Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

From: Richard Stallman Subject: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2018 01:16:46 -0400

Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines The GNU Kind Communication Guidelines, initial version, have been published in https://gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html. On behalf of the GNU Project, I ask all GNU contributors to make their best efforts to follow these guidelines in GNU Project discuaaions. In August, a discussion started among GNU package maintainers about the problem that GNU development often pushes women away.1 Clearly this is not a good thing.2 Some maintainers advocated adopting a "code of conduct" with strict rules. Some other free software projects have done this, generating some resistance.3 Several GNU package maintainers responded that they would quit immediately. I myself did not like the punitive spirit of that approach, and decided against it. I did not, however, wish to make that an excuse to ignore the problem. So I decided to try a different approach: to guide participants to encourage and help each other to avoid harsh patterns of communication. I identified various patterns of our conversation (which is almost entirely textual, not vocal) that seem likely to chase women away -- and some men, too. Some patterns came from events that happened in the discussion itself. Then I wrote suggestions for how to avoid them and how to help others avoid them. I received feedback from many of the participants, including some women. I practiced some of these suggestions personally and found that they had a good effect. That list is now the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines. The current version not set in stone; I welcome comments and suggestions for future revision. The difference between kind communication guidelines and a code of conduct is a matter of the basic overall approach. A code of conduct states rules, with punishments for anyone that violates them. It is the heavy-handed way of teaching people to behave differently, and since it only comes into action when people do something against the rules, it doesn't try to teach people to do better than what the rules require. To be sure, the appointed maintainer(s) of a GNU package can, if necessary, tell a contributor to go away; but we do not want to need to have recourse to that. The idea of the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines is to start guiding people towards kinder communication at a point well before one would even think of saying, "You are breaking the rules." The way we do this, rather than ordering people to be kind or else, is try to help people learn to make their communication more kind. I hope that kind communication guidelines will provide a kinder and less strict way of leading a project's discussions to be calmer, more welcoming to all participants of good will, and more effective. 1. I read that the fraction of women in the free software community overall is around 3%, whereas in the software field overall it is over 10%. 2. I disagree with making "diversity" a goal. If the developers in a specific free software project do not include demographic D, I don't think that the lack of them as a problem that requires action; there is no need to scramble desperately to recruit some Ds. Rather, the problem is that if we make demographic D feel unwelcome, we lose out on possible contributors. And very likely also others that are not in demographic D. There is a kind of diversity that would benefit many free software projects: diversity of users in regard to skill levels and kinds of usage. However, that is not what people usually mean by "diversity". 3. I'm not involved in those projects, even if in some cases I use the software they release, so I am not directly concerned about whatever internal arrangements they make. They are pertinent here only as more-or-less comparable situations. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

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