Introduce a new Conduct Team

Pull request

Table of contents

• Abstract
• Problem
• Background
• Proposal
• Details
  • Strategy for a sustainable Conduct Team
  • What we are looking for in Conduct team members
  • Initial team members
  • Process
• Rationale
• Alternatives considered
  • Make no changes
  • Have some overlap between Carbon leads and the Conduct team
  • Keep the restriction on new conduct team members accessing prior reports

Abstract

The Carbon Project relied on the three leads to handle conduct concerns initially as it bootstrapped its community team and expertise. We now have an active and effective community lead and team of moderators. Our community lead has worked to train and ramp up a new and independent conduct team.

This proposal both provides an overview of the process and hands off conduct handling to the new team! Going forward, we expect routine updates to the conduct team to happen without full proposals as they allow trained folks to rotate in and out of this difficult but essential role on the project.

Last but not least, making these changes uncovered a restriction in the Code of Conduct itself that we expect to be problematic to adhere to going forward. While well intentioned, it has a bunch of unanticipated effects that made both current and new conduct teams want to remove it. A related section has had its wording strengthened to try and address the underlying motivation at least partially.

Problem

• Our Code of Conduct team is made up of those with the highest power in the community (Carbon leads), and our current framework does not allow for clear accountability in terms of their own conduct due to this lack of separation.
• The diversity of backgrounds and perspectives is limited among our current CoC team.
• The Carbon leads have limited time and availability to intervene in urgent and important misconduct situations.

So, it is time to build a specialized team to deal with escalations which is not subordinate to the Carbon leads, and is able to handle diverse misconduct escalations in an adequate and timely manner. This means we can recruit and/or train people from diverse backgrounds to handle such escalations for the Carbon community, and provide competent support to the leads, the rest of the moderation team, and everyone else in the community.

Background

Our Code of Conduct: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Our current CoC team:

• Chandler Carruth (@chandlerc on Discord and GitHub)
• Kate Gregory (@KateGregory on Discord and GitHub)
• Richard Smith (@zygoloid on Discord and GitHub)

Proposal

Create a new Conduct Team as follows:

• Recruit and train 5+ potential new conduct team members to deal with conduct-related escalations on behalf of and for the Carbon community, and replace the current CoC team as soon as enough members are ready.
• We should always have at least 3 conduct team members available to respond promptly, even factoring in vacations, getting sick, or other normal disruptions.
• Subsequent updates to the exact members will be managed by the new conduct team themselves, and without full proposals but just PRs to update the relevant documentation.

Also remove a restriction on how reports are shared with new conduct team members going forward (but not retroactively, which would violate our past promise). While this restriction was well intentioned, it isn’t a restriction that the conduct team can effectively uphold going forward. For example, it would prevent informing new conduct team members of people banned because of bad-faith reports. We understand that reports are sensitive, and have strengthened our statements around keeping them confidential and only using them as needed.

Details

Strategy for a sustainable Conduct Team

The Carbon community needs a distinct, qualified, empowered, and diverse Code of Conduct team.

This crucial and particularly straining work needs to be shared among the team, so all members get enough support and rest. The proposal is for a member rotation strategy. Carbon’s long-term goal should be to have 5+ trained Conduct Team members, so at least 3 are available to discuss and act upon incident reports in a timely and adequate manner.

The initial team was recruited by our Community lead and pulls from the current trained moderator pool. We propose that the Conduct team itself is responsible to continue recruiting both new Conduct team members and new moderators to make both efforts sustainable. They will work toward better representation, embracing both broad and intersectional diversity.

What we are looking for in Conduct team members

Team members need a track record showing:

• Effective and constructive engagement with online, technical, and/or open-source software communities
• Advanced moderation and mediation skills
• Intercultural competence
• Extensive knowledge of human diversity and systemic discrimination forms
• Proficient written English communication skills

Other essential things we prioritize for all team members:

• Kindness
• Thoughtfulness, including while dealing with highly sensitive information
• Prioritizing the most vulnerable
• Readiness to have uncomfortable conversations, including sparking them
• Resilience in the face of abuse, including when becoming a target
• Verified Discord and GitHub user account
• Readiness to use Google Drive collaboration tools
• Readiness to deal with every escalation reported to the team while on duty

High-value things we look for but are not necessary:

• Personal experience of marginalization in tech communities (for example based on ability/disability, race/ethnicity, gender identity, lifestyle, first language, etc.)
• Already active in the C++ or Carbon community
• Figure of authority in some relevant domain
• Non-corporate working experience

Note that it is not important to be good at coding or a native English speaker to be effective as a member of the team.

Initial team members

• Allison Poppe (@acpoppe on Discord and GitHub)
• Céline Dedaj (@celineausberlin on Discord and GitHub)
• Christopher Di Bella (@cjdb on Discord and GitHub)
• Lexi Bromfield (@lexinadia on Discord and @lexi-nadia on GitHub)
• flysand (@flysand on Discord and @flysand7 on GitHub)

Process

Selection and sourcing:

• Candidates were identified and recruited by our Community lead.
• Candidates met with both Carbon leads and the Community lead individually to make sure everyone was comfortable with the role and responsibilities involved.

Onboarding and support:

• New members will have access to coaching and mentoring from the Community lead as a diversity, equity and inclusion specialist, and general support by a senior moderation team member.
• The project organizes regular informal moderation meetups to learn with and from each other, including a book club.

Exit:

• This work tends to be straining and that each person’s involvement may only be temporary.
• Both the Carbon leads and the newly formed conduct team will make sure that individual conduct team members feel safe to leave the team and community when they need to step out by developing a bench of candidates.

Rationale

• Community and culture
  • The Carbon project needs to have an effective and scalable process for handling conduct concerns to continue to be an inclusive and welcoming community.
  • Having a separate team focused on these concerns both enables more specialized skills and can provide a more effective path to hold the Carbon leads accountable to the same conduct standards.

Alternatives considered

Make no changes

This would leave the fundamental problems of both scale and external accountability unresolved.

Have some overlap between Carbon leads and the Conduct team

We considered having some amount of overlap between the leads and the conduct team on an ongoing basis. While this would help ensure that the Carbon leads are aware and attending to the community, culture, and conduct needs of the project, it ultimately had a number of disadvantages that made us decide to have a fully separate team:

• The Conduct team can and should focus their energy and leverage their special skills at evaluating conduct challenges. This is different from the focus, skills, and priorities of the leads.
• The leads want to encourage the conduct team to hold the leads own conduct accountable to the rest of the community, and so want to keep the conduct team especially as independent as possible.
• Even if in practice no conflict arises, having a visible separation is valuable to the community to build trust.
• Having two fully independent groups helps facilitate them each helping, supporting, empowering, and when necessary, challenging the other.

Keep the restriction on new conduct team members accessing prior reports

We considered this, as we are very sympathetic to ensuring community members feel safe making reports, even though the composition of the conduct team might change in the future.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find an effective restriction in this space that still allowed the conduct team to effectively respond to conduct concerns. We have tried to further clarify the expectations on the narrow and limited ways in which it is ever appropriate for this information to be used. Misusing conduct reports, much like other abuses of the Code of Conduct’s process, is itself a serious violation of the code.