Gerrit

[Empty comment from Monorail migration]

there cannot possibly be an objective way to evaluate such matters. you ultimately have to trust the judgement of the people in power, and hope it actually aligns with the best interest of the project.

Thanks Luca, David and Oswald for your inputs on this topic.
-We community managers will review this Issue proposal as soon as next week.

[Empty comment from Monorail migration]

I feel that the statements in the issue is somewhat unfortunate. I don't see how you could ever have a hard cut-off for when behavior is or isn't a CoC violation.
Part of the CMs election criteria is IMO to elect people that we trust have a good understanding for when they need to jump in and remind members of the CoC (i.e. when they feel that the CoC have or may have been vioated in some way).

To me:
...the CoC is not law, it's a collection of principles to keep the discussions in the community on a level that is beneficial for the community and it's members.

...violating the CoC is not serious in itself (everyone in the community is at risk of doing so). Being reminded of the CoC should in most cases result in change of tone, moving the critique to technical aspects and processes rather than people and quite possibly an apology. It is after all human to fail and learn from ones mistakes.

...CoC violations only become severe when they are repeated again and again even after being addressed as problematic by other members and the CMs.

The way I see it the actual question this issue wants to  address is:

 "How do we (as a community) decide when repeated CoC violations should become actionable?"

I.e. when has the perceived CoC violations gone so far that we feel the need to take action to prevent them, f.i. blocking a member for x weeks to emphasize the seriousness of the situation.
A similar question is:

  "What should the process of taking action to prevent further CoC violations look like?"

Within this process there should be mechanisms to prevent community members from being reprimanded simply because they have an opposing view to other community members.
IMO what this process looks like should be as public as the CoC itself.

You need a way to determine that someone has violated the COC once before you can claim that they have violated it more than once. I think this "Issue" is about the former.

My conviction is that all efforts to try to define objectively what exactly constitutes a CoC violation is doomed to fail.
Whether or not a certain behavior is a violation of the CoC will always be subjective.
But if someone subjectively feels that there have been a single instance of CoC violation the ramification aren't severe (depending on how severe being accused of stepping outside of the CoC is perceived by the individual that is being "accused" of doing so).
Therefore (IMO) trying to decide the "criteria for CoC violations" is an unnecessary and futile and endeavour.

On the other hand, if a member is subjectively perceived to continuously violate the CoC this needs to be actionable and depending on the severity of these actions it might no longer be enough to trust the subjective perception of one single individual anymore.
Since (if I'm correct) it's next to impossible to objectively determine what exactly constitutes a CoC violation we could go for the next best thing, the consensus from a group of people that through discussion attempts to merge each individual subjective understanding of the situation.

1. One single violation does (in practically all cases) not elicit any action besides a friendly reminder to f.i. moderate the tone.
Hence I (personally) do not see any problem with trusting the judgement of a CM, or any community member for that matter, and their, individual, interpretation of the CoC.

2. When, after multiple perceived violations of the CoC, the behavior is deemed to possibly be actionable there should be a clear process that CM can start that will try to determine whether further actions should be taken or not.

Example of chain of events and process:
1. User A uses harsh statements during a review.
2. CM asks User A, in the same comment-thread, to moderate the tone and focus on critique of technical details.
3. User A continues with said behavior in several other reviews, even after being reminded repeatedly of CoC by CM.
4. CM takes the action of continuing with step 1 of "the process":
A private message were the CM clarifies that the behavior is not acceptable, an offer to try to resolve any conflict with other members in a private or (if so desired) public context and a reminder that failing to resolve the situation will initiate step 2 of the process.
5. The CM perceives that User A continues to violate the CoC and initates step 2 of "the process":
The incident(s) are brought up for discussion in a suitable forum and if there is a consensus that the behavior merits that further actions should be taken User A is informed of the decision and the action that will be taken (possibly with the option of making this announcement public if User A so chooses).

[Empty comment from Monorail migration]

> Whether or not a certain behavior is a violation of the CoC will always be subjective.

I agree: the CoC is not a code of law but rather a high-level description of the "friendly and cooperative behaviour" we expect people to have in the community.

Also, bear in mind that most of the people in the community are NOT English mother-tongue and they could have use the language in a way that is "perceived" as offensive without explicitly meaning to offend anyone.

I don't believe we should have a set of "trial rules" for CoC violations but rather rely on the CMs and the cooperation of the individuals to make it work.

> I don't believe we should have a set of "trial rules" for CoC violations but rather rely on the CMs and the cooperation of the individuals to make it work.

My only amendment to that is that *if* we decide that repeated misbehavior should be actionable we should work out some sort of process for when the cooperation falls apart to support the CMs in their work.

This will be worked on soon by us CMs once back from Summer breaks.
Thanks everyone for your keen feedback on the topic :)

-This is now WIP, as a base started shaping up.
More in the coming weeks (or month, rather).

Sorry but I need to un-start this one now, as I'm currently running out of available time to do it properly.
-Stays on our Community radar anyway for this to eventually resume.

Meanwhile our current CoC still duly applies, as usual with our latest governance model.

Edits were made to reflect the following in Monorail: auto-CCs.