Hello world & BoD, it has been brought to my attention that one of our (female) contributors, who is also a TDF member (this is why membership committee is in Cc:) has been harassed in a private mail by someone who reads development and general user mailing list. I have the details, mail addresses etc. and can provide them via private channel, for obvious reasons I'm not doing that here.
This is quite a strong incentive for me to bring up the topic that is perceived as controversial by many, namely (the lack of) code of conduct in the community around TDF and (the absence of) action plan, as for what to do, when bad things happen. The most frequent (and in fact the only) argument I hear when mentioning code of conduct, or the fact that TDF has no code of conduct to be precise, is "but but but, we're such a bunch of nice guys, nothing bad has ever happened here, nobody has ever been harassed, so why bother, why restrict freedom of speech preemptively etc." Let me state very clearly that I don't buy that argument. Just because nothing bad has ever happened to you/people around you/people around people around you/..., just because nobody ever went public with what has happened to them, we simply can't assume that nothing bad has ever happened at all. Case in point, the above incident is at least 5 months old and she only decided to come out of the closet *now*. At the very least, in the absence of "real" code of conduct, a clear and concise public statement (in what particular form, I don't quite care) should be made by TDF that such behaviour ( = harassment, stalking, etc.) is not going to be tolerated and the offenders are not going to get away with it. Related to that, there is no plan of action (or not one that I'd know of) how to deal with incidents and what steps to take (on mailing lists, IRC, social networks etc.) when things go wrong. Sure, it's perfectly clear to me that those plans don't work most of the time and every case has to be dealt with individually (sometimes e.g. hangout featuring both affected parties and a mediator is a good solution, sometimes it's the worst thing you can possibly think of), ... But again, some public statement by TDF that incidents are going to be dealt with, we're prepared to act and people are going to be helped when needed should be made. It'd make people feel more safe. I volunteer to be a contact person for those cases (in fact, as you can see, I already am) Comments, opinions? Bub.oO -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
