Begin publishing CoC and moderation transparency reports
Table of contents
Abstract
Proposes a documented cadence, publishing target, and template for Code of Conduct and moderation transparency reports.
Problem
The Carbon community wants to be an example in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion. One of the best practices that supports such ambition is publishing transparency reports about misconduct within the community and actions taken in response. There is no previous experience with reporting back to the community about this so far.
Background
Transparency reports are not very common practice, but already around. So there are some ideas to grab from other communities, with their permission.
Proposal
We will benchmark relevant transparency reports to find inspiration to create our own. We will look at their scope, their format, their regularity and possibly community feedback we have access to.
We will create a template for Carbon’s transparency reports and maintain that as part of the project. Our Code of Conduct team will then create and publish regular reports in the GitHub discussion forum based on that template.
Details
Some examples of transparency reports in which conduct incidents had been reported:
Conferences:
- PyCon US 2022: https://pycon.blogspot.com/2022/06/pycon-us-2022-transparency-report.html
- CppCon 2021: https://cppcon.org/cppcon-2021-transparency-report/
- PyConDE 2019: https://2019.pycon.de/blog/code-of-conduct-transparency-report/
Other:
- LLVM CoC July 15, 2022: https://llvm.org/coc-reports/2022-07-15-report.html
- Linux Foundation 2021: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/linux-foundation-events-code-of-conduct-transparency-report-2021-event-summary
We propose a template for our own CoC transparency report, which has been greatly inspired by transparency reports issued by the Python community worldwide. Thank you, Pythonistas!
We also document there the cadence and target of publishing.
Rationale
Transparent moderation and handling of conduct issues is essential to sustaining a healthy community and culture, one of Carbon’s primary goals. We need to clearly and transparently surface the conduct of our community and how we respond to it.
Alternatives considered
Automated dashboards
An automated dashboard (for example “X days since AutoMod detected a “guys” in our Discord”, “Y incidents of harmful language”) would be great, but we are still figuring out the basics and principles together before we can automate more.
Such a dashboard could be an attractive alternative for the future.
Different cadence
Publishing quarterly may result in some quarters with very little or even nothing to publish. That seems fine. We considered a slower cadence of annually, but we worry that would be too slow for folks in the community to hold the conduct team and leadership accountable as things start to be forgotten.
We also thought about how to respond rapidly when needed but would prefer to publish out-of-band when needed rather than run an even more rapid cadence.
Different publishing options
We considered different places to publish the individual transparency reports.
They don’t seem to belong as part of our version controlled repository as they aren’t something that should be persistent – they reflect a report at a moment in time. And while we hope to never need it, we should retain the ability to easily redact information or make permanent edits to them if necessary. GitHub discussions seem like a good fit overall compared to alternatives like the main repository, the wiki, etc.
Using GitHub discussions also allows comments and discussion where folks could for example ask questions or get more information about how and why we are taking our moderation approaches. While there is some risk of these discussions being unproductive, we hope to be able to moderate them as well and still provide a place where productive and on-topic discussion can still take place.