do not permit women in specified roles. I acknowledge that Mozillains
belong to and support such organizations outside of their role with
Mozilla. My commitment to Mozilla is not to "honor" this view, whatever
that means. My commitment to Mozilla is to keep my response to that
part of their lives separate from Mozilla. If I know that person well
and we have conversations that range beyond Mozilla work, we may talk
about it. In any case, the following should be true: belief in
excluding groups of people based on personal characteristics can not be
extended to Mozilla

mitchell

[Tim Chevalier]

Mitchell,

Can you explain what you mean by "the discrimination language"? It's
not clear to me which comments you're referring to.

> 6. The comments that the advocates for content limitation are primarily employees and primarily North American remain -- to my mind -- unanswered.

If the community outside North America is actually more homogeneous as
far as traits like gender and sexuality go (n.b. I don't know whether
that's true), then that would explain part of why the advocates for
respect have been North American. As to why the advocates for respect
are primarily employees, to me that's simple: I believe I'm entitled
to dignity at work, while in a volunteer project that I'm free to
leave at any time without jeopardizing my livelihood, my expectations
for behavior are not as high.

I personally don't have the economic and social privilege required to
work for free, so I have never been a volunteer for a software project
that wasn't my paying job or closely related to it. Perhaps that
points to another reason why those advocating greater respect for less-
privileged people are also more likely to be employees.

Cheers,
Tim

[Majken Connor]

Mitchell,

could you be more specific about your divide of in Mozilla vs rest of life?
Do you count off topic irc conversations on irc.mozilla.org, or off topic
blog posts that get syndicated to planet as Mozilla or not Mozilla? Or
maybe explain more what context you were thinking in?

-Lucy

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 10:34 PM, Tim Chevalier <catamo...@gmail.com>wrote:

> Mitchell,
>
> Can you explain what you mean by "the discrimination language"? It's
> not clear to me which comments you're referring to.
>

> > 6. The comments that the advocates for content limitation are primarily
> employees and primarily North American remain -- to my mind -- unanswered.
>

> If the community outside North America is actually more homogeneous as
> far as traits like gender and sexuality go (n.b. I don't know whether
> that's true), then that would explain part of why the advocates for
> respect have been North American. As to why the advocates for respect
> are primarily employees, to me that's simple: I believe I'm entitled
> to dignity at work, while in a volunteer project that I'm free to
> leave at any time without jeopardizing my livelihood, my expectations
> for behavior are not as high.
>
> I personally don't have the economic and social privilege required to
> work for free, so I have never been a volunteer for a software project
> that wasn't my paying job or closely related to it. Perhaps that
> points to another reason why those advocating greater respect for less-
> privileged people are also more likely to be employees.
>
> Cheers,
> Tim

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[Daniel Glazman]

On Apr 4, 4:27 am, Mitchell Baker <mitch...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> 2.  It's critical to distinguish between Mozilla activities and the rest
> of life.  Whatever we say needs to separate these two categories very
> clearly.

Absolutely. But people are very rarely maintaining two blogs, one for
personal matters and one for mozilla-related matters. I also think
it's not reasonable to require it.

</Daniel>

[Mitchell Baker]

My point is that Mozilla is so diverse that there are many activities
many Mozillians engage in re their political, social and cultural lives
that re likely to offend other Mozillians. We can't be trying to stop
those diverse views. WE can only be talking about what if anything is
inappropriate when we meet as Mozillians.


mitchell

[L. David Baron]

On Tuesday 2012-04-03 19:34 -0700, Tim Chevalier wrote:
> As to why the advocates for respect
> are primarily employees, to me that's simple: I believe I'm entitled
> to dignity at work, while in a volunteer project that I'm free to
> leave at any time without jeopardizing my livelihood, my expectations
> for behavior are not as high.

I think there are a significant number of non-employee contributors
who are substantially more attached to the project than the average
employee. While they may be "free to leave at any time", they care
about Mozilla and its future, want to be a part of it, and want it
to continue being a community they can be a part of.

> I personally don't have the economic and social privilege required to
> work for free, so I have never been a volunteer for a software project
> that wasn't my paying job or closely related to it. Perhaps that
> points to another reason why those advocating greater respect for less-
> privileged people are also more likely to be employees.

It's not clear to me how you jumped between privilege with regards
to gender and sexuality and privilege with regards to economic
background. Why are the economically disadvantaged more likely to
advocate for respect for groups disadvantaged by gender or
sexuality? (The correlations in [1] aren't particularly supportive
of such a theory, though lack of clean correlation doesn't prove
lack of causation.)

-David

[1] http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=CAI01p1 or
http://www.madpickles.org/California_Proposition_8.html (same data)

--
𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂

[Mitchell Baker]

The Mozilla mission, how we achieve it is what we share as Mozillians.
We don't share employment status, we don't share religious views, we
don't share a bunch of cultural or political views.

So by mozilla I mean the activieis that move our mission forward. So,
will Mozilla programs exclude people, permit sexual harassment, etc. We
should not, and it's appropriate for the Mozilla community to build ways
of working that make this the case.

Will Mozillians participate in non-Mozilla institutions the exclude
people from roles? Yes. Would a mozilla code of conduct or community
norms try to govern that behavior. I think not.

Someone's religious life is not a Mozilla activity. The definiton of
marriage -- the topic which kicked this discussion off-- is not a
Mozilla activity or question.

So the question for us is: when and how much do we want to prohibit
conversations (I guess you call them "off -topic conversations" in the
ebb-and-flow of Mozilla life? There are a lot of comments about "not
very much" or "not at all." There are also reactions that "absolutely
when it hurts people."

Where these happen is a related, but separable issue. If one advocates
limiting the types of content in Mozilla channels, one might then decide
these limits should only be applicable to the main, broad-based
channels.

My preference is to have very narrow limits on content, and have them
apply very broadly across Mozilla.

For example, I think threats of personal violence are unacceptable. No
one should come to a Mozilla channel and be treated with mutilation,
stalking, rape or comments about their death. I don't care if we're
talking about the most obscure IRC channel hosted by Mozilla which has
become mostly off-topic but has mozilla folks hanging out and doing some
work there. This kind of content does not belong at Mozilla. I don't
want to ever wander anywhere in the Mozilla world and find it full of
people threatening violent activity.

I understand that occasionally people have conversations where the
context is such the language doesn't really mean what it says. That's
very risky in our world, with lots of people from different contexts,
langagues, and where the extreme understanding between people that is
required for such language to be OK with everyone is difficult to know
beforehand and impossible to know for everyone who will read it.

So yes, I would say that anyone who wants to joke about personal
violence does so at their own risk.


mitchell

[Mitchell Baker]

Tim

Appreciate your effort to try to figure things out. I think there's
still a good deal of cultural bias in your analysis.

You assume that because others don't agree with you that you have
"greater respect for less privileged people." That statement is also,
btw, potentially offensive to those whom you are so characterizing. It
might be a good exercise to sit down with the assumption that those who
disagree with you are *exactly* as decent and moral as you are, and then
try to internalize why they might have different reactions.

Your view of employees and volunteers may be true for you, but as you
say, you've never been a volunteer. This list has volunteers on it who
are trying to tell us what they actually feel.

You also talk about the "economic and social privilege required to work
for free." I don't know how you came to the view that Mozilla
volunteers are econically and socially privleged and that's why they
volunteer. Many are students, many work long hours and then contribute
to Mozilla, many make sacrifices to build the Mozilla mission. The
assertion that they are all privileged is wrong. And again,
potentially quite offensive. Maybe they are simply more dedicated to
this mission than others and so find a way to get involved.

I believe employees deserve to be well-treated, that's what a decent
employer does. To use this against volunteers however, along the lines
that "i'm an employee, so your view is *less* legitimate" is not my view
at all. Employees are resources of the Mozilla community, not the group
whose views outweigh all others. We're lucky enough to be able to earn
our livlihood working for Mozilla.

Working for Mozilla should bring humility, not entitlement.

Getting to know the Mozilla communities around the world is a glorious
privilege. It teaches so much about other perspectives and gives such
an opportunity to gently explore different perspectives. Shared
activity on behalf of the Mozilla mission opens so much room for
learning and growth. Even if it's uncomfortable here to find your view
of how to proceed is questioned, I urge you to do the though experiment
I outlined above.


Mitchell

[Majken Connor]

That reminds me of something I'd like to see addressed in the CoC -
conducting business in open and transparent ways and spaces, eg phone
meetings can be efficient for getting the work done, and should be used,
but are they done in such a way that allows people who can't make the
meetings to participate in a meaningful way?

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[Daniel Glazman]

On Apr 4, 9:15 am, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:

> That reminds me of something I'd like to see addressed in the CoC -
> conducting business in open and transparent ways and spaces, eg phone
> meetings can be efficient for getting the work done, and should be used,
> but are they done in such a way that allows people who can't make the
> meetings to participate in a meaningful way?

Uuuuhhh.
If this goes into a CoC applied to the whole Mozilla Community, the
effect will be *devastating*.

At this point, and the more I read the proposals for this CoC, the
more I think it just does not make sense any more. Mozilla does not
need a CoC ; it needs an informal reaction chain with someone or a few
persons able to make a _sovereign_ decision when an issue arises. Did
I hear someone else think "pmo peers"? Oh wait, we already have pmo
peers! And they did a good, an excellent job over the years. Do we
need more? I don't think so. As I said earlier, we're a world of
trust, let's trust pmo peers as we have always done.

FWIW, here's a filtered version of what you miss from the "Community
at large" when it discusses the proposed CoC behind private curtains
(I've been cc:ed at least eight times in the last couple of days
because of my posts here in mozilla.governance).

- total dismay
- can put whatever they want in that CoC, I won't care because I don't
have to care
- yet another bad handling of the Community
- negative or circumspect opinions about this CoC are dismissed
- US-centric thing and a waste of time
- only deserved a light warning to Gerv and then back to code
- did not read offensive words in Gerv's post but many in the primary
reactions to it
- what's next? a dress code?

</Daniel>

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Mitchell Baker <mitc...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> My preference is to have very narrow limits on content, and have them apply
> very broadly across Mozilla.

+1

Nick

[Tim Chevalier]

Mitchell,

Can you explain what you mean by "cultural bias"? Which culture is
biased in favor of treating people in gender and sexual minorities as
human beings?

Thanks,
Tim

[Mitchell Baker]

Tim

I mean that your view view that "it's my way or you are showing respect."

Also, i have to note that in this message you've gone a step further and
now imply that the issue is "treating people . . . as human beings."

I think it's time to stop this part of the discussion here. I think
it's not helping Mozilla, I'm not sure it's helping you, and it's not
helping build a community.


mitchell

[Majken Connor]

Could you describe more what you see wrong with having some sort of
openness in the code? I thought this one would be less controversial since
it's supposed to be a defining feature of how Mozilla works - in the open
where anyone can participate. Also let's be clear I mean Mozilla business
as Mitchell has also supported a line between actually getting things done,
and just hanging out.

I think it's important that more people who disagree could say something.
On the one hand I hope they already don't feel welcome to express dissent.
That's why I've personally been fighting against banning just everything.
Conflict is important. On the other hand, it's mostly been Asa and Gerv who
invested themselves in the original topic. It would be good for us to hear
other people who don't have the same investment coming out and saying
what's wrong and why.

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Daniel Glazman <daniel....@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Apr 4, 9:15 am, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

> > That reminds me of something I'd like to see addressed in the CoC -
> > conducting business in open and transparent ways and spaces, eg phone
> > meetings can be efficient for getting the work done, and should be used,
> > but are they done in such a way that allows people who can't make the
> > meetings to participate in a meaningful way?
>

> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>

[Daniel Glazman]

On Apr 4, 8:06 pm, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Could you describe more what you see wrong with having some sort of
> openness in the code? I thought this one would be less controversial since
> it's supposed to be a defining feature of how Mozilla works - in the open
> where anyone can participate. Also let's be clear I mean Mozilla business
> as Mitchell has also supported a line between actually getting things done,
> and just hanging out.

This has nothing to do in a Code of Conduct. Put it into a Guidelines
or "The missing Mozilla Community manual" document that is only a
source of information and advises and not something people must comply
with and I'll be fine.

</Daniel>

[Majken Connor]

I'd still appreciate more specifics. IMO it's a code of *conduct* and
having meetings and discussions in private without ever sharing outwardly
is exclusionary.

Though I think you raise a good point with "must comply." I'm not sure how
strongly the code is supposed to be interpreted. I have the impression that
it's guidelines and that "violations" will have a path to resolution. It's
not rules that you have to follow or you're out (though I can see people
who repeatedly disrespect each other being asked to leave, but that could
still happen now without a CoC).

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Daniel Glazman <daniel....@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Apr 4, 8:06 pm, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Could you describe more what you see wrong with having some sort of
> > openness in the code? I thought this one would be less controversial
> since
> > it's supposed to be a defining feature of how Mozilla works - in the open
> > where anyone can participate. Also let's be clear I mean Mozilla business
> > as Mitchell has also supported a line between actually getting things
> done,
> > and just hanging out.
>

> This has nothing to do in a Code of Conduct. Put it into a Guidelines
> or "The missing Mozilla Community manual" document that is only a
> source of information and advises and not something people must comply
> with and I'll be fine.
>