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Announcing Code of Conduct Enforcement Services #174

Open clairernovotny opened 3 years ago

clairernovotny commented 3 years ago

Hello project maintainers!

The .NET Foundation is pleased to provide a new centralized Code of Conduct (CoC) enforcement mechanism for member projects!

The Foundation has mandated use of our CoC for all projects since the start, and while we have a central contact for it (conduct@dotnetfoundation.org), it has mostly simply routed complaints to the appropriate project contacts for assessment and enforcement. This is an extra burden on projects as they have to deal with potentially unpleasant interactions and take decisive action. Further, different projects see different people and larger projects tend to attract more bad actors than smaller ones. While the larger project may see and take action, that leaves the bad actor free to bother other projects.

To increase the scale and effectiveness of the CoC, the Foundation board nominated a committee of people responsible for reviewing CoC complaints and adjudicating penalties. Offending users will be blocked from all member projects for the specified timeframe.

To protect the committee members from targeted harassment, membership in that committee will not be public, though the board knows the members. Notwithstanding the Foundation-wide process and blocklist, individual projects are free to maintain their own additional blocklists, should the need arise.

For transparency, we set up a mailing list that project maintainers can opt-in to for receiving periodic summaries of enforcement actions. These summaries will have personal information redacted for privacy reasons, but will contain enough context to show how and why decisions were made. You can sign up for that mailing list here: https://eepurl.com/hEENSb.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to either Nicole Miller (@NicoleAbuhakmeh), our new community manager, or myself.

Claire

Perksey commented 3 years ago

(Moved from the dotnet-foundation/members team)

Hi all,

Just saw some CoC resources pinged into my email for project leaders, which I'm massively thankful for! The Code of Conduct as of late has just seemed like a document that we shove in a readme, and (I don't know about any other projects) but my .NET Foundation project team has felt very much in the dark about what we're actually meant to do Code of Conduct wise.

It's good to know that, through this latest update, .NET Foundation project teams will receive notifications on recent enforcement actions (within reason). This is great, and will help projects prepare should these bad actors find their way to our communities.

However, there's still a lot of questions open about Code of Conduct enforcement. Not necessarily an exhaustive list, as by the sounds of things some peers have ran into their own confusion with the CoC:

Hope you don't mind me prying, but I figured I'd ask as this is something that we're all bound by and, as such, we should be in the know about who, what, where, when, and why!

clairernovotny commented 3 years ago

my .NET Foundation project team has felt very much in the dark about what we're actually meant to do Code of Conduct wise.

Please take screen shots and email them along with links and other evidence of potentially violating things to conduct@dotnetfoundation.org. If you're not sure, then send it and the team can review it.

  • We're now told of enforcement actions, but who actually makes those enforcement decisions?

There's a small committee nominated by the board. The committee is half folks from the .NET Team and half from the community. To protect against any potential harassment from serving on the committee, membership is being protected.

  • How consistently is conduct@dotnetfoundation.org monitored, and where do those emails go? My fear that given everything .NET Foundation is volunteer-based, that reported violations have a good chance of going unnoticed.

There's a high SLA on this list. The .NET Team has been using a similar mechanism internally for a couple of years. This initiative extends that to include community members and cover all Foundation projects. The membership of the committee is made up of some folks who are not volunteers and some who are. The expectation is that of prompt action.

  • The email sent around today indicated that emails sent to this address are forwarded to "the appropriate project contacts for assessment and enforcement", but as a .NET Foundation project leader I have received no details on this! Are there any resources to educate .NET Foundation project leaders on the Code of Conduct?

That was the method of operation in the past. If you hadn't received anything, that might mean we had not heard any complaints of incidents that were on your projects.

  • What measures have been taken to ensure that enforcement, whether done by some centralized enforcement group or at a project-level, is consistent among those enforcing it? (i.e. do all "enforcers" know when to let something slide and what poses a significant offence? is it open to being subjective? etc etc)

The team has years of experience in making these kinds of evaluations but is always open to adjust as needed. The transparency mechanism will allow for feedback if folks think a decision was too much or not enough.

Please keep any questions coming!

Perksey commented 3 years ago

Please take screen shots and email them along with links and other evidence of potentially violating things to conduct@dotnetfoundation.org. If you're not sure, then send it and the team can review it.

Ok, that makes sense, the email (or rather the email's description of past operation) implied that the project team was responsible for making CoC-level judgement calls, but glad to know that the mailbox does this.

There's a small committee nominated by the board. The committee is half folks from the .NET Team and half from the community. To protect against any potential harassment from serving on the committee, membership is being protected.

Makes sense.

That was the method of operation in the past. If you hadn't received anything, that might mean we had not heard any complaints of incidents that were on your projects.

Sounds good. The main question was whether there's any resources to educate project leaders on operating with the CoC, but by the sounds of things all things CoC are centralized so there's likely no need.

On the back of this, we've had a couple of cases where we've had some pretty vile violations of the CoC in our Discord server (such as very intentional homophobic slurs), but seeing as these were contained to our Discord server we just banned them from there and didn't take it further.

The way we operate at the moment is we just moderate at a Discord-level unless it spreads onto another forum, such as GitHub, or we're told otherwise by the reporter. Snippet from our code of code of conduct for this channel (codex):

inform the reporter that they can escalate this as a Code of Conduct violation to the .NET Foundation or we can do that for them

Are there any obligations for the moderation and Code of Conduct enforcement for communication channels introduced at the project-level? (i.e. anything that isn't GitHub)

clairernovotny commented 3 years ago

On the back of this, we've had a couple of cases where we've had some pretty vile violations of the CoC in our Discord server (such as very intentional homophobic slurs), but seeing as these were contained to our Discord server we just banned them from there and didn't take it further.

Are there any obligations for the moderation and Code of Conduct enforcement for communication channels introduced at the project-level? (i.e. anything that isn't GitHub)

Please report anything that takes place in an official forum, chat group, social media, as it pertains to a project.

If we know the identity of the offender, we'd like to ensure that bans are across all channels. In the case of Discord, screenshots, links, etc along with the identity, if known. The team can then ensure the offending user is blocked across all other areas.

Perksey commented 3 years ago

Please report anything that takes place in an official forum, chat group, social media, as it pertains to a project.

Gotcha, will modify our advice to moderators to flow incidents up to the conduct email going forward. I think that's all from me, thanks for your swift response!

jzabroski commented 3 years ago

Just wondering- for people who are punished for Code of Conduct means, is there any rehabilitation or is it like an IRC permaban?

I personally believe in repentance and allowing people to grow up and become better members of society. Mainly because others have given me such grace.

clairernovotny commented 3 years ago

@jzabroski People who get blocked can reach out to the conduct alias and it's a case-by-case decision.