1) To attendees that, “yes, that thing which you thought was inappropriate was in fact wrong. You should feel empowered to speak up about it.”
2) To organizers that “yes, we’ve already agreed this thing someone has done is wrong. Its worth doing something about it, even if that requires having an uncomfortable conversation which we’d rather just kick down the road.”
3) To other attendees that “yes, there was a thought process behind this and your place in this group of friends isn’t balanced on a knife’s-edge.”
4) To abusive people, “You probably want to move along” ...ideally. Alternatively, it tells them, “here is a mechanism you can exploit to separate your victim from their support network.”
Note that you cannot just slap up a code of conduct and assume that will solve/prevent all problems. That works as well as just adding “agile” to some PM’s job title. You have to have people who care about doing a good job at community management and are willing to endure the discomfort of difficult conversations.
How? Unless you want to write out long, complicated laws, you'll rely on words like "kind", "friendly", "aggressive" etc that are anything but clear and rely on interpretation.
You'll still need the group to agree on what those terms mean and kick out people that don't agree with that interpretation (and the individual circumstances) - which you could've had without a formal set of rules in the first place.
The moderate reasonable interpretation of what you are saying is a solid criticism: misinterpretation is still possible and we don’t have the time to all go to law school and explain what “mens rea” means to each other.
But some level of explicit communication still scales better than silence and implicit expectations.
> But some level of explicit communication still scales better than silence and implicit expectations.
For (very) large groups, certainly, because the amount of effort you put in doesn't really increase with the group size. For small groups I just don't see it.
If there is no troublemaker, you don't need a codified system. And if there is a troublemaker, that codified system will be used against you and you will either be forced to disregard your set of rules (why have it in the first place if it's not binding?) to deal with the situation, or watch your group fall apart.
