Skip to content

Comment on GitHub's Atom Switches from the Open Code of Conduct to the Contributor Conventparent

Comments

This particular one seems aimed at "forcing" project maintainers to police what people say on Twitter or on blogs. The driving example is some guy that heavily contributes to popular Ruby library (Opal). He wrote anti trans stuff on his Twitter account, and his Twitter profile says he's involved with Opal. Third parties got upset and decided they should kick him off this project. This code of conduct now codifies that, so people can say "ha! You have the responsibility to kick this guy out, yeah!"

This kind of thing isn't that necessary. Though some rules (like, I dunno, no posting dumbshit gifs) might tend to increase the quality of conversation. These particular ones seem more about making someone feel they've made an impact, rather than driving a high quality community. Though the justification will be that by policing everyone's behavior, we'll end up with all sorts of great work being done by people that are too offended to otherwise participate.

More likely, if you want to drive involvement, is to make sure your project itself isn't intimidating for people to start on. Good starter docs, explanations on how to submit changes, volunteers that gently help new comers, etc.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.