This is really good, Greg.

My personal opinion is that it is very easy to forget why the community exists, which is to further the development of the code and not for its own sake. When we say “Stay for the Community”, we are trying to encourage new people to enjoy what the community has to offer, but for practical purposes, people rarely stay for that. They stay because they want to get something out of the use of the code.

This tendency to confuse these is not unique to Drupal, but it is strong amongst the Drupal community, and it does lead to circumstances where the “unstructured” values of the community affect the way the community tries to manage the creation of the code.

Take for example Diversity. Diversity is often seen as a worthwhile aim in-and-off itself, but we don’t engage in activities to promote Diversity because Diversity is inherently good or important – it is, but thats not the point – we do it because it helps us achieve our our explicit aims of building better software (https://www.drupal.org/about/mission-and-principles). Diversity, as it stands, is not a value of the Drupal community.

We can easily lose our way as individuals, and we can easily lose our way as a collective of individuals. One really good way to lose our way is to think that somehow our individual values are somehow universal. You can openly express your feelings that white Australian men with beards are of lower intelligence, and as long as you do it respectfully and without prejudice that’s actually not going to get you into trouble. Maybe some people won’t like you, but that’s a completely different issue. That’s an individual problem.

The only stated “Drupal Values” that are not directly code-oriented are “teamwork” and “openness”. I might strongly disagree with someone else’s position on beards but it’s not really relevant unless I’ve gone and breached the Code of Conduct somehow. There’s nothing that says I must value Beards. There’s no Bill of Rights or or Human Development Goals for Drupal. Focussing on the Beards is a sure-fire way to lose our way.

Thanks for writing this.