We are adopting a code of conduct. I shared a draft in #CEXED56UR last month and received a ton of helpful feedback — thank you again to everyone who participated in that. I'm sharing the revised draft here in #C5T9GPWFL so that folks who don't follow #CEXED56UR have a chance to offer feedback before this becomes official. Here's the current draft: https://github.com/futureofcoding/code-of-conduct If you take the time to scan or read through it and make suggestions, thank you in advance!

thank you for this @Ivan Reese and everyone else who helped!

Serves as nice About page as in what is this forum about, what's cool to share, and what's not.

Very nice, as @wtaysom said, gives good idea of what it is all about! I am new to this community so I don't want to stipulate in any way that I know what are the general principles of the community, but this part caught my attention: "One of many principles held by the community is that computing currently reflects the interests of a narrow minority of people". It sounds a tiny little bit conspiracy theory-ish to me. Maybe intention was to say that programming at its current state is not easy to approach nor engage with without seemingly unneccessary amount of education, at least for simpler tasks? Instead, it might sound instead like there is a group of people intentionally keeping programming inaccessible due to their personal interests (elitism).

There's definitely strands of both perspectives within this community. E.g see https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=1173

@Martin That paragraph is meant to address diversity. One of the goals held by a number of people in the community is to make programming accessible to more people — see #CLYCGTCPL, for instance. One aspect of that is technical: programming tools force a lot of complexity on the programmer, and perhaps redesigning how we do programming could make it less demanding. Another aspect is political: a lot of software comes from for-profit companies with an interest in tightly controlling what you can do with their software, so it's rare that an end user is empowered to modify the software they use. One other aspect is social: programming, like anything else that is designed by humans, reflects the people who designed it. A lot of the people who laid the groundwork for our computers and programming tools were white, male, financially secure, straight, cis, able bodied, american, english-speaking, literate, sighted, etc. Thus the needs of these people were relatively well-addressed from the start (insofar as programming addresses anyones needs, a notion which we're here to push back against, haha), whereas the needs of people who are different from that norm were not necessarily as well-addressed — and in many ways, still aren't — so we call these people "historically underrepresented". One of the exciting things about the various future of programming initiatives, whether it's visual programming languages or verbal programming or physical interfaces or virtual reality or crypto or so on, is that they often benefit people for whom the current practices hinder. They're also opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds to be involved in the design of something new. All that is to say, I think it's important that we say, right up front, that we're aware of this history and are interested in learning from it.

Great work. I like it a lot! It really shows the mindset of this community and how anyone can safely engages in this collaborative thinking about future of programming. Thanks! 🙂

I can broadly agree that "the common practice of programming is tragically less humane than it could be", but the prominent placement of the sentence almost makes it sound like this is the raison d'etere of the group, which is not what I would have thought and not how I would frame my interest. OTOH... I'm feeling too lazy to suggest a rephrasing. It's seems odd to me that "Discuss politics" seems explicitly encouraged, given the strife and contention it comes with in groups that are not politically homogeneous. This community is likely to be left-leaning, but I find heavily leftist (as well as rightist) politics to be a turn-off. The draft says "computing currently reflects the interests of a narrow minority of people. A directed effort is needed to broaden the accessibility of computing and amplify the influence of historically underrepresented people in shaping its future." The link talks of "an isolated subculture of nerdy young men", but when I read this sentence, that's not the "narrow minority" I thought of. I thought instead of the narrow minority of business interests who just want to sell a product and get rich, and the lack of funding for any system better than that. From my industry experience I have observed product after product with frustratingly poor code quality, products with poor interoperability, poor documentation, poor modularity, impoverished abstractions, and various other problems. I have observed that very little funding is available to build better developer tools. A very little bit of this is "nerdy young men", a little bit is "humans being humans", but for the most part it's a consequence of capitalism being capitalism. It's a consequence of the fact that we have public funding for "science" (academic papers) but we don't have funding for open engineering. You can complain that open-source devs make stuff only nerdy young men can understand, or you can observe that people working for free have a limited ability to produce something polished. (As for commercial products, they tend not to care about making tooling for others to use, since tooling is a cost center, and they tend to rush products to market, producing poor initial architectures that are often never improved, or improved only after cruft accumulates for years.) So I disagree with the apparent conclusion of the CoC in this regard. As far as I'm concerned, the "historically underrepresented people" includes me, a white male, because I would like to shape the future of computing but can barely afford the time to do it. Of course, if I later become influential, that will be "white privilege", but I think this would be framed incorrectly. The problem isn't privilege, the problem is lack of privilege. We should want more people to have more privilege. But this is a political goal - a worthy goal, but is there any reason to expect the FoC group to become a political lobby?

This is valuable feedback. You raise a lot of interesting points. I won't respond them individually, since it'd be tricky to carry that many threads of dialogue for more than a round or two. Instead, I'll respond to what I think are the main themes of your feedback. The purpose is of the CoC is twofold. The first fold is to let people know that: 1) this community is moderated 2) there is a prohibition of bigotry 3) personal self-promotion is fine 4) advertising is not The second fold, and the reason that the CoC begins with an opinionated statement of purpose and includes an explicit statement that politics is on-topic, is: when you start asking, "Why isn't everyone a programmer?" you come up with a metric boatload of reasons. Many of them are technical, and many of them are political (in the sense of "principles related to power or status"). The technical reasons are where this community tends to spend most of its energy. But there are a lot of people out there who are interested in both, or are more interested in the political reasons, and have a different perspective on what the future of programming looks like. I've seen many cases where those people are excluded from discussions or communities because their interests are "off-topic". I wanted to make it clear that these discussions are explicitly on-topic here. They're welcome in #C5T9GPWFL, or in new channels if new popular topics emerge. I'd love to see us explore the relationship between wealth (I put this first because it's exactly the point you raised!), race, gender, education, language, ability, or age, and influence on the evolution of computing. Further, I would happily see us explore the relationship between fashion and computing, or weaving and computing, or raising children and computing, or space exploration and computing, or poverty and computing, or war and computing. The future of our practice is "humane" in the sense that without humanity, it's all meaningless. Unlike most other highly-technical communities, what we're here for isn't just technology for its own sake, and so we need a strong statement to let people know that we're open to much more than that. So that's my rationale. Whether the CoC I wrote is able to communicate those ideas.. probably not. (It seems like the link to that blog post about "nerdy young men" might not be as helpful as I hoped.) But I want to keep the CoC short, very clear about the few prohibited things, and more loose & open-ended about the things we're open to. I'd love to continue revising the CoC based on feedback like this, fine-tuning the message. In time, I will probably do just that (and if I do, I will come back to this thread for reference). But I've already put many (many) hours into researching and writing this CoC, and I've got a backlog of other things to do for this community, so I'm feeling too time-constrained to pursue a big rephrasing right now. If anyone else is up for taking the lead on this, I will happily collaborate on that. The CoC is a living document.

Oh I didn't realize it linked to Jonathan's post - maybe that link can be removed? It's only one interpretation of "narrow minority".

👍 I've moved that link to the list of references at the bottom, rather than being inline, so that it doesn't give the wrong impression. I still think it's worth including, since it offers one (of many) good angles on this problem.

Drafting a CoC isn't something I have an appetite for either. I guess if people are actually saying "I want to be in a community with a CoC!" for some reason, this will do the job...