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mjg59After less than a week of complaints, the TODO group have decided to pause development of their code of conduct. This seems to have been triggered by the public response to the changes I talked about here, which TODO appear to have been completely unprepared for.
While disappointing in a bunch of ways, this is probably the correct decision. TODO stumbled into this space with a poor understanding of the problems that they were trying to solve. Nikki Murray pointed out that the initial draft lacked several of the key components that help ensure less privileged groups can feel that their concerns are taken seriously. This was mostly rectified last week, but nobody involved appeared to be willing to stand behind those changes in a convincing way. This wasn't helped by almost all of this appearing to land on Github's plate, with the rest of the TODO group largely missing in action[1]. Where were Google in this? Yahoo? Facebook? Left facing an angry mob with nobody willing to make explicit statements of support, it's unsurprising that Github would try to back away from the situation.
But that doesn't remove their blame for being in the situation in the first place. The statement claims
Why? Because we don't perceive social problems as difficult problems, and we assume that anybody can solve them by simply sitting down and talking for a few hours. When we find out that we've screwed up we throw our hands in the air and admit that this is all more difficult than we imagined, and we give up. We ignore the lessons that people have learned in the past. We ignore the existing work that's been done in the field. We ignore the people who work full time on helping solve these problems.
We wouldn't let an industry body with no experience of engineering build a bridge. We need to accept that social problems are outside our realm of expertise and defer to the people who are experts.
[1] The repository history shows the majority of substantive changes were from Github, with the initial work appearing to be mostly from Twitter.
While disappointing in a bunch of ways, this is probably the correct decision. TODO stumbled into this space with a poor understanding of the problems that they were trying to solve. Nikki Murray pointed out that the initial draft lacked several of the key components that help ensure less privileged groups can feel that their concerns are taken seriously. This was mostly rectified last week, but nobody involved appeared to be willing to stand behind those changes in a convincing way. This wasn't helped by almost all of this appearing to land on Github's plate, with the rest of the TODO group largely missing in action[1]. Where were Google in this? Yahoo? Facebook? Left facing an angry mob with nobody willing to make explicit statements of support, it's unsurprising that Github would try to back away from the situation.
But that doesn't remove their blame for being in the situation in the first place. The statement claims
We are consulting with stakeholders, community leaders, and legal professionals, which is great. It's also far too late. If an industry body wrote a new kernel from scratch and deployed it without any external review, then discovered that it didn't work and only then consulted any of the existing experts in the field, we'd never take them seriously again. But when an industry body turns up with a new social policy, fucks up spectacularly and then goes back to consult experts, it's expected that we give them a pass.
Why? Because we don't perceive social problems as difficult problems, and we assume that anybody can solve them by simply sitting down and talking for a few hours. When we find out that we've screwed up we throw our hands in the air and admit that this is all more difficult than we imagined, and we give up. We ignore the lessons that people have learned in the past. We ignore the existing work that's been done in the field. We ignore the people who work full time on helping solve these problems.
We wouldn't let an industry body with no experience of engineering build a bridge. We need to accept that social problems are outside our realm of expertise and defer to the people who are experts.
[1] The repository history shows the majority of substantive changes were from Github, with the initial work appearing to be mostly from Twitter.
