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I understand you're involved in a lot of "anti-harassment" work.  This concerns me as an engineer, whose impersonal yet brash criticisms are easily misinterpreted by overly sensitive people as being personal attacks.

Can I count on you to keep identity politics out of the OSI and treat our community of engineers with the benefit of the doubt?  A lot of us have the Asperger's; we may not pull punches when we call out the mistakes of others, we only really care about the proverbial *thickness* of your skin, not how dark or rough it is.

Anti-harassment work is about helping people do a better job at creating welcoming communities, rather than issuing punitive actions against those who have made even small infractions. In my efforts, I'm interested in working with people to help them understand how their actions impacted others - and the community and the project - and how to do better in the future. My base assumption is always that people are trying to "do no harm," even if their actions did cause harm. I discuss this a bit in my session from FOSDEM, which you can watch online: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/community_guidelines/ . 

The free software movement may have started with a printer and a computing group at MIT, but it has expanded to be so much more than that. I like to think I'm a valuable member of the greater free and open source software community - and even the Debian project specifically - but I'm not an engineer nor do I preform the same tasks as one. Even when looking at technical contributors, there is a lot of diversity across age, gender, neurodivergence, race, religion, sexuality, and other self-identifiers. I, for one, identify as neuroatypical (which I talk about in my keynote from SeaGL 2018: https://archive.org/details/seagl2018-mollydeblanc-keynote ) and a woman. I understand the fear of saying the wrong thing and being punished for it, but I also understand that communities are made up of people who are coming from different places. When people come from different places, we need to build into our cultures accommodations for all of them: whether that's assuming someone isn't intentionally trying to do harm or going out of our way to edit our posts before we call someone "crazy."

However, it is worth noting that all work is not directly about community building and creating spaces for people to collaborate. When we do a license review process, we don't consider the community that brought us the license, or even the individual who wrote it, and rather discuss whether it meets the requirements of the Open Source Definition (OSD). We set organizational goals together as a board, and then, when we need to make a decision or consider a proposal, compare that to how that fits into our goals. Our primary goal is to uphold the integrity of the OSD.

I am also neuroatypical. I had a motor deficit and didn't speak clearly for much of my youth, and I still walk on my toes once in a while. I probably have ADD and could be on the spectrum, but they didn't diagnose in the '60's the way they do today. Back then, a lot of people didn't even believe that we should be mainstreamed in school! Things are better today, although we have a lot farther to go.

It's important to recognize that Open Source and technical fields in general are places where people with social difficulties can feel a sense of belonging that they might not achieve in other parts of their lives. We need standards of behavior but we also need to understand that what for many are painfully obvious social gaffes are not so easy to recognize for some of us.

Thank you for clarifying your position, Molly.  I am still in need of a bit more information, specifically in regards to enforcement.  Rules are one thing, but how they are applied is also a very important thing for us to know about.

In the event that someone feels harassed, what are your protocols for enforcement?  Will the accused have an opportunity to explain themselves *BEFORE* being ejected from a project?  Also, what happens when someone abuses the system and files repeated false accusations?  False accusations are themselves a form of harassment, especially when social media gets involved, so I'm wondering how such cases would be handled.

Sorry to focus so much on this single issue, but this is a very "hot button" issue these days.  Some take this anti-harassment thing too far, some seem to have a level head about it.  I'm just trying to figure out where you stand.

I recommend checking out my talk from FOSDEM, which is available on their web site: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/community_guidelines/ . It gets into detail about the questions you're asking. It's 25-minutes long.

Molly, I found this paragraph on your blog important enough to repeat here:

 With licenses like the Server Side Public License, proposals like the Commons Clause, and criticism of the Open Source Definition, it’s become more important than ever to push for the integrity and necessity of open source. Open source is not a developmental model — though there are certain models of development enabled by using an open source license. Open Source is about user freedom. If I want to make sure our rights are respected in technology, there is no better place to do it than on the front lines.

Very well said!

Molly...what are your thoughts or did you have any involvement or affiliations re the contributor covenant? Are you affiliated with the Linux foundation? What is your position regarding the future of our community?