Ginger coons

Format	recording, transcription
Language	english
Context	co-writer of the Code of Conduct for the Libre Graphics Meeting
Related	Libre Graphics Meeting

ginger coons is an active supporter of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) in art and design. She was the founding editor of the Libre Graphics magazine from 2010 to 2015. ginger is also a regular attendant at the Libre Graphics Meeting, a convention that gathers the community around free and open-source software used with graphics.

In 2014, the Libre Graphics community was discussing a Code of Conduct for their yearly meeting. I found parts of the discussion through the archives of the mailing list used by this group. The back-and-forth of messages raises important questions and concerns about enforcing rules. However, the thread of emails finishes without a prospect for the Code of Conduct. I’m curious about what happened.

After the discussion on the mailing list, we made a working group that became responsible for writing the Code of Conduct. Later, we had separate IRC [Internet Relay Chat] meetings. These may be logged somewhere but I don’t who, if anyone, kept them. Soon after, the working group created the Code of Conduct which the Libre Graphics Meeting still uses. Besides myself, in that group was Femke Snelting, Chris Lilley, and others. Many of the people active in that mailing list discussion became the working group for developing the Code of Conduct.

Through the mailing list, I understood some people were aiming to have a longer document for the Code of Conduct, while others thought a brief statement was enough. You surely had to compromise. Are you happy with the results of the working group?

Yes, I think we got a good outcome. I’m happy with how the Code of Conduct came out because it’s short enough to make people read it, which is important. It also articulates straightforward procedures. For example, there are always two people dedicated to responding to any concerns. Because we are a multi-juridical group of people, the Code of Conduct can’t be tight to the laws in one jurisdiction. A specific law can’t respond to the way we enforce things, the way we pass things on if we can’t deal with them ourselves. The Code of Conduct responds to our reality as a group.

It’s worth noting we are not a conference, we are a meeting — the Libre Graphics Meeting. We are a bunch of people with the same interests getting together, talking to each other. We are less online that we are in a meeting, although there are also online implications for some decisions we made. It was important to have informal documentation like that because of the character of the meeting.

Whereas we are predominantly a European community, we do things outside of Europe and we are above political correction. In particular, the first year after creating the Code of Conduct, the meeting was in Toronto. This happened in 2015, the year I was the local organiser. We also had one meeting in Brasil, however, most meetings happen within Europe.

For me, there are a lot of unique roles that a Code of Conduct can play in a community. In diverse legal contexts, they have particular functions. For example, in a lot of Codes of Conduct from North America, you see a particular work, as it often needs to cover legal obligations. If you are in a coworking place, for example, in a country that has explicit laws about workplace harassment, then I think that should come into your Code of Conducts. There are laws in the US for workplace harassment and those things should work together.

Looking through the mailing list, there was some discussion on whether the Code of Conducts was necessary at all. Some members were feeling there was already an implicit structure, so there was no need to have an explicit one. I see you don’t agree with this at all.

No, I don’t. For some people, financial support was one of the instigating reasons to create a Code of Conduct. The Python Software Foundation wanted us to have a Code of Conduct, and we couldn’t get money from them if we didn’t have one. But there have been incidents that are known within the community, which were also important for getting a great justification. To give you an idea, I’ve been harassed at LGM before. The discussion on the mailing list made me finally write something that had happened to me in 2010 at LGM that was very troubling to me at the time. That one is not a secret.

Do you know if more people came forward after LGM established the Code of Conduct?

I don’t think we have had incidents yet where we needed the enforcement measures that are in place. That may be a good sign, I would like to believe that having a Code of Conduct and making explicit there are ways of dealing with problematic behaviour will help people come forward if things go wrong. Before the Code of Conduct, we informally dealt with things, or we didn’t. If someone didn’t come forward about something, it wouldn’t be dealt.

The language of the document raised a lot of debate — whether to list the negative behaviours or reinforce the positive ones. How did the working group handle this?

In the end, we chose not to list the negative behaviours as there are definitions of harassment that are bigger than us. We can assume to an extent people know what harassment is, although we can assume they have an imperfect interpretation of what harassment may be. For example, sexually suggestive language might be different for distinct people. Again, we are extremely multinational and mostly non-native English speakers, which was also something referred a lot in our internal discussions. Someone might use a word without knowing what it means to someone else. A word may feel like harassment to me and the person who is saying it might not realise it. It becomes then important to centre it on the person who is feeling it’s being harassed rather on a universalistic definition of what is harassment. Can we codify that to cover all bases? Or is it more important to say: if you feel harassed, if you feel that someone is behaving in a harassed way towards you, here it is what you can do.

We are mostly an affinity group who does these stuff voluntary and we don’t obey to one legal jurisdiction. The focal point of our Code of Conduct is we want people to feel empowered to speak up if they are feeling victimised.

In my search for different Codes of Conduct, I found some more strict than others. A few seemed even morally wrong to me. These documents are very bounded to a community and their values, without trying to please everyone.

Some Codes of Conduct may say just be excellent to each other, but I don’t think it works. What is excellent? You really need to know each other to know that your idea of excellent matches up. In this situation, if you know each other well enough, having a Code of Conduct is probably unnecessary. To me, a Code of Conduct is for mediating between people who can’t implicitly trust each other. The matter that we all knew each other well was the argument people were making for not needing a Code of Conduct at Libre Graphics Meeting. This thought excludes people. Someone new can’t come into the community if the assumption is that our behaviour is mediated by the fact we are all a very close net, and that is problematic for growth.

This text was transcribed and edited for content.