While I agree that a CoC should be no surprise to anyone with common sense, it still makes sense to me to have them:
First, there are people without common sense. Sooner or later someone will not adhere to the unwritten rules and ask "Who's going to stop me?". Even if you can eject/ban them, it will be quite a mess, as you now seem to enforce completely intransparent and artificial rules. People will (rightly) ask you to state the rules before you enforce them. Even if your rules are completely obvious to you and all the people in your peer group, they won't be to everyone.
On the other hand, a CoC signals to potential participants that you take these things seriously. Look at it from the point of view of someone who is used to sexist/racist/otherwise discriminating comments: If you see that a conference has a CoC, that means that they know of your problem and are prepared to combat it. This is more a more inviting conference and it will put you more at ease, because you can feel safer.
Without a CoC, people will not attend because they're just tired of this.
So, yes, CoC should be unnecessary because we all know how to behave. Ideally, their content is suprising to no one. But experience shows that not everybody does, or that they in good faith behave in ways that are not acceptable to other people. With a CoC, you make it clear beforehand that "these are the rules", so everyone's on the same page, and you show that you mean it.
People will (rightly) ask you to state the rules before you enforce them.
Having a CoC doesn't mean that you get this benefit.
In the case in point, the rules being enforced from the CoC were not stated. After being ruled in violation, it was not made clear WHAT rule was violated. And certainly no rule in the actual CoC was violated.
> People will (rightly) ask you to state the rules before you enforce them.
Will they? Lots of communities do just fine without spelling them out. If you go over the line, you get a warning by a moderator etc, or, if you've gone way past the line, you get kicked out. You don't need to know where exactly that line is drawn, because reasonable people don't come close to crossing it. And unreasonable people don't care about lines and rules.
If you do spell it out, you invite litigation of rules and endless "but you didn't punish that" and in the end you'll have to say "yeah well, I didn't find that offensive", so it's back to "there's a line, but there's also some rules that are meaningless, because in the end the line I draw on the spot is what matters".
Since those kinds of rules will always be vague, and will never be applied evenly, I doubt they are helpful. Maybe there's a small subset of people that would behave perfectly reasonable only if there's a guide book of rules that they can abide by, but I don't think that group is large enough to offset the problems CoCs bring.
That's true, but it's either vague ("don't be an ass") or it's primarily a thing to have to get the moderators on the same page, not something the community needs, isn't it?
In my opinion, if the rules include value judgements, they're superfluous as rules, because accuser, accused and judge can easily come to vastly different results. If you try to get beyond that and formalize it, you end up with books, and by that time you've transformed your community into a rule-book-writing community.
The community wanted the moderators to get on the same page. They were also tired of discussions turning into arguments like whether insulting things by calling them gay insulted gay people.
> And unreasonable people don't care about lines and rules.
I agree with this statement. Having or not having a CoC will not change their behavior, nor should it change your response. But the response to your response can differ: If you've been transparent from the start about your rules, there's less room to complain about you enforcing your rules. If you had no CoC beforehand, there will be some parts of the audience asking if that was really fair. And this behavior doesn't even have to be malicious, just that their line is somewhere else, and so they don't understand your arbitrary enforcement. With clear and transparent rules, they may not agree, but it's clear where the line is.
We both think (at least, that's what I gather from your comment) that some rule is necessary, but I'm for being open about it and you want to keep them vague. I think it's easier for everybody to be transparent here, because you can decide beforehand if you agree to these rules. If they're too vague, I'm just hoping that, if push comes to shove, we see the world similarly.
And, again, having a CoC also signals that there is a line. Without it, who's to know that there will be behavior that you don't accept and what it looks like. Maybe you're fine with sexist comments, but not with racism. If I'm vulnerable, why should I gamble that your views are similar to mine? I'd rather not visit your conference if you can't make the rules clear.
> If I'm vulnerable, why should I gamble that your views are similar to mine?
Don't you do that with a CoC as well? Short of writing a long list of things that may and may not be said, you can only give a vague "please be kind to each other", but the concrete judgement what is and isn't kind depends on whether your views align with those in power.
My experience is that vague rules are both a recipe for corruption (where the enforcer's friends are exempt from the rules and the argument is "that wasn't rude, the person deserved to be called a shithead") and the troll's playground, because toxic people that want to cause trouble are great at figuring out the pain points that get to their targets but don't cross any lines.
I believe that enforcement is important, not rules. You can always have a more specific policy for the moderators to guide them and to develop the team's response, but that shouldn't be part of the rules.
It's true that it's not 100% fair that you might get kicked out for breaking a rule you didn't know existed, but to me that's collateral damage I'm more than happy to accept (and I've been on the receiving end of a "you crossed a line" talk).
I'm sorry, I'm not sure, I totally understand your argumentation.
You seem to be against vague rules ("My experience is that vague rules are both a recipe for corruption [...]"), with which I agree. That's why I want a CoC, so that the rules are open, known and overall transparent.
However, I'm afraid I fail to see why avoiding vague rules means that there should be no CoC at all. Isn't having no written/open rules the vaguest of all? Even if there are rules that only the moderators can see, how is that an improvement for the participants? They can't know what is acceptable, so neither can the accused argue against an unfair response, nor can a potential victim demand enforcement.
And why not have more concrete rules? Surely, they cannot be complete and there will necessarily always be room for intepretation, but I think it is better the more concrete the rules are.
First, there are people without common sense. Sooner or later someone will not adhere to the unwritten rules and ask "Who's going to stop me?". Even if you can eject/ban them, it will be quite a mess, as you now seem to enforce completely intransparent and artificial rules. People will (rightly) ask you to state the rules before you enforce them. Even if your rules are completely obvious to you and all the people in your peer group, they won't be to everyone.
On the other hand, a CoC signals to potential participants that you take these things seriously. Look at it from the point of view of someone who is used to sexist/racist/otherwise discriminating comments: If you see that a conference has a CoC, that means that they know of your problem and are prepared to combat it. This is more a more inviting conference and it will put you more at ease, because you can feel safer. Without a CoC, people will not attend because they're just tired of this.
So, yes, CoC should be unnecessary because we all know how to behave. Ideally, their content is suprising to no one. But experience shows that not everybody does, or that they in good faith behave in ways that are not acceptable to other people. With a CoC, you make it clear beforehand that "these are the rules", so everyone's on the same page, and you show that you mean it.