I am not quite sure who in the broader Go community is talking in the name of whom. Today I’ve stumbled over a post at GopherAcademy, titled “New Go Community Code of Conduct”. This blog post explains that from now on a new Code of Conduct (CoC) applies. The text of the CoC is published on a page hosted by GopherCon.
How are these two sites (GopherAcademy and GopherCon) related to this forum and the people who host it (GoBridge)? And how is the CoC related to the official Go project?
I don’t think this community is really connected to the go project community, the people that advance the language. I don’t know for sure, but this has been the perception for me anyway.
I am confused about what is “official” in the Go world and what is not. The help page links to various ways to communication, including this forum. But only some of these ways are said to be “official”:
Go Nuts Mailing List
Go IRC Channel
Go Blog
@golang at Twitter
Note that this forum is listed but not as being “official”.
What is the relation of all these communication channels? Who runs them? Who decides which, if any, CoC applies to it?
This forum, as stated in the welcome post follows the GoBridge CoC which is based on the older Go CoC. It may or may not be updated in the future, I guess? Does it matter greatly?
First, the new code of conduct makes clear that people who participate in any kind of harassment or inappropriate behavior, even outside our project spaces, are not welcome in our project spaces. This means that the Code of Conduct applies outside the project spaces when there is a reasonable belief that an individual’s behavior may have a negative impact on the project or its community.
I don’t think anybody active here is or will be subject to this regulation. But I find the idea that the community, whoever that may be, judges somebody for what he does in his private life disturbing.
Yeah there’s plenty of discussion of that in every place that deals with this. I don’t think you should see it as being judged and spied on in private life though. Rather, think of it like this - if we meet on the street, and I threaten to beat you up because I don’t like the way you look, you’ll have a legitimate grievance to take up with the CoC folks when you discover we are both going to GopherCon. Even though my unacceptable behavior was outside of a Go context, it might still make you uncomfortable about meeting me in a Go context. It’s also likely that if I did that to you, I might do the same or have done the same to others. Without the sentence you highlight the CoC has nothing to say about this.
(Yes, totally fictitious example. We’re all friends in the forum. )
All that said, I this is apparently controversial to the point of flame wars. Maybe those fit better somewhere else than here, or nowhere.
Also, while I have no beef with the CoC, it suddenly appearing from within Google is not great imho…
All this is very sad. But I will just ignore all of this as I do ignore what goes on over at Stack Overflow. I thought we were all adults. But I seem to have been mistaken. How I miss the old days of the internet
Yes it is sad that the benevolent overlords of the “Go Community” have decided to broaden their (over)reach. The arrogance is astounding, and the undercurrent of “Big Brother” is unsettling.
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