GitHub Hires Notorious Social Justice Warrior to Work on 'Anti-Harassment'

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Quote

 

GitHub Hires Notorious Social Justice Warrior to Work on ‘Anti-Harassment’
by Allum Bokhari | 25 Feb 2016

 

Coraline Ada Ehmke, a partisan feminist known for imposing hated progressive codes of conduct on open source coding communities, has announced she will join the influential software development platform GitHub to advise on “anti-harassment.”

GitHub’s decision is part of a trend of Silicon Valley companies bringing in social justice warriors to advise them on preventing “harassment.” The most high-profile case yet has been Twitter, whose new “Trust and Safety Council” has come under widespread criticism for its progressive bias.

Ehmke is known for the creation of the “Contributor Covenant,” a list of behavioural rules intended to govern the behaviour of coders working on open source projects. Among the behaviours banned by the covenant are “insulting/derogatory comments,” “public or private harassment,” and “other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting.”

Crucially, contributors to open source projects — who are typically unpaid, freely volunteering their time and skills to improve open source software — are expected to follow the code within open-source communities and everywhere else on the web.

For example, if a coder makes an “insulting/derogatory comment” on Twitter that’s entirely unconnected to their coding work, they are still liable to be kicked out of their open source project if the project is governed by the Contributor Code. It’s a recipe for policing the behaviour of the entire open source community across the whole of the world wide web.

 

Rage further,
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/25/github-hires-notorious-social-justice-warrior-to-work-on-anti-harassment/

[FunkyMike]

How ...

[Pong]

I'd never heard of Coraline before, or the Contributor Covenant.  I usually call out codes of conduct that are over-reaching, but the Contributor Covenant actually seems to be a reasonable one. You can read it here.

The article in simply wrong in terms of where it applies though. To quote it directly:

Quote

This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community. Examples of representing a project or community include using an official project e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event.

Honestly, it all sounds pretty reasonable to me. It's short, and pretty much tells people to be nice, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

 

There are plenty of "social justice warriors" out there who take things too far, but in this case, Coraline seems like one of the more sensible ones.

[+Red King Subscriber²]

4 hours ago, Pong said:

4 hours ago, Pong said:

I'd never heard of Coraline before, or the Contributor Covenant.  I usually call out codes of conduct that are over-reaching, but the Contributor Covenant actually seems to be a reasonable one. You can read it here.

The article in simply wrong in terms of where it applies though. To quote it directly:

Honestly, it all sounds pretty reasonable to me. It's short, and pretty much tells people to be nice, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

 

There are plenty of "social justice warriors" out there who take things too far, but in this case, Coraline seems like one of the more sensible ones.

I'd never heard of Coraline before, or the Contributor Covenant.  I usually call out codes of conduct that are over-reaching, but the Contributor Covenant actually seems to be a reasonable one. You can read it here.

The article in simply wrong in terms of where it applies though. To quote it directly:

Honestly, it all sounds pretty reasonable to me. It's short, and pretty much tells people to be nice, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

First paragraph,

First note that majority of the COC is irrelevant to coding. The only aspect here about programming is "level of experience" - which is... well a job interview discriminates based on "level of experience".

The rest is irrelevant for programming. Accepting such a COC is a hint of one's acceptance that yes in fact this is needed - which is a form of self deprecation.

 

Reading further,

 

Another moot point is "Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences"

Someone talking about their gender reassignment surgery would fit into the above category - which is in fact not appropriate.

 

"Using welcoming and inclusive language"

Slave and Master for threads is a big NO NO.

 

"remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or permanently"

EX: Racist for supporting Trump - banned and your commits rejected.

 

The heart of the issue,

Keyword is "public spaces"

You are representing the "representing the ... community" by having say a Twitter or a Facebook account.

 

Example,

"body size" - having an opinion that fat / morbidly obese people are unattractive, should loose weight, etc.

"gender identity and expression" - believing that kids should not have gender reassignment surgery

"religion" - being against Islamic terrorism

"orientation" - being religious / being for traditional marriage / etc

"sexual identity" - rejecting the wage gap argument, stating that there are differences between men and women

 

Obviously any such criticism as above is not "welcoming and inclusive language"

And expressing such opinions as listed above in "public spaces" is "considered inappropriate in a professional setting"

 

Thus such opinions "may be reported by contacting the project team at [INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS]" and "will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response"

which will in turn "ban temporarily or permanently any contributor"

 

But what if the project managers are sane reasonable people? Well then they are not following the COC and are for body shaming, transphobia, islamaphobia, sexism, etc.

[Pong]

23 hours ago, _Alexander said:

First paragraph,

First note that majority of the COC is irrelevant to coding. The only aspect here about programming is "level of experience" - which is... well a job interview discriminates based on "level of experience".

The rest is irrelevant for programming. Accepting such a COC is a hint of one's acceptance that yes in fact this is needed - which is a form of self deprecation.

 

Reading further,

 

Another moot point is "Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences"

Someone talking about their gender reassignment surgery would fit into the above category - which is in fact not appropriate.

 

"Using welcoming and inclusive language"

Slave and Master for threads is a big NO NO.

 

"remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or permanently"

EX: Racist for supporting Trump - banned and your commits rejected.

 

The heart of the issue,

Keyword is "public spaces"

You are representing the "representing the ... community" by having say a Twitter or a Facebook account.

 

Example,

"body size" - having an opinion that fat / morbidly obese people are unattractive, should loose weight, etc.

"gender identity and expression" - believing that kids should not have gender reassignment surgery

"religion" - being against Islamic terrorism

"orientation" - being religious / being for traditional marriage / etc

"sexual identity" - rejecting the wage gap argument, stating that there are differences between men and women

 

Obviously any such criticism as above is not "welcoming and inclusive language"

And expressing such opinions as listed above in "public spaces" is "considered inappropriate in a professional setting"

 

Thus such opinions "may be reported by contacting the project team at [INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS]" and "will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response"

which will in turn "ban temporarily or permanently any contributor"

 

But what if the project managers are sane reasonable people? Well then they are not following the COC and are for body shaming, transphobia, islamaphobia, sexism, etc.

Well, at least your member title is accurate. 

 

The COC is irrelevant to coding because it has nothing to do with the code - it's entirely about interacting with the community around a project. If all you do in a community is submit bug fixes and new features, and never interact past the level of submitting a pull request, then a COC will almost certainly never come into play. A COC is about how you conduct yourself when dealing with and communicating with the rest of a community - rather like the rules here on Neowin say I can't called you a jizz-guzzling cockmaster, but I suppose accepting that Neowin needs rules and moderators is self deprecating?

 

Exactly how you're interpreting "Examples of representing a project or community include using an official project e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event." as meaning having a Twitter or a Facebook a account is beyond me. Maybe you're missing the fact that they're all prefixed with "official" or "appointed representative", or maybe you simply want to cause a fuss over nothing (which is what I suspect is your real motivation here). Making a post to your personal Twitter account is clearly not covered by the COC. The COC does not say what you seem to think it does, so maybe try reading it slower next time?

 

Being respectful to differing viewpoints means that you can continue being a racist, homophobic, Trump-supporting lunatic all you want, and someone else can continue being a fat, gay, transsexual man-horse who self identifies as a octopus tentacle. If you're spending your time discussing body size or religion in the bug tracker of an open source project, then you're not longer discussing the project and the conversation should never have happened in the first place. What the COC is really saying is that you shouldn't change how you deal with a bug submission or a code review because you;ve discovered that whoever submitted it is Muslim. If your response is "I'm closing this, why not asked Allah to fix it?", rather than simply dealing with the issue as you would for anyone else, then you're clearly not being helpful and probably should be removed from the community. Again, Body size, gender, religion, sexuality have nothing do with an open source project, and if someone keeps brining them up, then it's probably time to remove them from the project. You're not going to be banned or have commits rejected because you support Trump, you'll be banned if you submit code that contains comments like "// Whoever designed this API is ######## gay" or editing a community wiki to have a banner for Trumps website at the top. It's not about banning people or punishing them because of what they believe, it's about making sure their opinion on certain topics isn't seen as the project's opinion.

 

What if the project managers are sane and reasonable people? Then they most likely have better reading comprehension than you do and they'll apply the COC as it is described. Sane and reasonable people don't bring up transphobia, or body shaming as part of normal discussions about an open-source project, because there is almost never a reason too. However, sometimes it does happen, whether as part of joke and something that wasn't necessarily intended to be offensive, or as part of a deliberate attack, but either way, it's useful to have a COC to point to which defines what is acceptable and what is not, and how it should be dealt with.

[T3X4S]

Can someone explain to me why this is even needed on a website for coding ?

I dont write code, dont keep up with that community, so this is a question from a n00b in every sense of the word.

I dont understand any of this.

 

[Pong]

17 minutes ago, T3X4S said:

Can someone explain to me why this is even needed on a website for coding ?

I dont write code, dont keep up with that community, so this is a question from a n00b in every sense of the word.

I dont understand any of this.

 

Big, open-source projects can have hundreds of developers, and thousands of people who use the code and submit features requests, bug reports etc. The communities can be massive and very active. Neowin has rules that help keep discussion civil, and open-source projects sometimes need the same thing, often called a Code of Conduct, to keep discussion on-topic and civil. Look at the issues for Angular Material to get some idea of the scale that some projects work at. 

 

Open source projects can be quite emotional and petty places at times, because people invest a lot of their own time into something and they feel like it's their baby. There's not always a clear way to make a decision: should we use method A or method B? Which is better? It can easily break down into personal insults, and that's the least productive way of doing anything. The Code of Conduct is there firstly as an indicator of what is acceptable, and secondly as a way of describing what should happen when someone does something unacceptable. It places the rules and who is accountable for dealing with them in the open, which is better for everyone.   

[T3X4S]

5 minutes ago, Pong said:

Big, open-source projects can have hundreds of developers, and thousands of people who use the code and submit features requests, bug reports etc. The communities can be massive and very active. Neowin has rules that help keep discussion civil, and open-source projects sometimes need the same thing, often called a Code of Conduct, to keep discussion on-topic and civil. Look at the issues for Angular Material to get some idea of the scale that some projects work at. 

 

Open source projects can be quite emotional and petty places at times, because people invest a lot of their own time into something and they feel like it's their baby. There's not always a clear way to make a decision: should we use method A or method B? Which is better? It can easily break down into personal insults, and that's the least productive way of doing anything. The Code of Conduct is there firstly as an indicator of what is acceptable, and secondly as a way of describing what should happen when someone does something unacceptable. It places the rules and who is accountable for dealing with them in the open, which is better for everyone.   

Well - that is certainly an excellent description, thank you.

I thought it was just a place to dump some code "to the masses" - but, like I said, was a complete n00b as to what it really entailed.


Thank you, makes more sense now.

 

[Jub]

Splendid.

[WinMacLin Guy]

I do not see how this code of conduct is overreaching. What is essentially being said here is that things not related to the code should not be discussed or used against others. In other words, you really should not be discussing things like Bernie vs. Trump, feminism, global warming, body shaming, religion, personal insults or anything else not related to the code. Similarly, you should not be harassed or targeted  because a member Googled your name and found out that you support a certain political party, are a feminist or an anti-feminist, pro-body shaming or against body-shaming, are old or young, white or black, religious or irreligious, have ethnic sounding name, etc. The privacy stuff such as not releasing digital and personal contact information of others without their permission is just common sense. Moreover, the code of conduct is saying that you cannot make statements not related to the code/project when using "an official project e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event" (from what I understand these are expectations that many organizations and projects already hold) and you cannot privately harass people related to the project. All of these things are perfectly reasonable and none of it is preventing people from expressing their positions through their personal accounts on social media account, email, personal events, etc (when referring to public spaces the code of conduct was not saying that the individual should not express their view publicly but rather they should not express it when using official project accounts or at times when they are representing the project).

[Memphis]

3 minutes ago, WinMacLin Guy said:

I do not see how this code of conduct is overreaching. What is essentially being said here is that things not related to the code should not be discussed or used against others. In other words, you really should not be discussing things like Bernie vs. Trump, feminism, global warming, body shaming, religion, personal insults or anything else not related to the code. Similarly, you should not be harassed or targeted  because a member Googled your name and found out that you support a certain political party, are a feminist or an anti-feminist, pro-body shaming or against body-shaming, are old or young, white or black, religious or irreligious, have ethnic sounding name, etc. The privacy stuff such as not releasing digital and personal contact information of others without their permission is just common sense. Moreover, the code of conduct is saying that you cannot make statements not related to the code/project when using "an official project e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event" (from what I understand these are expectations that many organizations and projects already hold) and you cannot privately harass people related to the project. All of these things are perfectly reasonable and none of it is preventing people from expressing their positions through their personal accounts on social media account, email, personal events, etc (when referring to public spaces the code of conduct was not saying that the individual should not express their view publicly but rather they should not express it when using official project accounts or at times when they are representing the project).

Are you sure? The impression I got was that if it could be linked back to you, then you fall under the policy. I hope I am wrong, you should be able to express your opinion from non work or business related accounts.

[WinMacLin Guy]

6 minutes ago, sidroc said:

Are you sure? The impression I got was that if it could be linked back to you, then you fall under the policy. I hope I am wrong, you should be able to express your opinion from non work or business related accounts.

The reason I interpreted it that way is because of the following statement in the scope section:

 

"This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community".

 

Based on this I believe that the official stance is that it only applies when you are representing the project and they gave clear examples of what representing the project entails such as using official (by which I assume they mean tied to the project) email accounts, official social media accounts and representing the community at events. What I took away from it was that harassment would not be tolerated in any case (I think that is reasonable) and people should be able to use your personal views on your own personal accounts against you (regardless of whether you privately identify as liberal or conservative, gay or anti-gay, feminist or anti-feminist, religious or irreligious, etc.).

 

I agree with you when you say that people should be able to express their opinion when using accounts not associated with their workplace and perhaps a clarification should be made in this code of conduct to expressly mention that just so that there would be no confusion. I also believe that there are a lot of grey areas that this code does not cover but are worth pondering.

[Pong]

18 minutes ago, WinMacLin Guy said:

The reason I interpreted it that way is because of the following statement in the scope section:

 

"This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community".

 

Based on this I believe that the official stance is that it only applies when you are representing the project and they gave clear examples of what representing the project entails such as using official (by which I assume they mean tied to the project) email accounts, official social media accounts and representing the community at events. What I took away from it was that harassment would not be tolerated in any case (I think that is reasonable) and people should be able to use your personal views on your own personal accounts against you (regardless of whether you privately identify as liberal or conservative, gay or anti-gay, feminist or anti-feminist, religious or irreligious, etc.).

 

I agree with you when you say that people should be able to express their opinion when using accounts not associated with their workplace and perhaps a clarification should be made in this code of conduct to expressly mention that just so that there would be no confusion. I also believe that there are a lot of grey areas that this code does not cover but are worth pondering.

To clarify this some more, the definition given in the Code of Conduct defines "representing the project or community" as: 

Quote

Examples of representing a project or community include using an official project e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event.

If you're not using an account officially tied to the project, then the code of conduct does not apply to what you said. Your personal accounts are not expected to follow the code.

 

Some projects may decide to expand it and cover personal social media accounts, but very few do, and they are most certainly the exception rather than the rule.

[th3rEsa]

I wonder if they keep a seat for Randi Harper ready.

[th3rEsa]

3 hours ago, T3X4S said:

I thought it was just a place to dump some code "to the masses" - but, like I said, was a complete n00b as to what it really entailed.

In my not-so-humble opinion, a code repository is just a place to dump some code. Of course you'll have to work with other humans every now and then, and it might be wise not to attack them too much. However, that requires nothing but basic social behavior, not a "code of conduct" of any kind.

 

The whole SJW humbug adds nothing to the circumstances; well, nothing but additional efforts for no additional effects. It makes me sad to see that large projects are stalled with Codes of Conduct, keeping everyone from doing actual work.

 

Shut up and code, everyone.

[+FloatingFatMan Subscriber²]

Now watch Github turn into a feminazi haven...

[th3rEsa]

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