Please see the updates below This was going to just be a tweet, but I felt it needed more than 140 characters.

If you know me in person, you’ve probably met me at a conference or user group. It should be immediately apparent that I am a confident, outspoken person (at least publicly).

I’m a former PHPWomen US Lead, as well as co-organizer for Prompt, raising awareness about mental health in technology, I’m no stranger to speaking out on tough subjects.

Furthermore, I’ve been a contributor to the PHP community for 15 years, and an internals contributor for half of that (since PHP 5.3.0).

The fact that I — as that person, and as a member of the majority makeup of the PHP community — don’t feel safe contributing back to the Code of Conduct discussion in favor of it — should tell you everything you need to know about why we need one. This is due in part to the hostility from some people involved, and to possible backlash from the wider community.

So let me state here, for the record, in unequivocal terms:

I fully support a Code of Conduct, and a reporting infrastructure in which we can act to remove those who are unable to abide by the Code of Conduct from our community.

This should be applied to all mailing lists, all websites (e.g. comments in the manual, news items, etc.), and all social media put out by the PHP project itself.

It should also apply anywhere a contributor is using their @php.net email address — whether thats a private email conversation, or at a conference/user group where you put it on your contact slide. Obviously while the person could not be removed from the event, they can be restricted from contributing based on their behavior.

Also: thank you Anthony for bringing this RFC to the table.

Update

This has gotten quite a bit of support and a couple of questions, so I wanted to add one specific thing:

To clarify, I don’t support the Contributor Covenant as it stands as the CoC for PHP; I think it is a good starting point, but it is just that, a starting point. Additionally, regardless of the content of the CoC, what matters more is documented procedures for handling reported violations.