How does it protect them? as far as I can tell they do absolutely nothing. If someone is misbehaving at a conference or online, you're already free to kick them out without a clause like this in your code of conduct.
Presumably it's not legal protection, but protection against the woke mob. CoC signals that to the mob that the community leadership is on their side so they'll be spared when any controversy arises.
Stage 1: Initial contributors and founders have a rough aggressive tone that is slowly adopted by new people (who are generally polite when they come).
Stage 2: Old boy club realizes that their own impoliteness is being used back against them. They write a complex CoC with intersectionalism and all goodies that are hard to follow or understand for non-Americans.
Stage 3: Old boy club now ostensibly follows the rule set, while being ice cold, authoritarian and contemptuous on the mailing lists. People not in the clique are undermined and contradicted regularly.
Stage 4: People not in the clique explode when the pressure gets too much. We have a CoC "incident"!
Stage 5: Here is when the CoC comes in handy. The Stealing Council now solicits reports of all past "microaggressions" of the target. People sift through the mailing lists and compile a dossier, ignoring any context that individual messages might have been written in.
In short, the CoC allows for a pseudo "justice" system, where trials are held NKVD troika style, without hearing the target once. You have a document to point to! CoC complaints are also private, so complaints against the old boys can be brushed off and ignored. A public CoC complaint would be a CoC violation, so the old boys are fully protected!
In most cases the Stealing Council operates like a FISA court. Punishments are handed out privately and the targets are afraid to go public.
I was the original author of the Pycon Canada Articles of Association back when we were starting it, which included a section on conduct and inclusivity.
A code of conduct is not there to protect powerful people. It's not there to browbeat people into being absolutely politically correct 100% of the time either.
A code of conduct is something you put together so that everyone involved in the initial organization look at it once, and say "yep, I'm dealing with reasonable people here" and 99.999% of the time you don't have to look at it again because you've established from the start the type of people you're dealing with and they attract others that share the values.
Then once in a blue moon someone does something awful and you pull it out and kick them out.
Pete Forde was pretty "powerful" in the Ruby community and I don't exactly see him leading conferences or introducing people to Tobi anymore.
The problem is your "once in a blue moon." This can easily read as, "arbitrary time where we don't have any other justification for kicking out someone we dislike."
For the truly terrible people, you really shouldn't need a code of conduct to kick them out. An assumption of good behavior is a decent assumption. For abrasive people that you don't want to deal with, things get harder if they are just difficult in good faith. But, the difficult in good faith people are the most difficult to work with using a code of conduct. Being in good faith, they likely literally don't see the problems they cause. And the code does nothing to educate.
> For the truly terrible people, you really shouldn't need a code of conduct to kick them out.
Good point, often overlooked. Though I hear the creak of an opening door to "we just don't like you" culture-fitting exclusion.
Written policies separate, by both time and person, rule creation from rule enforcement. That disconnect gives both the policymakers and enforcers CYA protection:
The rule I wrote wasn't intended to be used this way.
If it were up to me… but it's not, I just follow the rules.
Written policies are just another way to creak that door into a culture-fitting exclusion. Often done much more heavy handedly, as that second hypothetical line of yours is as often a lie.
I get the desire to make things more objective, but as long as people are involved, it is going to be near impossible to separate that aspect from things without trouncing on people that are otherwise invisible to the ones writing the rules.
The whole Python industrial complex (PSF, PyCon, python-dev) has always been extremely hierarchical. CoCs were introduced to protect the old boys and advance their careers at FAANG.
The most egregious abuse of power occurred in the Python NumFocus space, where a couple of highly paid directors defamed a speaker for basically nothing:
I have never seen those directors do anything useful like writing software.
The whole Python ecosystem is a swamp full of parasites who need a rule set to oppress the productive part of the population and justify their existence.
It looks like you cant execute one of the common CoC rules. Assume good intentions. I dont need to look at a CoC of a conference, because, you know, I am living these ideas: I actually assume good intentions, so I dont need a CoC to assure myself.
IMO (which I think is not a majority opinion, mind you) the biggest benefit of a code of conduct is to prevent the person being disciplined from saying "oh I'm sorry I didn't know" and getting a pass. There are (rarely) times a first offense warrants a harsh punishment.
