EthicalSource
Project maintainers vs Community leaders
The wording "project maintainers" in 1.x changed to "community leaders" in 2.x. The 2.0 changelog entry mentions about it:
- Emphasizes 'community' over 'project' scope, effectively merging the Community Covenant into the Contributor Covenant
- Moves enforcement responsibilities from project maintainers to community leaders
I was interested in reading more. I've been searching this repo's gh, google, and the website for the disucssions about this change, but can't find any. Can someone point me to those discussions? Cheers!
I am interested on this too. I found this ref https://www.contributor-covenant.org/faq/
Doesn’t a code of conduct give too much power to project maintainers?
Project maintainers are the arbiters of code of conduct violations and are the unquestioned leaders of the projects they own. Without a code of conduct, a project maintainer has the power to eject any contributor from a project for any (or no) reason at all. A properly enforced code of conduct creates a social contract between and among contributors and maintainers that make such abuses of power less acceptable and common. If you don’t trust a project maintainer to act in a just and fair way, you probably should consider not participating in their community.
In the open source project I involve in, maintainers roles are reviewing, merging, releasing, and other jobs. Whereas the owners of the project, those who have the keys to everything, are perceived as leaders. They can ban someone, whereas maintainers generally do not have that access.
Because maintainers are the most active in the project, if there is a conflict, chances are it happen between maintainers. Consider this scenario based on an actual case. there are 4 maintainers, 2 vs 2, and in one group, there is a maintainer with the key to ban. He exercised it to ban the other two violators, one of whom cried fouled and threatened legal action. A leader of the project step in to triage. In the end, due to pressure, two maintainers exited the project, and two were reinstated.
This can happen to maintainers: "You can ban me, but you do not have the right! See you in court."
