Hacker News Reader

Comment by soyiuz | Hacker News Reader

CoCs are useful for coordination among large, non-local, diverse communities.

Have you considered that instead of "purposefully want[ing] to stir up discord" for funding the rules are meant to reduce the incidence of actual harassment/abuse? Or to promote inclusivity?

How does an articulation of values "stir up discord?" I can point you to numerous examples of harassment and inequity in the tech community. Can you point me to an example of "discord" brought about by better rules of conduct? Or to this funding that you mention?

View on HN

> "Can you point me to an example of "discord" brought about by better rules of conduct? Or to this funding that you mention?"

Only my wife's anecdotal experience...she was a full-time software developer and the companies she worked for routinely tried to use her as an example in their "we support women in tech" PR. She hated it and said it felt degrading. Also, there were various "women in tech" groups that reached out to her, based on some of her open source work, for conference speaking engagements/panels/writing/etc, and they were pushy about it. When she was showing the groups to me, they were all operating off of donations from various Fortune 500 companies. The "discord" is that a lot of these "women in tech" groups, advocated in some cases by women who aren't even doing anything tech related, castigated my wife, on two various instances, for not wanting to participate. My wife didn't want to be a pawn for some corporate PR or for some "women in tech" group...she just wanted to engineer things in peace.

That's a great example. Someone (like your wife) may be bothered by being contacted by pushy activist groups and then even castigated for not participating. We weigh that against systematic income inequality and sexual harassment along gender lines.

It seems like that minor inconvenience is worth the net benefit to the community, from which your wife benefits (for example, by being legally protected against sexual discrimination in the workplace).

Still, those pushy activists should see the GP's wife as a person with her own interests, priorities, and desire to be left alone, not just a token [insert group identity here]. A generalized version of what I just said might even make a good item in a CoC.

I don't think this would need to be codified...There seems to be too much of that going already

No, that minor inconvenience is absolutely not worth whatever benefits you imagine.

> "It seems like that minor inconvenience is worth the net benefit to the community, from which your wife benefits"

You'd be hard pressed winning her over with those arguments in all honesty

> "...for example, by being legally protected against sexual discrimination in the workplace"

Sexual discrimination in the workplace protections aren't the result of the work done by groups previously mentioned...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com