summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/articles/code-of-conduct-does-more-harm-than-good.md
blob: 9233272f9457f265498cd077e88ae1e85cb8cb3a (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Code of conduct does more harm than good

Code of conduct is a set of rules which gives an illusion of maintaining peace amongst the people of an community while introducing even bigger controversies and problems instead.

### The Concept
A code of conduct (or CoC) is a document that establishes expectations for behavior for a open source project’s participants. The idea of it that it can help create a positive social atmosphere for your community by enforcing upon unproductive attitudes from other participants can make you feel drained or unhappy about your work over time.

### The Big Problem
Conceptually, CoCs are flawed as it misses the concept of person's beliefs. No person's mindset is equal, even if they are likeminded, they still would not always agree with each other. A CoC can be targetted explicitly at a certain people's beliefs which could be deemed as "problematic" while in reality, it really isn't. This causes the discrimination against them as their rights such as freedom of speech (in the form of expressing their views) are now compromised, which in turn can cause major internal conflicts within the community even leading to a community split in the worst case scenario.

Unfortunately, CoC used in many open source projects does exactly what has been told above, it actively targets specific groups of people who are getting disadvantaged through these set of rules, just because their views and opinions aren't considered "ideal" by the project maintainers. This causes unnecessary conflicts within the community itself, while the unity weakens.

### The Solution
At the end, our views are different from one another. We may agree on something but disagree on other. Hence at the very least, we should just simply agree to disagree and walk away. It shouldn't matter if a person is a conservative or liberal, black or white, straight or gay, or anything in between, his or her skills shouldn't go to waste just because of the differences, while keeping the concept of the free speech thriving.