Winding the clock back? authoritarianism?

[broukema]

The aim of this issue (shifted from apontzen issue 7) is to allow people to respond, provide arguments for/against, if they disagree with the concern that many versions of the London Code of Conduct, including commit 85a18a6, appear to wind back the clock to authoritarian traditions, defeating the point of trying to conduct science workshops/conferences in a way that is fair to all participants. The Inhomogeneous Cosmologies Toruń was the result of much internal discussion in the organising committee; one element was replacing the authoritarian aspects of the London Code of Conduct by non-authoritarian procedures (the right of organisers to discuss an incident either publicly or privately, as appropriate).

The argument presented in this issue is that the expressions "comply immediately", "violating these rules", "leave the event at the sole discretion of the organizers without a refund of any charge" give the impression of being authoritarian procedures:

• the spirit of habeas corpus appears to be violated - absolute authority is given to the "organizers" to evict (not imprison!) a participant without any chance of appeal
• there is no reference to the informal equivalent of the right to a fair trial - "organizers" make a decision at their "sole discretion"
• there is no reference to the presumption of innocence

(Other issues debated in the committee included how prominent the code of conduct text should be on the meeting website, and whether or not to have a code of conduct at all. Empirical evidence in favour of having a code of conduct in the astronomy context included Brough et al 2011 ArXiv:1106.6094; Matteucci & Gratton 2014 ArXiv:1402.1952; Schmidt et al 2017 ArXiv:1704.05260. This is not raised as a separate issue here, because within the committee, as far as I remember, there were no counterarguments raised against this evidence.)

[broukema]

The Cosmology from home Sococo/Zoom/Slack/Youtube conference has more moderate wording, but still seems to be authoritarian, without handling habeas corpus, the right to a fair "trial", and the presumption of innocence:

• https://www.cosmologyfromhome.com/code-of-conduct archive

"If violations of this code of conduct are reported to the Cosmology from Home organizing team, they may take appropriate action, including warning the offender or expulsion of the offender from the event with no refund."

• How does the organising team decide? What rights does the accused have? Is the accused presumed to be innocent? What is the discussion and mediation procedure?