Guidelines for #drupal* IRC channels

I just wrote up this:

For many of us, the Drupal community is a professional space connected to our careers and businesses. As more companies consider using Drupal, people turn to the IRC rooms to understand Drupal and the Drupal community better. Drupal IRC rooms are not a personal or private space for making jokes at the expense of other people or groups of people, posting links to videos of a sexual nature, or generally behaving as if the space is connected to a frat house. The Drupal community is a place that welcomes everyone, and offensive speech, even in the name of "joking," drives people away and makes them feel unwelcome. Please remember that your behavior in any Drupal IRC room reflects on Drupal, and do not say or do anything that you would not normally say or do in front of a crowd at a DrupalCamp, in front of your boss, or in a client meeting.

Thoughts?

[update: latest revised version in comment 19 below]

As a Drupal community member who still also uses Drupal for non-commercial activities I would like the reference to professional use to be dropped.

As a fraternity member I would like the "frat-house" reference be dropped.

Nice!

@jensimmons I think it's really good! Short and sweet, but makes the point very well.

Let's get this up there (without the frat-house reference of course).

The message does say "for many of us", and "professional" does not necessarily mean commercial. Changing "companies" to "organizations" in the second sentence would lessen the commercial nature of it.

I'd agree about the frat house thing... I think you could just drop that part and say "and so on".

Um. You guys are too tame. Documentation, sure but such behaviour should immediately be reported either to me (who is the Drupal contact towards Freenode) or Freenode staff because it violates network policy http://freenode.net/policy.shtml

In accordance with UK law freenode and the PDPC have no tolerance for any activity which could be construed as:
incitement to racial hatred
incitement to religious hatred

or any other behaviour meant to deliberately bring upon a person harassment, alarm or distress. We do NOT tolerate discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, gender, sexual preference or other lifestyle choices and run with a zero-tolerance policy for libel and defamation.

I was shown a sample so to clarify: stupid, sexist and offensive are not the kind I was pointing to. That indeed needs to be handled by the Drupal community. Discriminative, hompphobe and such, however, need to be escalated and dealth with very quickly and harshly.

+1 and a general thank-you to everyone who keeps IRC a safe place.

I revised what I wrote above, and am including the current statement on http://drupal.org/irc/courtesy as the 1st paragraph:

Drupal is a community and IRC is one means to communicate and interact with others. There are men and women of all ages and it is best to remember to treat others with respect and courtesy, as you would in any other community.

Drupal IRC channels are not a personal or private space for making jokes at the expense of other people or groups of people, posting links to videos or photos of a sexual nature, or using lewd speech. The Drupal community is a place that welcomes everyone, and speech that can be seen as offensive — even in the name of "joking" — makes people feel unwelcome and drives them away. Please remember that your behavior in a Drupal IRC channel reflects on Drupal, and do not say or do anything that you would not normally say or do in front of a group of people in public.

Drupal IRC channels are a shared space, and for many of us they are related to our careers and businesses. As more organizations and businesses consider using Drupal, people turn to the IRC channels to better understand Drupal and decide whether or not Drupal is right for them. Let's not publicly misrepresent the true nature of our community by being careless with what we say.

In addition, the Drupal community supports the official policy of Freenode:

In accordance with UK law, freenode and the PDPC have no tolerance for any activity which could be construed as:

• incitement to racial hatred
• incitement to religious hatred

or any other behaviour meant to deliberately bring upon a person harassment, alarm or distress. We do NOT tolerate discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, gender, sexual preference or other lifestyle choices and run with a zero-tolerance policy for libel and defamation.

While we believe in the concept of freedom of thought and freedom of expression, freenode does not operate on the basis of absolute freedom of speech and we impose limitations eg. on "hate speech".

We expect all members of the community to treat other community members with respect and reserve the right to terminate anyones access to our services should they be found to be in breach of policy.

Read more at: http://freenode.net/policy.shtml

--
[note: this was edited to change 'rooms' to 'channels']
[update: most recent version in comment 19]

+1 from me. Very well written.

Michelle

The revised statement is excellent. +1 from me as well.

I'm of the opinion that shorter is better for this sort of thing. How about this...

Drupal is a community and IRC is one means to communicate and interact with others. There are men and women of all ages and it is best to remember to treat others with respect and courtesy, as you would in any other community.

Drupal IRC rooms are not personal/private. Additionally, many irc users save logs of channels they follow for later review so any comment should be considered completely public. Drupal IRC rooms are not a space for making jokes at the expense of others, posting links to videos or photos of a sexual nature, or using lewd speech. The Drupal community is a place that welcomes everyone, and speech that can be seen as offensive — even in the name of "joking" — makes people feel unwelcome and drives them away. Please remember that your behavior in a Drupal IRC room reflects on our community.

The Drupal community supports the official policy of Freenode which can be found at http://freenode.net/policy.shtml

It is perhaps worth pointing out that much of the above will vary from one society to another, and even one person to another. For example it is quite common to see curse words used even on high volume drupal channels with no objections. Since drupal is global I'm imagining many users come from cultures far more conservative in what they consider foul language or lewd speech than others yes? My point is ultimately you will need someone to arbitrate and whoever that is their opinion will be their opinion. I'm happy with chx there by the way ;)

I like the way this reads, and agree with it 100%.

The topic is Guidelines, and not Rules and Regulations though, yes? Expecting people to reflect their public behavior on IRC is something I am all about, but it is very subjective - there's a lot of different walks of life out there.

I'm not the best person to be writing any revisions about stuff like this, but I do think that there should actually be some positively suggestive rhetoric, and not just what is frowned upon, or prohibited.

Perhaps a note about how since Drupal is an open-source, community driven project, the community itself is also expected to discuss certain things openly and thus further people's knowledge? Could this be a supportive statement for representing Drupal properly and in a positive way?

Also one last note on the concept of 'professionalism.' Is this term really necessary? Are we talking about professional standards in the average American corporate workplace? The word professional has different connotations across different cultures, although I think that *socially* we are all globally looking for a standard for behavior among people.

Just my opinions.

I prefer #9 as well. One nitpicky thing... Channels, not rooms. :)

Michelle

Regarding...

people don't tend to click through to links

True, but the freenode folks are free to change their policy at any time. Simpler to use a link if you anticipate staying in conformance.

My comments:

Re #17: I don't think the point is that we keep up with the exact wording of freenode's policy. The point is to quote from it (or quote from the Spring 2010 version) to say we support the overall ban on any hate speech. And to make the point that that ban is actually the official policy of freenode, and any channel that allows hate speech or incites people to violence could be terminated by freenode. It doesn't matter whether or not people click the link. They will if they are super interested, and won't if they aren't.

Re #16: I think it might be a good idea to talk about Druplicon, but perhaps in another issue. Meanwhile, anyone is free to delete or change replies that have been programmed into Druplicon -- for any reason, not just because they are upset by what the bot says. That's part of what makes the bot fun.

Re #12: Since this is something that's not going to be read often, and since it already has a page of it's own, I think it's fine for it to be a bit long. I'd rather we have something useful that can help operators facilitate the channels.

-----------------------

And to others, yes this is a subjective thing. (Well, the part about asking people to think about what they say, to be respectful, and to not make jokes at other people's expense — that is subjective. The part about not allowing any speech that is considered discriminatory, hateful, or inciting violence is not subjective. There is plenty of case law on what that includes and does not include, and if you want to think about that, than go read some of those court decisions. We aren't debating that part of the language here.)

I do not see a need to create a long statement of exactly what is and is not "allowed". We know it when we see it. Being told by someone to wear a white t-shirt in the rain to our local Drupal Meetup so he could see my boobs through my shirt is just not ok. Listening to people discuss which Hooster's is better than other — also not appropriate for a Drupal channel. Link after link after link to "nsfw sex videos" with comments like "look another hot asian chick!" — it's not what most of us want for Drupal. We all know this stuff goes on all over the internet. There are plenty of places where anyone who wants to have conversations like that can have those conversations. I just haven't heard anyone make an argument as to why that kind of speech should be allowed in Drupal channels.

This effort by many people is to have a general Drupal community-standards statement that such conversation is not appropriate for any Drupal channel. And that it won't be tolerated.

All you have to do is read about what happened to Kathy Sierra to know why not facilitating the culture of our channels can lead to bad consequences. I am tired of meeting one person after another in New York who refuses to come to our local meetup (especially women) because of the quality of banter in the old #drupalnyc channel. This isn't just a problem for women in NYC, it's also a problem for many (most) men. And it was a man who made the move last week to create a new channel for New York that could be free from such banter — #drupal-nyc. I appreciate the many men (thank you!) who have been trying, along with women, for YEARS now to change the culture of the old channel. Having failed to improve things, it turned out to be easier to just create a new channel, make that channel the "official"/public channel, and set out to apply guidelines to that space. This statement can help us do that.

Yes, we will all need to take into consideration the difference in language, and culture, and expectations across the wide variety of people involved in Drupal. I believe we are smart enough to be able to do so. We are human beings, we don't all agree on anything. That will continue to be true regarding matters like these. And that's ok. Just because it's messy, doesn't mean we can't have guidelines. We don't need an exact list of what's 'banned' or of 'consequences.'

Conversations like the hundreds that have happened in #drupalnyc have not been allowed in the main drupal channels — because of the policies of individual operators there. There was no discussion at all — an operator would give a warning, and if it didn't stop, the op would immediately kick or kick-ban the person involved. Rather than immediately kick-banning people from the new #drupal-nyc channel, there is a desire to have a public policy and be able to point to it when things start to get out of hand (if they do), where we can ask people to tone it down or take it elsewhere. Then if the conversation doesn't shift, an op can kick or kickban, knowing there is a Drupal community guideline about IRC conversation to back them up.

I really do wish that the people who want the freedom to talk in any way they want in a Drupal channel would just come out and say why it is they think the restrictions created by this proposed statement are a bad idea. Nitpicking around the sides of the issue and bikeshedding the exact details may be an attempt to stop this policy, but it doesn't speak directly to the main issue at hand. Is it ok to say the kinds of things I'd described above in a Drupal channel or not?

So here's a revised statement based on comments:

-----------------

Drupal is a community and IRC is one means to communicate and interact with others. There are men and women of all ages and it is best to remember to treat others with respect and courtesy, as you would in any other community.

Drupal IRC channels are not a personal or private space for making jokes at the expense of other people or groups of people, posting links to videos or photos of a sexual nature, or using lewd speech. The Drupal community is a place that welcomes everyone, and speech that can be seen as offensive — even in the name of "joking" — makes people feel unwelcome and drives them away. Please remember that your behavior in a Drupal IRC channel reflects on Drupal, and do not say or do anything that you would not normally say or do in front of a group of people in public.

Drupal IRC channels are a shared space, and for many of us they are related to our careers and businesses. As more organizations and businesses consider using Drupal, people turn to the IRC channels to better understand Drupal and decide whether or not Drupal is right for them. Let's all do our part in maintaining the standards of the community, and representing it's true nature.

In addition, the Drupal community supports the official policy of Freenode:

In accordance with UK law, freenode and the PDPC have no tolerance for any activity which could be construed as:

• incitement to racial hatred
• incitement to religious hatred

or any other behaviour meant to deliberately bring upon a person harassment, alarm or distress. We do NOT tolerate discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, gender, sexual preference or other lifestyle choices and run with a zero-tolerance policy for libel and defamation.

While we believe in the concept of freedom of thought and freedom of expression, freenode does not operate on the basis of absolute freedom of speech and we impose limitations eg. on "hate speech".

We expect all members of the community to treat other community members with respect and reserve the right to terminate anyones access to our services should they be found to be in breach of policy.

Read more at: http://freenode.net/policy.shtml

-----------------

So let's discuss this to a point where we can take action regarding the IRC Courtesy page.

I fully support the effort to have a more explicit statement of IRC policy, and am additionally appalled and saddened that this kind of thing is going on in a #drupal channel. We can nitpick this a lot (I'm not really a fan of the third graph myself) but what you have is wayyyy better than what is there now and it is a handbook page after all. It's not like it is set in stone.

This looks great to me. How do we get this up on the courtesy page? Are we still going to call the page IRC Courtesy? I'd rather it be called IRC Guidelines or something.

It's been brought up a few times that Drupal should have a Code of Conduct -- not just for IRC, but across the community in general. IRC is just a small but very visible part of our community. But we have forums, meetups, camps, and conferences. The code of conduct in Drupal is visible in all of those places, and as a community we have a duty to make it clear what we believe our standards are. At one point I thought such a thing might be unnecessary, but it is not.

The Ubuntu community has a code of conduct, and it's a nice thing to be able to point to.

That said, I'm not trying to derail this; by all means, an IRC guideline is good, but it seems like the basic principles apply on a lot more than just IRC.

It's great. Do it.

Webchick - thanks for raising the issue on G.D.O so we could have this discussion.

Jensimmons - thanks for jumping in and drafting something, reading responses and incorporating the feedback. Thanks for eloquently stating why this is necessary.

I agree shifting the title from IRC courtesy to IRC guidelines is appropriate. Also agree that this would be a good starting point for a wider code of conduct. And yes, such a thing is necessary. Should inappropriate images or behaviour be presented at a DrupalCon, Camp or Meetup - the code could be referenced.

It's a natural stage of community development to codify cultural norms as the community grows. In small groups, behaviour is moderated by existing relationships, in larger groups less people know each other, or each other's friends, and so codes, guidelines, rules, regulations and ultimately laws are defined to help the community get along.

Very well said in #18. Definitely go forward as is I say. Improvements (if any) can always be made over time.

On a related note, a discussion for a broader Drupal community code of conduct is going on at http://groups.drupal.org/node/73223