Dear lovers of green, swift-tongued reptiles, On behalf of the openSUSE Board, I would like to propose the adoption of a Code of Conduct for openSUSE. Right now, openSUSE has the following paragraph buried deep in the project's Guiding Principles [1]: [We value] ... respect for other persons and their contributions, for other opinions and beliefs. We listen to arguments and address problems in a constructive and open way. We believe that a diverse community based on mutual respect is the base for a creative and productive environment enabling the project to be truly successful. We don't tolerate social discrimination and aim at creating an environment where people feel accepted and safe from offense. While this a very good summary of how people should behave toward each other, it's not really easy to find these guidelines as a newcomer. There is a lot of abuse in places like IRC channels and mailing lists (notably the opensuse@ mailing list), and we would like to propose a simple, clear Code of Conduct to start fixing this problem. GNOME has a very simple Code of Conduct [2], which is based on Ubuntu's. It can be summarized in four points: * Be respectful and considerate. (About avoiding personal attacks or poor behavior due to disagreement) * Be patient and generous. (About understanding that people ask for help because they need it, and avoiding "RTFM" answers) * Assume people mean well. (About avoiding knee-jerk responses when you disagree with something) * Try to be concise. (About avoiding repetition of topics and off-topic discussions) We would like to propose that openSUSE adopt the same principles for its Code of Conduct. I don't foresee any need to have a "police" for this; when something goes out ofhand, we can simply discuss cases of repeated offences and take the appropriate action. The Board can certainly help with this. What do you think? [1] http://en.opensuse.org/Guiding_Principles [2] http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct Cheers, Federico --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org