[CREATE] Code of Conduct

[Tobias Ellinghaus]

Am Montag, 20. Januar 2014, 20:09:42 schrieb Gez:

[...]

> A person who's ready to call other people names, making mean comments
> about race, gender, sexual orientation or whatever is a jerk. And that
> can't be excused by saying you don't know it makes people feel bad.
> If the offense has an intention, then the CoC won't make a difference.
> It's hard to believe that a person who can't respect others will respect
> a CoC.
> If the offense is unintended, then dialog in-situ can solve most of the
> awkward moments. The CoC won't make a difference there.

Even that isn't as easy as it seems. Christoph Schäfer has been told a few 
days ago that his way of arguing was aggressive (or something like that, I 
don't want to go through all the mails to find the exact wording) while it 
sounded like a perfectly normal discussion to me. Maybe it's that Germans are 
more direct, maybe it's a benefit of being a technical person who can do 
without all the nice extra words and express the issues at hand. But whatever 
the reason is, not everyone is comfortable with the American (?) way to put 
everything into harmless words. So it is similar to the hugging example: may I 
not tell someone that he is an idiot if that is the case? Not necessarily in a 
derogative way, but just in a discussion. Does the idea that someone expresses 
his disagreement like that make you feel uncomfortable? Well, not being able 
to express me the way I am used to makes ME feel uncomfortable.

So where to draw the line? As I wrote at the first day of this discussion I 
also prefer the "treat others the way you think it is ok, and if it turns out 
that the other person doesn't feel the same then try to adapt and find some 
common ground for social interaction." approach. That is what being a social 
being is about: being able to copy with different social backgrounds, adapting 
and reacting to the situation at hand. And in the worst case avoid that person 
if interaction is not possible.

[...]

> Gez.

Tobias

PS: Please forgive me that I generalize by using "Germans" and "Americans". 
This is just a heuristic that I found to work reasonably well in this case.
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