A fictional example:

You're in a volunteer group that does a public service chore, like sprucing up a local park or maintaining a health information website. It's been around for many years. Most people treat each other respectfully, but one of the long-time volunteers is an exception. He sharply criticizes anyone who doesn't do things his way, often in ways that make them feel bad. Some people have left the group, or not joined, because of his behavior; everyone else has gotten used to it. He knows a lot about the work, and he puts in a lot of hours, and over time the group has come to depend on him to help keep it going.

A few months ago, a new volunteer joined. Unfortunately, now he has started to copy that long-timer's behavior. If he notices someone else making a mistake, he mocks them while telling them what to fix.

So:

Should we have the same standard for everyone's behavior in a volunteer group? In particular, when we're evaluating and addressing destructive behavior, is there a difference between these two people? What does your intuition tell you?

Context [🔗]

I'm thinking about this because of a recent conversation in a slice of the open source world. Should people who use and make the R programming language move to adopt a code of conduct, and if so, how? One factor for R folks: they report difficult experiences uploading packages to the package repository (CRAN), especially because of one particular long-timer volunteer in R.

I am not an R user, but I do have significant experience both with managing interpersonal conflicts in open source and with the difficulties of managing a popular package repository (PyPI, in my case). So, when I happened across this conversation via the Fediverse*, I shared my thoughts. And then, among the responses in my mentions, I noticed one person saying that it was also worth noticing how many useful and positive contributions that one long-timer had also made.

But this is only the latest instance of a question I've run into, in many forms, over the years.

As has Glyph, who, while I was writing this, published "On the Defense of Heroes."

Let your heroes face accountability. If they are really worth your admiration, they might accept responsibility and make amends. Or they might fight the accusations with their own real evidence — evidence that you, someone peripheral to their situation, are unlikely to have — and prove the accusations wrong.

Jacob summarized my thinking, in response, with:

Also, this reminds me of a conversation I was having with @brainwane the other day. She was saying, when someone starts citing bonafides as a defense against misbehavior, it really invites the question of whether that person is advocating for a double standard. Like, how big a history of contributions, exactly, do you need to be partially or fully exempt from community standards?

When we notice inappropriate behavior by someone in a volunteer group, should we apply two different standards? One if they're a "known quantity" and one if they're not?

My answer is: yes, sort of. Not so much for assessing the behavior. But I suggest different approaches in how we react to it as we work on repair (as distinct from punishment).

Assessment [🔗]

Someone with a lot of experience or past contributions usually has significant authority and power (formal or informal) in a group. And that increases the seriousness of a misdeed, because it increases its impact. Other people are more afraid to push back, often have little recourse .... and people learn to set their own norms for behavior based on that misdeed.

Different people have different moral systems we use to weigh the "badness" of a wrong. In mine, I do care about several factors, including:

• how much a person knew or ought to have known that what they were doing was wrong
• how much harm it did
• how irrevocable that harm is
• their intentions and state of mind when doing it
• whether exterior circumstances made it really hard for them to choose differently

So, when I'm assessing misbehavior in a group, a more experienced and high-status individual's likely committing more wrongitude than a newbie who tries to pull off the exact same nonsense. If I hold a "double standard" here, it is stricter, not looser, for the more experienced participant.

In the fictional example I used to start this post, the leader's misbehavior is likely worse than the new volunteer's. It's caused and causing more harm including very-hard-to-heal harm (such as damage to the group's reputation), it's happened consistently (so, it's not just occasionally when he's having a bad day), and he has had years of chances to consider and try out alternate approaches for criticism -- but hasn't taken those opportunities.

Response and repair [🔗]

But I weigh participation history ("how long has this person been active in the group?" and "how much have they contributed?") the opposite way when responding to the misbehavior. Because, if we know someone, if they've accumulated a history of contribution, then we may have more incentive to repair, and we likely have more ability to repair.

First, incentive: I'll be ruthlessly pragmatic for a moment. We have a limited amount of time and energy to do this emotionally exhausting work. So if we notice destructive behavior by an utter stranger, versus by someone who has already demonstrated a commitment to the group and its goals, then it does make sense to prioritize spending our time talking with and healing the relationship with the known person.

I distinguish more, here, between an utter stranger and someone who has at least a little history of good-faith, healthy group activity.

And it's important here to balance both retaining seasoned, committed contributors and nurturing newer contributors, to work towards succession and sustainability. If the long-time volunteer is burning out, or otherwise on a trajectory towards less contribution, the group has less incentive to find a mutually agreeable way to keep them around. Conversely, if the new volunteer holds significant promise aside from this one misstep, the group has more incentive to repair.

And as for ability: We more likely have a relationship with a better-known person (so, we know how to contact them and are more likely to be able to have a difficult but productive conversation), we have context for why they've misstepped, and we have some knowledge of their motivations and goals.

In the fictional example I created, if other members of the group decide they want to hold the long-time volunteer accountable, they won't have trouble finding a way to contact him, and they can figure out who among them has the most rapport and credibility with him. They can think ahead of time about what he's good at and what he values, and privately work on ideas about how to reorganize the group's work to preserve those while reducing what's not working. This sort of strategizing makes it easier (not easy) to repair, and is much harder to do with a stranger. It takes time and compassion.

This depends on relationships and recalcitrance. Sometimes the long-timer has absolutely no friends in the group, and is so obstinate that they're not willing to ever entertain the possibility that they ought to change. But don't assume. I've succeeded several times at getting folks like this to listen and apologize and start on the road to change, even when others thought there'd be no getting through to them. Skill and patience can do a lot.

(There's one more thing that I'm not addressing at all here: the thorny labyrinth of obligation. What do we owe to each other? To what extent does the group owe the individual a responsibility for repair, and does that responsibility differ toward the newcomer and toward the long-timer? If you are eager for an unsatisfying conversation where I gesture a lot and say things like "what even is a community?!?!" then you can ask me about this the next time we talk synchronously - Jacob enjoyed it, anyway.)

This is all relative to a lot of other factors, for sure. But I do think it can make sense to respond to misbehavior with context of the person's other actions, and spend more effort on repair and coaching with people who have greater experience or who have contributed a lot.

Distinction [🔗]

Sometimes people argue that, when getting past major contributors to voluntarily improve their behavior, recognizing past contributions is essential. And they might mean different things by that, so it's worth checking to clarify.

And then, based on whether they're talking about assessment or response, you might still disagree! But I hope you'll disagree more productively.

* Some relevant posts and threads in this current conversation: "noteworthy and significantly outside the norms" , "What standard ought we apply?" , "what do we need to have a transparent and developer friendly package system?" , "What do we need to do to make r-universe sufficient for everyone else?" , "CRAN submission correspondence should be publicly available" , "My summary of the general #RStats sentiment this weekend" , "I saw this example of yr python community holding behaviour misaligned with their CoC to account" , and "I have been amazed by how rladies culture and tidyverse culture just got duct taped on top of r-help culture".