On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 10:37 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
It is of course possible that a member of the committee could act in bad faith for any number of reasons. You can say the same thing about any position of leadership or authority within the community, though. That hasn't really been much of a problem in my experience, and I see no reason for particular concern about it here.
I thought the same thing as a member of the Django community. It adopted a CoC that I vocally warned was dangerous and far more likely to be abused than provide any benefit. I was shocked when the very first time it was ever invoked it was by one of the founders of the project (whom I previously personally respected) and it was absolutely used in the manner that I had feared which was to shut someone up whose opinion he did not like rather than any legitimate concern. Unfortunately this is not such an unusual circumstance as one might hope in these projects or conferences. It is impossible to separate the concept of political correctness from these CoCs I find and they are much more dangerous things than they appear. We should tread with extreme cautious about adopting such a thing.