I wanted to attend the IndieWebCamp Nuremberg this month, just as I did last year. While browsing the page for information, under "Participating" I saw a link to the "Code of Conduct" that one has to adhere to when attending the event.
There has been much talk about CoCs in the last years, and I generally try to ignore such things as much as possible, just like CLAs and NDAs. But now it was that I should forced to follow one, and asked some questions about it in IRC.
My understanding of rules in societies is that there are two levels:
If you break the law, police will come and arrest or fine you.
If you do not follow good sense, people will yell at and/or avoid you.
So, why do we need a third level? A "Code of Conduct", which also could be called "house rules"?
If you add a Code of Conduct, you think that level 1 (law) does not help and level 2 (good sense) is not available/adhered to.
In the IRC discussion, Rosemary Orchard gave a couple of reasons for a CoC:
Reason 1, "people feel safe", follows the same reasoning that states follow when flooding public spaces with video surveillance.
But just feeling safe does not actually make you safe. Video cameras do not make your life more safe, neither does a Code of Conduct.
I'd have put this under "good sense", but that's obviously not enough.
The premise is that banning someone based on some written text is easier than referring to some nebulous common sense.
I did realize that in the end, every Code of Conduct only exists to achieve one goal: Make it easy to ban people from some space, be it an online community or a conference.
This seems to be an easy argument: Because of diverse social backgrounds, members of an international community cannot assume that other members share the same common and good sense.
If you follow this reasoning, then the rules written down in a Code of Conduct have to be very clear, so that people with different backgrounds can understand them without ambiguities.
And this is where it all breaks: Instead of clear and unequivocal rules, the IndieWebCamp Code of Conduct (and probably all others, too) is full of soft words that can be bent in every direction:
Respectful behavior
- Be considerate, kind, constructive, and helpful.
- Avoid demeaning, discriminatory, harassing, hateful, or physically threatening behavior, speech, and imagery.
If the organizers determine that an event participant is behaving disrespectfully, the organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion and exclusion from the event without warning or refund.
So what actually is "demeaning"? It's a very soft word that has no singular definition, and will mean totally different things depending on your background.
The same applies to "discriminatory" and "harassing". Almost every joke discriminates some group, be it guests in a restaurant (German: Ober-Witze), types of animals or groups of people that are on the losing side of a joke.
The Wikipedia definition of harassment refers to common sense, which we can't rely on because of reason #4:
It is commonly understood as behavior that [...] embarrasses a person
IndieWebCamps have hacking days where people code together. Now when I point out some stupid bug in someone else's code, this might embarrass the person who wrote it.
This already covers the Code of Conduct's definition of "disrespectfully", and bam, I'm kicked from the conference.
Together with reason #2 ("somebody will care") this will eventually lead to overreaction: When someone complains based on the CoC, the organizers will know that people expect them to do something, because they themselves put their conference under the Code of Conduct. Common sense will be less likely to be applied in such situations.
A Code of Conduct is a set of rules to ban people.
It is needed because people have so diverse backgrounds that no common sense exists.
People with different backgrounds understand the rules differently, because they are soft instead of explicit.
I will not attend the IndieWebCamp this year.
Other people can express the issues better than I:
Bad things happen because of CoCs:
Gerade habe ich einen kleinen Vortrag beim Leipzig Semantic Web Tag über LESS gehalten.
LESS ist eine semantische Templateengine, mit der man Daten aus RDFa- und SPARQL-Endpoints in HTML umwandeln und damit auf seiner Website, Blog oder sonstwo anzeigen kann.
Hauptteil des Vortrags war eine Demonstration, die Folien sind hier runterzuladen.
At FrOSCon we had nicely fast and stable wifi - but outgoing SMTP connections on port 25 got blocked. An easy way to tunnel out those connections is using SSH's port forwarding feature:
ssh -L 25:localhost:25 user@example.org
With that, you can connect to your local port 25 which gets forwarded via SSH to port 25 on example.org. All you need is an SSH account on that machine. When setting the local port to > 1024, you don't even need local root access.
Dieses Wochenende (26./27. April) war ich in Hamburg auf der PHP Unconference 2008, organisiert von der PHP Usergroup Hamburg. Tobias Struckmeier war so lieb mich und mindestens 6 andere Leute für das Wochenende bei sich aufzunehmen, wodurch mir dir nervige Hotelsuche oder das Übernachten in der Uni erspart blieb. Außerdem wurde der Abend etwas länger; nachts um 1 saßen wir nach der Heimfahrt von der Recycel Bar vor den Laptops und informierten uns gegenseitig über coole selbstgebaute Software :)
Sonnabend in der Eröffnungssession wurden die Sessions festgelegt - schön basisdemokratisch nach Anzahl der Wünsche der Teilnehmer. Meinen Vortrag über PEAR2 wollten nicht genug Leute (<8) hören, das Angebort für den SPARQL bekam volle 9 Punkte und wurde als auf den Sonntag 16:00 in den letzten Slot gesetzt.
Den so "gewonnen" Freiraum konnte ich sehr schön mit dem Beisitzen in den anderen Sessions füllen und hier und da was Neues aufschnappen. Das tolle an der Unconf sind eigentlich - wie überall - die Gespräche zwischen den Vorträgen, von denen es reichlich interessante gab.
Ich wurde allerdings immer mehr in dem Gefühl bestärkt, auf den falschen Gebieten tätig zu sein: Der PEAR-Talk wurde nicht genommen, das PEAR-Installerbuch in der Verlosung als zweitletztes genommen und mein SPARQL-Vortrag am Sonntagnachmittag wollten ganze drei Leute hören... Nach der Vorstellung von DBpedia entwickelte sich aber doch ein interessantes Gespräch über die Verfügbarkeit von Daten über die Menschen. Sie existieren sowieso im Netz, allerdings haben nur ... Organisationen die Mittel, sie zusammenzuführen. Ergebnis: Damit alle die gleichen Chancen haben, müssen Informationen für alle verfügbar und frei sein. Denn irgendjemand hat immer Zugriff darauf - warum also nicht alle?
Zusammenfassend war es ein sehr interessantes und schönes Wochenende. Als zum Schluß darum gebeten wurde, Kritik und Verbesserungsvorschläge einzureichen fiel mir absolut nichts ein - perfekt!