I organize a local tech meetup. A lot of our organizing and out-of-band socializing happens through a separate, very large, local tech community Slack group. A few years ago, CoCs were all the rage and there was a push for all communities to adopt one. As a consequence, I've done a lot of my own thinking on CoCs [0].

As an event or community organizer, a lot will depend on how you think of your CoC. You can either think of it as a list of rules by which you will adjudicate conflicts, or you can think of it as a communication tool.

I see the former thought process in our Slack group's CoC, and in most of the CoCs that get mentioned in articles like this. It suggests a moral absolutist approach, that all conduct in all situations can be correctly binned into "good" vs "bad". Not even logic is complete, so I don't see how codes of ethics and morals can be complete.

Such thinking also denies the concept of mens rea, whether or not the person intended to do harm. I haven't watch the talk to know how the criticism was worded, but we have had other scenarios described where the mere usage of certain words can lead to adjudication of "CoC violation", because the word had a different denotation to the listener than the speaker. In such cases, there is clearly a lack of ill intent. Where the line should fall is how the "speaker" reacts to the correction, not on the gaff itself.

Being authored by a singular entity, any CoC is always going to fail to match everyone's cultural norms. What we're talking about here is attempting to codify how we behave in social groups, how we show respect to other people, and hopefully how we avoid conflict, rather than just accepting that conflict is inevitable and must be smote with great prejudice. Those are all issues of manners, which are infinitely evolved and evolving and flexible and untestable and often unspoken rules.

Maybe it's because I'm older and grew up on a much more diverse Internet, before Facebook and Twitter and Google bubbles took over, when online interaction took place on topic-oriented message boards and chatrooms, leading to frequent and sustained interactions with people from multiple nationalities and walks of life. Maybe it's my recent work in the foreign language instruction industry, where social faux pas is the inevitable result of students stretching their wings and flying too close to the sun. Maybe it's my upbringing in which my parents emphasized honor and always doing the right thing. When dealing with social conflict, there absolutely must be consideration for the intent of the action, a willingness to use it as a teaching moment, and not one of punishment.

These are the problems I have with "enumerated behavior" CoCs as myself, an actor in good faith. But I can technically get over it. Far more troubling is that bad-faith actors use these lists to stand just over the line on the safe side and use it against good-faith actors. An overheard, off-color joke, told in bad taste, is a literal violation of the CoC, but it lacked ill intent to the person who was offended by the joke. Tell the person, "hey, people can hear you, this is not cool". 9 times out of 10, the person says, "oh, I'm so sorry" and is on their best behavior the rest of the time. That other 1 time, they double down, creating a pattern of behavior and a clear demonstration of ill-intent. But using the CoC to then blacklist people, and then amplifying the furor through social media in attempt to get the person fired from their job, is engaging in a form of harassment, but one that is protected under the guise of "protecting victims". It comes from a "zero-tolerance" mentality, one that is itself a social harm.

Where I took the CoC for my tech meetup was to use it as a communication tool. I talked with a lot of people about why they wanted a CoC and the message was singular, "to know that I will be safe". I wrote a CoC that focused on communicating the commitment of the organizers to proactively guiding behavior patterns towards ones of good manners, to reassure attendees that they can communicate with us about their concerns in any way that is comfortable for them, and that we will immediately prioritize said issues.

I tell people, "you don't know who heard you, you don't know how they heard it, and you don't know what they took from it." Most people don't make complaints. The "enumerated behavior" CoC is a reactionary document, one that assumes that no smoke equals no fire. It's not enough to have a good fire department. You also need to build your structures to fire code and not store oily rags in a pile in the corner of your garage.

Our CoC has no enumeration of bad behavior. It mostly just says that attendees are expected to be polite to each other, with the addendum that politeness will not be defined. In this way, it puts the issue of behavior and intent at the forefront. A polite person apologizes if they accidentally offend someone. A polite person informs someone they have been offended without making it into a crusade, in the hopes that they will be apologized to. And the boundaries of politeness is free to flex with the boundaries of the group.

I also semi-regularly remind people that the authority they assume I have is only because they give it to me. The group exists soley for the benefit of the people within the group. If there is some way in which the group is not meeting the needs of the people within it, there is no point in talking about "the integrity of the group", as "the group" is not an entity unto itself, with some notion of rights or feelings that need to be protected. It's just the people.

I feel it is because of this that we've only had to ban 2 people in the last 6 years. While those moments were certainly tense, we came away from them with no disagreement that they were handled correctly. I still stand by those decisions. There's almost always some moment to make a comment about, "hey, that thing you just said could be taken in this other way", and it usually ends with the person whole-heartedly apologizing. Our group is diverse and lively. It feels like a real community. Folks are able to disagree with each other without fear.

As for the Slack group, I just keep to the technical channels and don't engage in anything that comes even close to conflict. My speech has been chilled, so to speak.

[0] Incidentally, one of my thoughts was "how did the group of people who came up with these not think of how the acronymn sounds?" I also am not too keen on the usage of the term "conduct", as it evokes images in my mind the Military Code of Justice and "Conduct Unbecoming", which in turn evokes images of command authority structures, which I dislike greatly. But whatever you want to call it, I'm going to continue to use the apparently accepted term of art.