Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

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Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by RCheesley » Fri May 29, 2015 2:26 pm

Please use this forum thread to discuss the blog post at http://community.joomla.org/blogs/commu ... dback.html
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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by montano » Fri May 29, 2015 3:50 pm

Let me preface what I am about to say with, I appreciate the effort that goes into creating a document such as this CoC and the courage of the volunteers to attempt enforcement. Good luck and Godspeed.

This document reads a bit like a high school field trip permission slip. It is too wordy and too apologetic. It is also written through the prism of OSM and not the community as a whole. An example of succinct rules can be found here in our own forum http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=65

How in the world are you going to enforce these rules? What are the consequences? Are Diane, Alice, Jacques and yourself now the Joomla Police? I've been known to butt heads with all 4 of you, will I get banned because you simply don't care for me? Do I have to be careful to agree with you at all times for fear of sanctions? Your team is TOO small and lacks community diversity.

What are the sanctions? How can you ban someone from Twitter or Facebook?

This community is very quick to forgive the offender and brand the victim as a troublemaker.

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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by RCheesley » Fri May 29, 2015 5:56 pm

Let me preface what I am about to say with, I appreciate the effort that goes into creating a document such as this CoC and the courage of the volunteers to attempt enforcement. Good luck and Godspeed.
Thank you for the appreciation, indeed it has been a long - and much overdue - process and we are pleased to have reached this stage.
This document reads a bit like a high school field trip permission slip. It is too wordy and too apologetic. It is also written through the prism of OSM and not the community as a whole. An example of succinct rules can be found here in our own forum viewtopic.php?f=8&t=65
That’s a valid comment. We took examples from multiple sources - Open Source projects such as KDE, Typo3, Ubuntu, Drupal to name but a few - and other sources who have communities around their products and services.

Many projects have used the same Code of Conduct (based on the Ubuntu Code of Conduct) and simply changed a few words, however we did not think this was what we needed in our community. There were core areas which were missing from many of these policies - many were just as old as ours - and there were important aspects that had not been touched on (for example a process through which a complaint passes) which we felt needed to be clarified.

This means that the document is longer than the predecessor, however we feel that it represents all aspects relating to the conduct we expect to see in the community, and how we deal with inappropriate conduct.

If there are ways that it could be shortened while retaining all of the key points, please do suggest via comments on the document itself.
How in the world are you going to enforce these rules? What are the consequences?
That’s a great question, thank you for asking it. There is a whole section in the document which details the proposed process. This was based on a document which was originally written by Ryan Ozimek, and which he posted on the public Joomla Leadership Group here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/joomla- ... tMFYZbU1gJ - we adapted this to take into account that we might be dealing with issues that are not ‘seriously bad behaviour’ requiring a ban - so some of the parts in this proposed process are slightly adapted.

This also draws from the well documented processes adopted by both the KDE community (https://ev.kde.org/workinggroups/cwg.php) and the Drupal community (https://www.drupal.org/governance/commu ... king-group) - having had discussions with their community managers last year at the European Community Leadership Summit they have shared their processes for managing incidents from start to finish, and the kinds of sanctions that could be imposed. These would of course need to be appropriate to the incident.

The process we have proposed at the moment states that the following would occur:

If action is deemed necessary after the Conflict Resolution Team have heard from all involved parties, an email is sent to the private leadership mailing list where a discussion can take place

If a LT member is involved, it would be sent to all LT members excluding those involved in the incident

If, as a result of the discussions on the Leadership Team private mailing list, it is deemed that sanction/s are required, a motion will take place to proceed with the specified sanction, which must include the duration, resources that will be restricted, and the reason for the sanction.

A two-thirds majority vote by current leadership team members is required to proceed with the proposed sanction/s
Are Diane, Alice, Jacques and yourself now the Joomla Police?
The team who were tasked to update the Code of Conduct policy were suggested to form the interim team and act in the capacity of the Conflict Resolution Team until such a time as the policy was accepted, and there was a full process to elect a team of individuals.

It was stated:

“The interim CRT recommends having a team that includes members not in leadership, with a diverse mix of language, gender and geographical location moving forward.

The election process to the CRT will be determined with the implementation of the new Leadership Structure process.”

We recognise the shortcomings of the way this interim team is formed, but we need to start somewhere. If you would be interested in being a part of this team, I’m sure that your experience with the project and interest in the subject would be a most valuable asset to the team.
I've been known to butt heads with all 4 of you, will I get banned because you simply don't care for me?
The process has been developed with the guidance of other Open Source projects to ensure that this kind of abuse of power could not happen. Firstly, the team would be comprised of a group of individuals who are all working together for the good of the community, personal vendettas simply don’t have a place in that team. Secondly, there would need to be an incident to trigger the process, reported through the appropriate method, which would initiate hearing all sides of the incident, including yours. Finally, any proposed sanctions would need to be discussed by, and voted by a majority of two-thirds of the current Joomla leadership. Therefore I think it would be highly unlikely that you could get banned just because ‘you simply don’t care for me’.
Do I have to be careful to agree with you at all times for fear of sanctions?
No, given the responses above I hope that it makes it clear it won't be possible to have sanctions imposed just because you don't agree with something. What our community should be mindful of, however, is the way in which they express their disagreement. That should be expressed with the Code of Conduct in mind.
Your team is TOO small and lacks community diversity.
We absolutely agree, which is why we explicitly stated our acknowledgement of this. As stated above, it is necessary to start somewhere, the team at the moment is purposely called the interim team - until such a time as a proper process is in place to elect a team.
What are the sanctions? How can you ban someone from Twitter or Facebook?
This is something that would need to be discussed on a case by case basis and agreed by the leadership teams as a two thirds majority. Some examples provided by other Open Source projects include making a formal public or private apology, stepping down from roles, taking a 'time out' from contributing, revoking of privileges, revoking of commit rights, revoking of access to resources, and so forth.
This community is very quick to forgive the offender and brand the victim as a troublemaker.
This has been the case in the past and we sincerely hope that this policy will go some way to address this going forward.

I hope that this answers all your questions, thank you again for taking the time to leave your questions and do respond if anything remains unclear.
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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by montano » Fri May 29, 2015 6:23 pm

Ruth, I don't say this often, but my questions have been answered beyond my satisfaction. Color me gobsmacked!

I'm happy to volunteer for the CRT and hope others will too. It needs to be representative of our peers if it is going to be a "jury" so to speak.

As a long-time moderator, one of the issues we've had to deal with is private discussions about an unruly or irksome forum member. The problem is in the long-term. What happens is everyone gets over it eventually and we may at some point want this person to be on the team. Someone has to go back and delete all the talk about them from the past before we can give them entry to the board. I know this has been an issue on the Google Groups as well.

To my mind, and you're free to disagree, the CoC should be like a poster.
Be respectful
Treat others as you wish to be treated
Think before you speak
Give your peer the benefit of the doubt
Be kind

Failure to comply will result in a conduct peer review and possible banishment from Joomla sponsored activities and websites.
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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by mandville » Fri May 29, 2015 7:11 pm

If a LT member is involved, it would be sent to all LT members excluding those involved in the incident
is contradicted by the following
If, as a result of the discussions on the Leadership Team private mailing list,
you would have to email the rest of the team (those not involved) separately, surely.
does the crt replace or assist the ombudsman role?
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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by montano » Fri May 29, 2015 7:22 pm

I edited your document down to one page Here

Much of what is written on the original should be moved to a Standard Operating Procedure handbook for volunteers on their respective teams.

Perhaps a blog post giving examples of scenarios, but those examples do not need to be included on the document itself.

Names of the CRT members should not be on the document. It could prevent someone from submitting a report.

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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by RCheesley » Fri May 29, 2015 7:34 pm

Mandville:
If a LT member is involved, it would be sent to all LT members excluding those involved in the incident

is contradicted by the following

If, as a result of the discussions on the Leadership Team private mailing list,
you would have to email the rest of the team (those not involved) separately, surely.
Thank you for raising this terminology being unclear. If the incident involved Leadership Team members, they would be excluded from the discussions about the incident. This would be accomplished by mailing people directly, rather than using the LT internal mailing list. I will add a comment to this section suggesting that it is clarified.
does the crt replace or assist the ombudsman role?
Great question, I am not sure that we can give a definitive answer at this moment in time. The role of Ombudsman remains to be defined by the Transition Team. A likely outcome could be that the Conflict Resolution Team would have a close working relationship with any Ombudsman process. Ideally complaints would be processed through the Conflict Resolution Team and potentially, if any of the parties are unhappy with the outcome, the Ombudsman could review the processes as you would see in other organisations with such a structure.

I hope that gives a bit of insight into the question about the Ombudsman and answers your question on the process to be followed if there is a Leadership Team member involved in any incidents - if either of the above require further clarification please let me know.
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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by RCheesley » Fri May 29, 2015 7:52 pm

montano wrote:I edited your document down to one page Here

Much of what is written on the original should be moved to a Standard Operating Procedure handbook for volunteers on their respective teams.

Perhaps a blog post giving examples of scenarios, but those examples do not need to be included on the document itself.

Names of the CRT members should not be on the document. It could prevent someone from submitting a report.
Cindy,

If you haven't already, would you mind adding the above as a comment on the doc? I'm on my tablet and it doesn't play too well with google docs comments!

Many thanks again for your contributions!

Ruth
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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by montano » Fri May 29, 2015 8:08 pm

Ruth, I found myself hacking away at the original in the comments and I don't want to be disrespectful of the work that went into it. I posted a link to the shortened version in the comments.

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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by RCheesley » Fri May 29, 2015 8:15 pm

Thank you, that's much appreciated :)

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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by montano » Fri Jun 26, 2015 9:09 pm

It is unfortunate that this important topic is losing traction. It is something that affects us all.

Would you help me understand what's wrong with the current CoC document http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla/the- ... nduct.html

It seems the issue is how to enforce the rules, not the need to create new rules. How is that going? Who are the Conflict Resolution Team members? Is it still just you, Dianne and Alice?

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Re: Joomla Code of Conduct Update - Community Feedback

Post by RCheesley » Thu Jul 16, 2015 12:04 am

montano wrote:It is unfortunate that this important topic is losing traction. It is something that affects us all.
Cindy I'm sorry to hear that you feel this is losing traction. During this process an incident arose which the interim team were asked to look into as a matter of priority. Unfortunately this meant that we had to slightly delay compiling the feedback into a version that we could present for voting by the Leadership Teams.

As I'm sure you appreciate we all have pretty full-on lives outside of Joomla, and a lot of commitments within the project itself, so we have to keep things in balance.

Please don't see this as us losing interest in the process!
montano wrote:Would you help me understand what's wrong with the current CoC document http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla/the- ... nduct.html
As a bit of background, I took a personal interest in this when I was verbally attacked by a serving board member while in a conversation with another individual who was not involved in the project (just a regular volunteer helping me with organising a project). The board member in question was - after the incident being raised with the board and discussed internally - subsequently re-elected despite a known history of repeated incidents of this nature and an ongoing complaint against them.

There were no sanctions, nothing other than an apology that was made to me and the other person. Given the past history of the individual (which I only learned when I spoke with others about the incident) I felt this to be woefully inadequate. I also was very concerned at the lack of a robust process - in my mind this was verging on leaving the project open to all manner of problems if we had no way of showing how incidents were dealt with by the organisation and as we have repeatedly seen, no way of imposing sanctions where necessary.

I felt that this was completely not OK, and to be told there was no way to do anything about this led me to suggest to CLT that the Code of Conduct was in need of updating. In fact, it hadn't really been touched in nearly 5 years, I believe.

I was asked to form a team to work on this (the current team) to come up with a draft proposal to be presented at the next Leadership Team Summit. As part of this process I set about reaching out to other open source community managers, leaders and team managers to learn how they dealt with conflict in their communities.

This took quite a bit of time as we had to amalgamate a lot of different resources, pick out what was useful for us and what wasn't. We also had to consider how the process would work in terms of recommending and imposing sanctions if required, and so forth.

This was presented in Cancun at the Leadership Team Summit for discussion, and we were asked to continue with a proposed revision. This is where we published the first version for comment by the Leadership Team, the second version for comment by the wider community, and finally we have just sent the third version for voting by the Leadership Teams.
montano wrote:It seems the issue is how to enforce the rules, not the need to create new rules. How is that going?
I believe that both need attention, the way we word the code of conduct needs updating to reflect the world in which we live, and the way we enforce the rules needs to be made clear. We need to have the confidence to enforce the rules when it is appropriate to do so. The community need to have confidence in the processes, so that when sanctions are imposed they understand and trust the process that has been followed to get to that point. Community members should feel that if they raise a complaint there is a clear process to do so, and a fair process for the complaint to be investigated.
montano wrote: Who are the Conflict Resolution Team members? Is it still just you, Dianne and Alice?
The election of the team will form part of the structure transition process, currently the listed members remain as the interim team.

I hope that goes some way to answering your questions and I apologise for not noticing your reply sooner.

Kind regards,

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