Civility notes (was "Traversable instances for (,,) a b")

A couple weeks earlier there was a discussion on tuple instances on this list that got somewhat out of hand, leading to a meta-discussion on civility. There was the suggestion to create and endorse a CoC for this community. Now both topics have not received much further contribution, an indication that not much more can be gained from these discussions. Yet I have a bad feeling about leaving them in such a manner, because: There is no real conclusion, there is no agreement, and I do not see much advancement of how we, as a community, cope with negative situations. And while I can understand that there is little incentive/motivation to continue due to negative emotions involved, I also fear that ending discussions on such negative emotions will discourage contributions in general not only now, but in the future as well. So I will dare to continue, ask a couple of questions, and make some suggestions: 1. At which point of the particular tuple instance discussion would it have helped to have some CoC, and in what way? Is the hope that the participants had considered this CoC and not said something in the way that they did? Or would it have allowed us to quickly point out the CoC at some specific point in response to some mail? Or something else? I _can_ see a couple of instances where a CoC could have been pointed out, but these don't convince me, because a) in those cases giving clear, respectful negative feedback (for example regarding "joking") (would/should) have worked just as well if not better and b) because simply pointing out the CoC during a discussion is rather non-constructive because it is a vague form of criticism and the receiving party will most likely consider it inappropriate, and so it has the opposite effect. 2. on a related note, I have a hard time pinpointing the moment in the discussion where things transitioned from cool to flaming. I'd perhaps name as important factors the useless rhetoric (go and ask those mathematicians) and the case of hiding behind "it was a dumb joke" followed by what in my eyes reads like a dishonest apology. But I am not certain and perhaps unfair. My subjective estimation is that discussing this a bit further is more constructive than working on a CoC. What parts of the discussion were unfortunate, exactly, and why? The general opinion here seems to be to ask for civility without naming names. I disagree: I have little hope that giving the vague feedback to all participants that some parts of the discussion were non-constructive/disrespectful will improve things in the future. As an example, we might take the following advice from this: "Humour is important and generally welcome, but it is necessary to be especially careful to make it clear when exactly we talk in jest, and to not let slip phrases that can easily interpreted as offensive if not interpreted as a joke. We will not accept retroactively hiding behind 'it was a joke'." (perhaps some people think such a statement belonged in a CoC, but then this is a different/more specific kind of advice than what I can see in existing/proposed CoCs.) 3. And back to first discussion: I refuse to vote -1 or +1, because the topic is more nuanced than that. Instead, I vote for the following: "Additional tuple instances shall be added after such a point in time where either the methods have been renamed as to avoid confusion, or after the generic versions are no longer exposed in the default Prelude. (and whether this point will come is intentionally left open.)" 4. And reflecting on the previous point, I encourage all participants to try to not make pure -1/+1 votes, but to include conditions under which they may switch, especially for controversial subjects. I have hopes that this will help finding a majority-backed compromise. 5. It would help to have the discussion and the arguments made by both sides archived somewhere other than on the mailing list. In one of the last mails I wrote to this list I implicitly complained about the signal-to-noise, and to be clear, I don't mean that any messages consist of noise. But it can easily take a couple of mails back-and-forth to get some point across, and these threads can grow to over a hundred mails quickly. I realize that the main issue here of course is the amount of work it would mean to somewhat objectively summarize an (often heated) debate. But then the alternative is the reiteration of the same topics in an almost predicable frequency. Thoughts? (Sorry, Tony, for somewhat singling out the "joking" as the negative example. This might be unfair. You have a valid point, but conveyed it rather poorly especially to the end of the discussion.) -- lennart