They are really important for ensuring your community behaves in a respectful, meaningful, and impactful manner.
Yet the majority of open source projects seem to get by just fine without one. Where does this idea even come from, that a project needs a code of conduct? Is there any evidence that it even does anything?
Yep, you can check out the stats on the State of the Octoverse: octoverse.github.com/
"What the data shows: The largest repositories use codes of conduct as a welcome sign... We found that the positive effects of trust and safety work in both open source and company settings, and for both small and large repositories."
That's only a correlation though; it seems just as likely that communities that already have low tolerance for negative behaviours are also quicker to add a code of conduct.
That second link does make some good points that seem to apply mostly to businesses, but fall apart in the context of smaller open source projects, specially the legal aspect of it (which is also very specific to the USA). Most projects also just use an unmodified, widely used COC like the contributor covenant, meaning it doesn't signal anything to a would-be contributor other than a binary "has COC" vs. "has no COC".
Last but not least, a COC would be useless without a community that actively complies with it, in which case this community in itself would be a much stronger signal (think looking at code vs. looking at documentation).
Considering those points, I'm still very sceptical of the effectiveness of having a dedicated "be nice" document as part of the project. It seems more like the main reason to have one is the relatively small effort of throwing one in the repo regardless of how useful it may be.
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Yet the majority of open source projects seem to get by just fine without one. Where does this idea even come from, that a project needs a code of conduct? Is there any evidence that it even does anything?
Yep, you can check out the stats on the State of the Octoverse: octoverse.github.com/
"What the data shows: The largest repositories use codes of conduct as a welcome sign... We found that the positive effects of trust and safety work in both open source and company settings, and for both small and large repositories."
Here's some good info about what a COC is good for: ethics.org/resources/free-toolkit/...
That's only a correlation though; it seems just as likely that communities that already have low tolerance for negative behaviours are also quicker to add a code of conduct.
That second link does make some good points that seem to apply mostly to businesses, but fall apart in the context of smaller open source projects, specially the legal aspect of it (which is also very specific to the USA). Most projects also just use an unmodified, widely used COC like the contributor covenant, meaning it doesn't signal anything to a would-be contributor other than a binary "has COC" vs. "has no COC".
Last but not least, a COC would be useless without a community that actively complies with it, in which case this community in itself would be a much stronger signal (think looking at code vs. looking at documentation).
Considering those points, I'm still very sceptical of the effectiveness of having a dedicated "be nice" document as part of the project. It seems more like the main reason to have one is the relatively small effort of throwing one in the repo regardless of how useful it may be.