User talk:PatrickGeorgi

Community Code of Conduct

This is a work in progress. Might or might not become applicable to the project. As in, ever. We'll see.

Problems with the CoC: It's specific to US issues and sensibilities, ignoring that coreboot is a global project. That its base document (the citizen code of conduct) is more targetted at events (and not online communities) shines through the cracks more than envisioned.

Objectives: a set of reminders to keep our community civil even when debating contentious topics.

Principles of the CCoC

Online communities like ours are not like physical communities. There are things that work well in real life, that aren't quite as suitable in the coreboot community.

We're global and that breaks lots of assumptions

People may be sensitive to different topics than what you're used to. There are language barriers and cultural differences. While it's hard-to-impossible to keep track of everything at all times, be prepared that your hilarious joke might face a luke-warm reaction (or worse).

Most of the time, there's a person at the other end

Even when jumping at the throat of an online service someone in our community set up, there's someone maintaining it. They might not appreciate you going ballistic at the work they do for the community, often in their spare time. Same applies to code, which leads to:

Don't assume incompetence in others (and their contributions)

Just because a piece of code is unsuitable for your purpose doesn't mean that it's entirely broken, completely useless, and so on. And just because it's broken now doesn't mean it never worked. Chances are that every piece of code in our repository worked at some point in some configuration.

Diminishing the efforts of others is discouraging, and a community gets healther by encouragement. Improving the code? Sure, that's great. Assuming everything in the tree is crap - please no.

Bad faith typically doesn't play a part in the scheme of things

There are trolls out there on the internet, but they're usually clearly visible from a long distance. Especially in a highly technical project like coreboot where "faking it" is rather hard. Other than that, most people actually try to do good, not bad.