Public minute project for the sprint
Hi,
Here is a proposal of minute we could release on bits.debian.org. Any
reedback is welcome, including rewording of deletion of not precise things.
Regards
"Sprint report of the Community Team
2020 has been a very new year for the team, as many things have happent
since the 2019 sprint and the Debconf BoF. Most of the team was renewed,
some former persons came back, making the team be composed of 7 members
now. Since April, the team has a delegation from the DPL. While things
start getting results (processes, addressed requests, etc), it was
important for the team to be able to work together in "live" during some
time to make certain things speed up in our thoughts and action.
It was the purpose of the Sprint Week-end, which standed the last
October week-end. Formally, the team organized 2 3-hours meetings on
Saturday and Sunday.
Among the addressed topics, including back to difficult requests during
the year, the team could have a consensus about some cross-ideas we can
share publicly to help the community to understand our job and collect
feedbacks.
Roel of the external activities on the Debian contributor status
=================================================================
Issue: when the community gets knowledge about a person having criminal
activities, not related to Debian, what to do?
While the project probably does not want to know about the private life
of people, some criminal activities may result inconfortable situations
for the community. For example, how to be confortable during a physical
event or whatever, to stay with someone who did sexual or violent offences.
Consensual proposals:
The community team tends to think that the answer depends on the
offender behavior:
1. The project should let anyone a chance to tell us things we should
know about past actions:
- approving expressively the code of conduct before being a Debian
contributor
- being asked: "Is there anything we should know about you that might be
a problem for your interactions with the Debian community? e.g. past
public online activities you now consider inappropriate"
2. If the person mentions problematic activities outside of Debian, but
expresses a will to let it behind, then the community should not be
unconfortable with this.
If offenders don't improve, or continue to complain about their
treatment, that's toxic behaviour for the community and the person
should be requested to leave. The important thing is to inform him/her
explicitly.
If the person did not say anything but someone reports to the Community
Team about knowledge of it, having an impact on an event, it is
important to protect the reporter and take this account for future
interaction with the reported person. Of course, the person is free to
explain how he/she perceives his/her situation, but the project should
be careful about his/her interactions.
What should we do about people who are arguably not violating the CoC,
but drive others out of the community or otherwise negatively impact the
community?
===============================================================================================================================
Firstly, it seems clear that technical excellence is not an excuse for
being problematic around other people (including bad actions against a
kind of group (transphobic, racism). But sometimes the situation is more
subtile: people feel excluded from a team, some people repeat a bad
behavior interacting with the community (eg. continuing to push an
argument over and over and over while it's obviously not going anywhere)
Proposal: After several private messages to make the person stop
bringing things up in public and causing grief for everybody else, the
community team can request a temporary ban from the communication
channels or DAM. It may be definitive if things don't change.
Suggestion: "If you're reported 5 or more times for being a jerk, you
should be encouraged (forced?) to take a break for a while (4w? 8w?)
In some cases, we can talk to people periodically and remind them to try
and interact better, consider other people's opinions more.
What process for more responsiveness and to be more trustable
================================================================
The community team will try to set a rota to assign people to a front
office task. It implies to answer any new request in less than 24 hours
with an acknowledge message, registering the request in the internal
tools, and address, forward or share it. In any case, at least one
action should take place each week, with the reporter informed about it,
related to his/her request. The action may happen after the weekly meeting.
Some work in progress is done to define what cases may be addressed by
the front officer, those which should be forwarded to a 3-people
subgroup, those which should be handled by the whole team.
The community team agreed to improve the process writing, the onboarding
with newcomers with mentoring, resources, etc
Writing a guide to help people determining what typical actions could
violate the Code of Conduct
================================================
For each section of the code of conduct, the team tried to remember some
cases where the code of conduct was not respected. A document will be
written soon to explicit, for each section, how someone can be aware if
he has chance to be compliant or not with the CoC.
In general, we had an agreement about some important ideas:
* if someone is a Debian Developer and has a bad behavior inside or
outside the community, he carries out the project reputation, so it is
not acceptable
* the important thing is less avoiding mistales than learning from them,
improving oneself after them
"
Regards
--
Jean-Philippe MENGUAL
Debian Developer non uploading
Community team member
Accessibility team member
debian-l10n-french team member
President of Debian France non-profit organization
Reply to: