Is the Rust mod team really just 3 people?
I'm really surprised to see this coming from Rust. I've viewed Rust's governance as one of the best amongst open source projects. Coincidentally we have very recently put together a mod team in Nim[1] that is significantly larger than just 3, it would be really great to hear more details so we can learn from this.
We acknowledged this in our statement. We suggested that the future mod team do a better job recruiting new members than we did.
I’m glad to see them resign, and I hope open source can ultimately route around the unearned power grab that the “CoC” movement represents.
1. I don't think we're actually talking about that much power, in most instances the issues amount to "not behaving professionally in an environment that wants to have a professional character"
2. What would it need to be for you to consider what power it gives as "earned"? I'm surprised since it seems that power being explicitly delegated by the project should be enough by any measure.
The Rust leadership doesn't make a good impression to be honest. I like the language itself but it isn't really an open source community I would want to engage in aside from the technical aspects (my involvement is limited in any communities because I mostly write commercial software, just dabble here and there, although I am clearly dependent on open source and try to point that out to those less positively inclined to the concept).
What really interests me is why you believe such COCs are necessary. Do you believe they improve open source communities? It is a necessary evil if a certain popularity is reached? Is formalization an attempt at transparency? As I said I dislike COCs, but the Rust one has less than 300 words. Does this reach any target audiences? Is "professionalism" worth striving for?
In my capacity as a developer I have professional exchange in a corporate setting. Sure that every corporation has their own behavior rules, but there is never a formal framework for such engagements that mostly involves people from different companies. Perhaps people behave better because otherwise their job is on the line, but why does it work here? And I believe for many working in such a setting a more "direct" method of mutual engagement seems kind of refreshing. Would be sad if open source tried to mimic the corporate work. There is no greener grass here.
Inter-corporate communication is not a good analogy here, because inter-corporate communication can't generally be modeled as a set of individuals freely associating with each other. Their status as representatives of their employers significantly changes the landscape. Companies are generally careful not to install people with less-than-stellar communication skills at their interfaces with other companies in the first place. I suppose the maxim to trot out here is, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
> I very much dislike COCs and overbearing moderation teams in open source communities.
Same. And I have avoided some such communities in the past.
But, I am not necessarily against overbearing moderation. For example, r/askhistorians is one of my favorite subreddits, and I would attribute that state to their intense moderation.
I had this 2 star repos for a niche problem with perhaps 2-3 visitors per month and someone quite aggressively suggested that I should put one up. At the same time more an more projects put one up and I wondered where this push in OSS came from.
Suddenly projects needed committees to enforce some form of weird compliance. I just think it didn't improve conduct in any community that I saw. Not that you have to look very far to find eccentric personalities but I never thought that to be a problem, on the contrary.
[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/r0en25/what_...