Contributions This Week

2/2/2025: Tried to find a fix to Issue #85 of the class website: Discrepancy in course and weekly schedule. I was hoping to claim it, but wasn’t able to find a tentative weekly schedule for Spring 2025, so I replied to the issue in hopes that someone knew where to access it. I noticed that this issue was opened in Feb 2024, so it’s also possible that Professor Klukowska no longer provides tentative weekly schedules and the best fix is to delete the mention on the website.

Code of Conduct Activity

When a large group of people come together to work on something, a shared set of conduct standards goes a long way in ensuring good collaboration. This is true for the Go project, as well as most projects that involve a significant amount of collaborators. A code of conduct can be quite useful for fostering a collaborative environment that is understanding, civil, and supportive.

The Go project’s code of conduct differs from the Contributor Covenant on which it is based mainly at two points: an addendum to the “Scope” section that says “This Code of Conduct also applies outside the project spaces when the Project Stewards have a reasonable belief that an individual’s behavior may have a negative impact on the project or its community,” and the swapping of the “Enforcement” section with a “Conflict Resolution” section. This new section considers the resolution of code of conduct violations as a part of conflict resolution, and encourages people to address violations directly and report if the matter cannot be resolved or if the behavior is threatening or harassing. These differences might be due to the need to accommodate specific circumstances that arise in collaboration on this project. For example, the community may not want to allow people in who do not explicitly break any rules, but nonetheless may have a negative impact. They may also want to give people a chance to remediate unintentional code of conduct violations.

The Eclipse project’s code of conduct is also based on the Contributor Covenant, but has many more changes than the Go project’s code. This may be because the Eclipse Foundation is a much more structured organization than the Go project, as it makes references to bodies like the Board of Directors that the Go project’s Code does not refer to.

The Sugar Lab’s code of conduct, unlike the others we looked at today, is not based on the Contributor Covenant. It is based on the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. Instead of a series of declarations (“Our Pledge”, “Scope”, etc.), its subheadings read more like instructions to community members (“Be considerate”, “Be respectful”, etc.).

The Git Code of Conduct is based on the Contributor Covenant. The main difference is at the “Enforcement Guidelines” section, which comes after “Enforcement” and lays out a sequence of steps that will be taken to address Code of Conduct violations.

The video “How to Drive Consensus & Transparency in OpenSource Communities” was quite helpful in that, since it is an in-person talk, the speakers gave specific advice while speaking about more general points. In our last class, we touched on how reading the Code of Conducts gave us the impression that they were simply common-sense rules for social behavior, and most of this talk’s content did feel like this, but the specifics were helpful to hear. In terms of what it tells me about open source communities, it illuminates a lot of conflict within them, but this is to be expected of any collaborative effort, and it’s nice to have specific advice on how to deal with conflict from people with a lot of experience with this.